Woman as Erotic Object: A Darwinian Inquiry into the Male Gaze

Griet Vandermassen

Laura Mulvey and the male gaze The term male gaze was coined in 1975 by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, to denote the way in which women are relegated to the status of erotic objects in classical Hollywood cinema. Mainstream film, Mulvey argued, reduces women to to-be-looked-at-ness, to passive objects for male fetishistic gazing and desire. Men, on the other hand, are presented as active agents and as possessors of the gaze, and hence, as representatives of power. Women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact. They function as erotic objects both for the characters within the story and for the spectator, who identifies with the main male protagonist and derives a sense of omnipotence from this identification.
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Basically, Mulvey wanted to understand, and denounce, the visual focus on women on screen. She adopted psychoanalysis as an explanatory framework, drawing upon to the Freudian notions of scopophilia and castration anxiety. According to Freud scopophilia, the desire to see, is fundamentally sexual in origin, and is associated with taking pleasure in looking at other people as objects. Cinema, Mulvey claimed, satisfies this scopophilic drive. She further explained the existence of the male gaze in terms of patriarchy and castration anxiety. Woman, lacking a penis, symbolises the threat of castration. By objectifying her on screen as a passive sexual object, man tries to gain control of her and to overcome his fear of castration. At the same time the male gaze is a reflection of an unequal power relationship and a tool of domination. It reflects the patriarchal order, which has coded the erotic in a way that tends to sustain patriarchy. Mulveys account of the male gaze became contested in the early 1980s, because she imposed masculinity as a point of view. She thus ignored the female spectator and the possibility of a female gaze, as well as the spectators potential to construct critical readings. In a later essay she responded to these critiques, proposing that female viewers can shift between passive feminine identification and active masculine identification. This is so because cinema revives the dormant masculinity within them, masculinity that in childhood they had to shed in order to become proper women.
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Mulveys theories have provided the basis upon which an influential branch of feminist film theory has been built. Indeed, despite the many critiques of her views, only a minority of feminist critics have adopted a non-psychoanalytic explanatory framework. Most writers in feminist film theory accept Mulveys basic psychoanalytic principles, and only try to add some refinements or qualifications. 3 It

has become overwhelmingly clear, however, that psychoanalysis utterly fails at providing us with a scientifically sound and empirically validated account of the human mind. 4 It follows that it will fail to grasp the nature of the male gaze, broadly defined here as the combination of the strong visual nature of male sexuality and the male tendency to objectify womens bodies. There is, moreover, a much simpler explanation, that, crucially, ties in perfectly with the rest of our rapidly growing knowledge about the biological determinants of human behaviour. As I will try to show, the male gaze has nothing whatsoever to do with castration anxiety, only a little with patriarchy, and almost everything with sexual selection, and hence, with our evolutionary heritage.

Some Empirical Findings Let us first have a look at some findings that are clearly at odds with psychoanalytic interpretations. Take gay male porn. We might consider this kind of porn to be a test case for the claim that male objectification of bodies signifies castration anxiety or reflects the patriarchal order. On this view, after all, there is no reason why men would objectify other mens bodies: other men do have a penis and are in the possession of the phallus. There is a substantial industry producing pornographic films, books and magazines for a male gay audience, and what we find is that the objectification of bodies is as typical of gay male porn as it is of straight porn. Both types of porn are essentially identical, differing only in the sex of the actors. They hardly contain any plot development, focussing instead on the sex acts and emphasizing the display of bodies. It is foremost videos and, in the last few years, the Internet that dominate male-oriented erotica, testifying to the deeply visual nature of male sexuality, whatever the males sexual orientation. Unlike women, men tend to be sexually aroused by objectified sexual stimuli, whether they are straight or gay.
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Second, attractive women in varying states of dress and in often highly erotic poses are featured in magazines designed exclusively for women. Women enjoy looking at other womens bodies. They even seem to be more interested in womens bodies than in mens bodies. Playgirl, the womens variant of Playboy, featuring male nudes, is hardly bought by women. It has a predominantly gay male readership. 6 Third, male objectification of womens bodies is characteristic of all human societies, whatever their degree of sexual equality or inequality. Even in the most sexually egalitarian societies, boys tend to carve symbols of breasts and vaginas on tree trunks, and men make great efforts to see those parts of the female body that are usually concealed. 7

More generally, many psychosexual differences between women and men are universal, although differing in degree. All societies know rape, and it is perpetrated by men. Everywhere, men are more physically aggressive than women, more prone to lethal violence (including war), and dominant in the public political sphere. Everywhere women are more involved in childcare than men. 8 And, highly relevant to the purpose of this paper, men everywhere show an outspoken preference for

youth and beauty in women, whereas women typically prefer a man who is older and rate physical attractiveness as less central to their preferences. 9 Cross-culturally men will also look for casual sex more often and much more intensively than women. They let less time elapse before seeking sexual intercourse and relax their standards dramatically when pursuing brief sexual encounters, except for the standard of physical attractiveness. They strongly dislike women seeking commitment when pursuing these encounters, because they merely want unencumbered sex. 10 The ease with which many men can engage in impersonal sex is also demonstrated by the universality of prostitution. Whereas prostitutes may be male or female, their clients are almost invariably men. Again, the desires of gay men mirror the desires of straight men. Like straight men, gay men tend to prefer attractive young partners, and to prefer many of them. In fact, they typically have a much higher promiscuity level than straight men, probably because they do not have to compromise with the differential sexual psychology of the opposite sex. Women typically desire signs of commitment before consenting to sex. 11 That these and other patterns of difference between the typical male and the typical female mind exist cross-culturally is hard to explain from a psychoanalytic perspective, except if one is prepared to accept far-fetched and uncorroborated theories. It is also hard to explain from a constructivist perspective, but it is exactly what an evolutionary biologist who knew only the physical differences between the sexes would predict.

The Evolution of Sexual Difference From a Darwinian point of view the human mind is as much a product of evolution as is the rest of the body. The mind is, after all, a product of the brain. From this perspective many human emotions, cognitions and behavioural dispostions are adaptations: features that were retained in the course of evolution because they helped individuals to survive and reproduce, as a result of which they became more prevalent within the population. Specific statistical psychosexual differences between the sexes are fully to be expected, as both sexes encountered partially different problems of survival and reproduction in the environment in which they evolved. The Darwinian perspective need not conflict with other perspectives, as the human brain was designed to think, to learn and to construct cultures.
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Seen through an evolutionary lens, the existence of the male gaze and the relative absence of a comparable female gaze reflect evolved basic male and female sexual psychologies. On this view modern media do not impose arbitrary standards of beauty and behaviour on women and men, as is often assumed. Rather, they exploit the evolved psychologies of the sexes, manufacturing products that tap into typically male and female interests and dispositions, such as (male-oriented) porn and (female-oriented) romance novels. What are the characteristics of these psychologies, and why did they evolve?

When we take a look at the rest of the animal world, we see that sexual difference abounds. In mammals particularly, males are usually larger and more inclined to dominance competitions. They compete among themselves for sexual access to females. Females are usually more sexually choosy: they prefer to mate with the strongest, most dominant, most brightly feathered, or otherwise most conspicuous individuals. Through their mate preferences they influence which male characteristics will be represented more frequently in subsequent generations. If females refuse to mate with the smaller or subordinate males, male genes for a smaller size or for non-competitiveness will eventually be selected away. This process of selection caused by reproductive competition is called sexual selection. The mate choices consistently exerted by the members of one sex on the members of the other sex will cause the sexes to diverge.
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But why are females usually--but not always--the more choosy sex, and why do they have these highly specific preferences? Why are males usually willing to mate with any female that comes along? The answer is parental investment: the amount of time and energy males and females invest in offspring. In humans and other mammals male parental investment tends to be less than female parental investment. For a female mammal the minimum amount of time and energy needed to produce offspring is quite large, due to gestation and lactation. A male, however, in principle can father offspring with hardly any investment at all: all he needs is one act of copulation. In the course of evolution this set the stage for differential mating preferences and strategies. Due to her limited egg production and the long periods of gestation and lactation, a female mammals potential number of offspring is limited. If she mated indiscriminately, she would have had less healthy and surviving offspring than females who chose to mate with the most healthy or most parentally investing males. It is the latter females whose preferences and strategies would make it into subsequent generations. Indeed, many features preferred by females, such as the exhuberance of the peacocks tail, have been found to be indicators of health and genetic quality, or to benefit the survival of her offspring in other ways. For males it was different: they had little to lose and much to gain from seizing every mating opportunity that presented itself, and from competing for sexual access to choosy females along the lines that females had set. The more they followed this strategy, the greater the odds that their traits and behavioural inclinations would eventually become typical of the males of the species.
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Parental investment is the key to the puzzle of sexual difference. What counts is not being male or female, but the relative amount of parental investment. In some species of birds and frogs parental investment is reversed, because it is the males who incubate the eggs. As predicted by the theory, these species exhibit reversed sex roles: males are more sexually discriminating, whereas females are larger, more competing for sex, and more aggressive. 15

In humans the situation gets more complicated. Due to the heavy male investment in offspring, which is itself the evolutionary result of the extreme vulnerability of human infants, human males can be expected to be choosy as well when it comes to long-term relationships. This means that the

dynamics of human mating will involve female-female competition and male choice, in addition to male-male competition and female choice. Men will try to best their rivals in the characteristics most keenly desired by the opposite sex, and women will do the same. Due to our evolutionary history, what both sexes typically desire, and the sexual strategies they use, will differ to some extent. I now turn to those differences that uncover the nature of the male gaze.

Womens Bodies, Mens Minds I have, in fact, identified them already: the centrality of physical appearance to male mate preferences, the powerful male desire for many sexual partners, and the male relaxation of standards when pursuing casual sex, due to which men can easily have sex with near strangers. An additional factor is the greater male interest in sex. Men think and fantasize about sex more often. Indeed, a key male sexual fantasy is to have sexual access to dozens of beautiful, nubile women.
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Historically,

powerful men have been able to turn this fantasy into reality, by establishing harems (in societies with institutionalised polygyny), or by having many affairs (in officially monogamous societies). In combination, these four factors create a male tendency to look at women as sex objects, as mere collections of female body parts. This tendency is reflected in mens sexual fantasies, which typically focus on body parts and sexual positions, and feature sex partners who let themselves eagerly be reduced to yearning flesh. 17 It is also reflected in the visual focus on women in films by male directors, who sometimes, by way of montage, cut up womens bodies. To some extent representing women as sexual objects might be about control as well. A fantasy of a woman as mere willing flesh signifies easy sexual access, something which should strongly appeal to the male mind. Even then, however, the fantasized women are not passive. Attractive women have what men want. Their beauty and sexuality are sources of power. The more beautiful a woman is, the more men will desire her, and the more she tends to be in control.

As set out above, the stronger male desire for sexual promiscuity is a psychological adaptation. Being the less-investing sex, it paid more for ancestral men than for ancestral women to pursue brief affairs. For men it meant a direct increase in the number of offspring, as a result of which male inclinations for promiscuity would rapidly spread through the population. Women secured benefits to promiscuity as well, such as access to extra resources or protection, but they did not reap benefits from indiscriminately seeking sex as an end in itself. Mens quick sexual arousal and their relaxation of standards when it comes to casual sex seem to be adaptations motivating them to seek sexual access to a variety of individuals.
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This does not imply that men do not want committed relationships. Humans have evolved to be a pair-bonding species, and, as I mentioned before, human males invest substantially in their children, by caring for them, protecting them and financially investing in them. Because, however, men can never be sure that they are really the father of a womans child and because of the relatively low

costs and possibly high benefits for men of extra-pair copulations, evolutionarily it paid them to expend relatively more energy on mating effort, and less on parental effort, than women. There is much empirical evidence in support of the Darwinian prediction that both sexes will have evolved to pursue committed long-term relationships as well as brief affairs, depending on the context, but that men will look for casual sex more often and more intensively. 19

This leaves us with only the fourth factor to be explained: why do men place a premium on physical attractiveness in their mate preferences, for long-term relationships as well as for brief affairs? The answer is, again, simple. Evolutionary logic leads us to expect that feelings of romantic and sexual attraction will be typically associated with traits in the other sex that entailed high reproductive success in the world in which our ancestors evolved. Because womens reproductive capacity declines sharply with age, men are expected to have evolved feelings of attraction to female signs of youth and fertility. Ancestral men who felt more sexually attracted to older than to younger women, became no ones ancestors, because they hardly left any offspring. Female reproductive success, in contrast, was not as closely linked with obtaining fertile partners. Moreover, male fertility is less steeply graded than female fertility and therefore cannot be assessed as accurately from physical appearance. We might therefore expect physical appearance to occupy a less central place in womens partner preferences than in mens. This is, indeed, the case.
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Other than commonly thought, beauty is not just a cultural construction. While there are certainly cultural influences on standards of attractiveness, the structural constituents of what we experience as female beauty are consistent across cultures and have been established as reliable cues to fertility. Female physical attractiveness amounts to signs of youth and health. Smooth and clear skin, full lips, lustrous hair, white teeth, a graceful gait, firm breasts: all are cues to high fecundity. Beauty is also constituted by facial and bodily symmetry and by having average features relative to the rest of the population. Both symmetry and being average are positively linked with health and a good genetical constitution in the whole of nature. Furthermore, attractive female faces have proportions that signal a combination of sexual maturity and relative youth. As a result of sexual selection, we also experience as beautiful those features that magnify indications of femininity: large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips, and a small chin. Women worldwide use makeup to accentuate these feminine features and to make themselves look younger, thereby trying to increase their mate value. Another universal standard of female beauty seems to be a low waist-to-hip ratio, which is positively linked with health and fertility.
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As men typically evolved to seek sexual access to fertile women, and as a womans body provides powerful and observable cues to her reproductive capacity, the visual nature of mens sexuality need not surprise us. Of course men are not aware that their experience of sexual attraction has an evolutionary rationale. They do not have to know why smooth skin and firm breasts appeal

more to them than wrinkles and other signs of old age to typically find the first characteristics more attractive than the latter. Underpinning this taste, however, are psychological adaptations. The existence of the male gaze is perfectly predictable from an evolutionary perspective. No castration anxiety is needed to explain it, nor need it signify contempt of women--although, of course, it may do so in individual instances. This does not mean, however, that patriarchal and other cultural influences do not affect the development and expression of evolved male and female psychosexual dispositions.

Culture and Competition Mens partner preferences have helped to direct the course of the evolution of female physiology and psychology, as they influenced which female characteristics were able to spread in subsequent generations. The same holds for womens partner choices. Apart from this intersexual selection, there is intrasexual selection, but both are linked. Intrasexual selection, or intrasexual competition, means that men should evolve over time to compete with each other to obtain those resources and display those qualities that women prefer. The more they do this, the more they will be able to satisfy their evolved mate preferences. Women as well should evolve to compete with each other to display those cues that men find attractive, since for them, too, the extent to which they can get what they want depends on their own mate value. It follows that conflict between the sexes cannot be separated from same-sex competition. As men continue to desire beauty in a partner, they impose a pressure on women to look youthful and attractive. Hence, women will compete with one another in this realm, trying to enhance their own beauty at the expense of other women, because this raises the odds of attracting a desirable man, which means: a man with resources and high social status. Similarly, as long as women continue to desire status and resources in a mate, they exert pressure on men to compete for these assets. No doubt both sexes sometimes suffer from these pressures. Take the female tendency for physical comparison, which leads women to enjoy looking at other womens bodies. By doing so, they gauge the competition as well as learn through identification how to manipulate male desire to their own advantage. Advertisers, however, exploit the universal appeal of beautiful, youthful women to sell their products. The constant bombardment with images of flawless models leads both sexes to raise their standars of what constitutes an attractive woman to unrealistic heights, resulting in unhealthy competition and a lowering of self-esteem in women.
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This is just one example of how culture may exploit or exaggerate evolved dispositions. Because film and photography did not exist in prehistory, our brain to some extent reacts to media images as if they were real. Producers of pornography make big money out of mens easy arousal at the prospect of sex with a variety of willing sex partners--even if they will never meet these women in the flesh, mens brain and body react as if they were physically present. 23 Cultural or social pressures may also act against evolved dispositions. As long as male film directors were working in a society

untouched by feminist criticism, they could easily indulge in their inclinations to represent members of the opposite sex as sex objects. 24 With the rise of second wave feminism and the ensuing critiques of this unidimensional representation of women, more diverse ways of portraying women have started proliferating.

To conclude, I do not think that the male gaze originated as a tool of domination or that it inherently reflects an unequal power relationship. Many behavioural tendencies of the sexes as typically represented on screen are not created by the media, nor are they the product of a patriarchal political system. They are a product of our evolutionary history, with their specific ways of expression being mediated by the cultural and social context. The more patriarchal a culture is, the more men will feel justified in openly treating women as sex objects, for example. What the male gaze most certainly does not reflect, is castration anxiety.

Mulvey L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: L. Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 2 Mulvey L. (1981). Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema inspired by Duel in the Sun. Framework, summer, 12-15. 3 Freeland C. (1998). Feminist Film Theory. In: M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; Smelik A. (1999). Feminist Film Theory. In: P.Cook and M. Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book. 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute. 4 See, e.g., Crews F., ed. (1998). Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York and London: Penguin Books; Grnbaum A. (2002). Critique of Psychoanalysis. In: Erwin E. (ed.), The Freud Encyclopaedia: Theory, Therapy and Culture. New York and London: Routledge; MacMillan M. (1991), Freud Evaluated. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1997. 5 Salmon C. (2004). The Pornography Debate: What Sex Differences in Erotica Can Tell About Human Sexuality. In: C. Crawford and C. Salmon (eds), Evolutionary Psychology, Public Policy and Personal Decisions. Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 6 Ibid.; Pinker S. (1997). How the Mind Works. London and New York: Penguin. 7 Symons D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8 Brown D. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. 9 Buss D. (1989). Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12:1-14. 10 Buss D. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books; Schmitt D. et al. (2003). Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests from 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 1, 85-104. 11 Buss D. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books. 12 Tooby J. and Cosmides L. (1992). The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In: Barkow J., Cosmides L. and Tooby J. (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 13 Darwin C. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray; Geary, D. (1998). Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. Washington: American Psychological Association. 14 Trivers R. (1972). Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. In: Campbell B. (ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971. Chicago: Aldine. 15 Ibid. 16 A large body of scientific research documents four important gender differences in sexuality: 1) men show more interest in sex than women; 2) women place greater emphasis on committed relationships as a context for

sexuality; 3) aggression is more strongly linked to sexuality for men than for women; and 4) womens sexuality tends to be more malleable. See Peplau L. (2003). Human Sexuality: How Do Men and Women Differ? Current Directions in Psychological Research 12(2):37-40. 17 Ellis B. and Symons D. (1997). Sex Differences in Sexual Fantasy: An Evolutionary Psychological Approach. In: Betzig L. (ed.), Human Nature: A Critical Reader. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 18 Buss D. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books. 19 Buss D. and Schmitt D. (1993). Sexual Strategies Theory: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Mating. Psychological Review 100:204-232; Schmitt D. et al. (2003). Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests from 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 1, 85-104. 20 Buss D. (1989). Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12:1-14. 21 Etcoff N. (1999). Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. London: Little, Brown and Company. 22 Buss D. (1996). Sexual Conflict: Evolutionary Insights into Feminism and the Battle of the Sexes. In: Buss D. and Malamuth N. (eds), Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; Buss D. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books. 23 Many women respond sexually to pornography as well, but few are motivated to seek it out. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. A womans propensity to become aroused at the mere sight of nude males would have compromised her reproductive success. Once a woman has consented to sex, however, there is no reason to believe that she would be any less responsive to sexual stimulation. See Symons D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 24 This is not to deny that women sometimes view men as sex objects as well, but they are almost always attractive men of very high status. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are cases in point. Some men also view women as property to be owned and used. Male sexual proprietariness has been extensively studied from a Darwinian point of view and is based, to some extent, on the same evolved mental dispositions described in this paper. It is, however, sufficiently different from the male gaze to justify its exclusion from analysis here. See Wilson M. and Daly M. (1992). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel. In: Barkow J., Cosmides L. and Tooby J. (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.