Hot Robot Slave

According to Mulvey, the ‘male gaze’ is the way men view women by looking at them, which then judges them and objectifying them. As Berger points it out in paintings, ‘men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at’ which men surveys them and depiction of fantasy ensues. This is very evident to pop culture today due to media productions directed towards male audiences. This exploits women and all their beauty because sex sells.

One example that takes the male gaze in a literal sense is a video made by famous youtubers Smosh. They make funny, crazy and sometimes offensive videos for their fans on youtube. This particular video kinda hits the spot in this topic. The video is called ‘Hot Robot Slave’ in which they literally get a female robot and make her do household work, and they even attempt to date her. Just like in the male gaze where male objectifies the women, in this video, the woman is really an object. You could further look on the comments on what the audience's fantasy, which majority is male.

I too realized that I did a video of showcasing the ‘male gaze’ in a literal sense. In the opening of my short film ‘Taking Julia,’ the main character sees a girl walking by and he immediately stare and fantasize about her in a model photo shoot. This was made to show the women’s beauty and have the audience stare with the main character. I made this opening sequence to attract viewers, and have them hooked on to watch the whole video. I even made the thumbnail of the video the girl’s screen capture picture. Yup, guilty as charged. The video made 5k views in a week on youtube, which is not bad knowing I’m not as popular as Smosh, with their video almost reaching 2 million views.

Bell Hooks starts with a history lesson about how the slaves were forbidden to stare and gaze at the slave owners and white people in general. They were punished when they looked. The only time they can look is through mediums like the movies. They couldn’t relate to the characters that they were watching because they were often stereotyped, so they gaze at them with their own ideals rather than what the media and others intended for them. That is oppositional gaze.

During the class discussion and having read the reading materials, I noticed more and more on how the male dominates the media, and often enough, are centered around them too. With these gazes and the different perspective, it shows more on how the media exploit women and sexuality, and use that as an advantage to market their products. Knowing this, now I can strengthen my marketing campaign with my films and videos.