Back in 2013, you couldn’t escape Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. It went to number one in the UK and was everywhere that summer. But people didn’t just talk about the song. They talked about the video. Three guys in suits sing and dance, while three models in barely anything walk around them. Some UK student unions even banned the song. So is it just a bit of fun, or is it a perfect example of what Laura Mulvey called the “male gaze”?
So what is the male gaze?
Mulvey (1975) came up with the idea in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Basically, she argued that films are made with a straight male viewer in mind. Men are the ones doing the looking, and women are there to be looked at. She called this “to-be-looked-at-ness”. She also talked about three different “looks”: the camera’s, the characters’ and ours as the audience. In most films, all three point the same way, so we end up seeing women through a man’s eyes, whether we notice it or not.
Spotting the gaze in “Blurred Lines”
Once you know the theory, it’s hard to unsee it in this video. The camera keeps lingering on the models’ bodies, the guys keep looking at them, and we’re invited to look too. The men get to sing and run the show. The women don’t sing at all. Then there are the silver balloons spelling out a boast about Thicke’s body, which pretty much tells you what the video is about. And the line “I know you want it” got a lot of criticism for blurring the line around consent. That fits with how passive the women are on screen.
What surprised me is that the video was directed by a woman, Diane Martel. She said she told the models to look straight into the camera so they’d seem in control. But does that really change anything? I don’t think so. The whole video is still set up for the viewer’s enjoyment. So the male gaze isn’t really about who’s behind the camera. It’s about how the shots are framed. It gets even more uncomfortable when you learn that in 2021, Emily Ratajkowski, one of the models, wrote in her memoir My Body that Thicke groped her on set.
Can you flip the gaze? Lily Allen’s “Hard Out Here”
Later that year, Lily Allen released “Hard Out Here”, which makes fun of videos like “Blurred Lines”. She even copies the balloons. The idea was to turn the gaze back on the music industry. But people pointed out a big problem: the dancers twerking around her were mostly Black women, while Allen stayed fully dressed. This is where bell hooks’ (1992) idea of the “oppositional gaze” comes in. Mulvey doesn’t really talk about race, and hooks shows that Black women can still be objectified, even in a video that’s meant to criticise objectification.
Is the theory out of date?
Mulvey was writing about 1970s Hollywood, and she assumed every viewer was a straight man. That’s obviously not true anymore. Gill (2007) also argues that in today’s media, women are often shown as choosing to be sexy, as subjects rather than objects. So who controls the gaze on TikTok or Instagram, where lots of women film themselves? It’s not as clear-cut as it was in Mulvey’s time.
My own experience
To be honest, I’d never seen the “Blurred Lines” video until I started writing this post. The first time I watched it, I just thought it was a fun, catchy video and didn’t think much about it. But when I watched it again with Mulvey in mind, I started noticing how the camera follows the women’s bodies while the guys sing and stay in control. Since learning about the male gaze, I do notice camera angles and who’s being looked at a bit more. I still enjoy these kinds of videos, though! As for “Hard Out Here”, I think Lily Allen meant well, but the way she used the dancers ended up repeating some of the same problems. It made me realise that even calling out the male gaze isn’t as easy as it looks.
Conclusion
“Blurred Lines” shows that Mulvey’s idea still works for music videos today. The women are there to be looked at, even when they look back at the camera. But “Hard Out Here” shows that flipping the gaze isn’t simple, and that gender isn’t the only thing that decides who gets looked at.
