The Male Gaze
The perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women.
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female."
- Laura Mulvey
Consider movies, for example. Usually, the camera is positioned and moved in a way to suggest that the perspective of the camera is a male perspective. The most obvious example of this is when women are sexualized by the camera slowly tilting up from their legs or fixating on a part of their body. Directing the audience's attention towards women in this way suggests the perspective of the camera is that of a heterosexual man. As a result of this, women in movies are often objectified and dehumanized whilst male perspectives are normalized and neutralized. This is not unique to movies, we can see it elsewhere in other texts.