Through the Lens of Desire: The Male Gaze in Mean Girls

In Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory, she argues that mainstream cinema and other visual media often represent women from a masculine and heterosexual perspective, reducing women to objects of male desire and pleasure. This theory highlights how the “gaze” reinforces patriarchal norms, framing women as passive subjects to be looked at, while men are active agents who look and act. It explores the dynamics of power and control within visual representation and how these representations shape societal views of gender and sexuality. At a more fundamental level, it argues that the camera is an extension of male desire. 

Mulvany’s theory is demonstrated in the 2004 film Mean Girls. The film centres around Cady Heron, who attempts to navigate the complex social hierarchies of high school while infiltrating and ultimately dismantling the power of a popular but toxic clique known as “The Plastics.” 

While it is important to note that the female characters in this film are given a high level of agency and decision-making power, which contrasts Mulvany’s passive female argument, that agency still fundamentally centres around male desire. For example, Cady’s initial choice to take down the plastics only happens because the group’s leader, Regina George, had hooked up with Cady’s crush and thus stole the desire Cady was seeking. From there, Cady makes two deliberate sets of choices, First, she makes choices to strip away Regina’s popularity. As framed in the film, this means making Regina fat, ugly and single. In other words, it means reducing Regina’s looked-at-ness and stripping her of the ability to be a vessel for the male desire. Second, Cady makes a set of choices designed to increase her popularity. Posited by the film, this involves Cady becoming stereotypically attractive and ditzy. All choices Cady makes to increase the male desire shown to her.  In other words, despite the film not directly featuring a passive female and active male as discussed in Mulvany’s theory, the male desire and men are still the active concepts pushing the plot forward with female characters often taking a passive role in the plot. 

One can even see the male desire pushing the plot forward by the end of the film. The film ends with Cady joining a mathletics club and telling the student body that everyone is unique at a big school dance. This culminates in Cady, and the film, sending the message that you shouldn’t change yourself, and makes you unique, for men. This good message, the problem is that the film still delivers in the confines of the male gaze. Cady only learns this lesson when her crush tells her she is unattractive in her vapid state, telling her he liked her more when she was unique. Cady then becomes unique again, in part, to gain that desire back. She then tells the student body at the dance that the way to win a man is to be yourself. Something we see succeeding, as the film ends with Cady dating her crush. In other words, the film attempts to say that women should not perform for the male gaze, and yet it just changes the way women perform it. In other words, the performance of male desire is transformed from one of superficiality to one of uniqueness. 

Of course, the film has other problems in this regard as well. For example, its shots often rely on the same problematic motifs, but at a more fundamental level its plot attempts to break away from the theory and simply fails.

References 

Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, Pages 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Waters, M (director) (2004) Mean Girls [motion picture], Paramount Pictures.