The Gaze and the Female Spectator

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. From an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, Mulvey argues that that cinema provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding why film creates a space where women are viewed as sexual objects by men. She says that it is the combination of the patriarchal order of society and looking as a pleasurable act (voyeurism) that create film as an outlet for female sexual exploitation. An important observation that she makes is that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist. According to her, without a woman to compare to, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. She argues that it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film to sexually objectify women. The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is the perspective of the audience as they see the female character on screen. The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film. This argument, of course, conveniently ignores the presence of Gay males in any given movie audience.
In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film. Essentially we[who?] must take away the pleasure in looking that film allows for by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so is to destroy the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest".
Mulvey's argument comes as a product of the time period in which she was writing. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was written in 1973 and published in 1975. This was during the time period of second-wave feminism, which was a period concerned with the women's achievement of equality in the workplace and the psychological implications of sexual stereotypes. Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.
Critics of Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze challenge that she does not allow for the female spectator. More than that, she does not assume that female viewers will take on a masculine gaze. Mulvey underestimates the female audience's ability to critique and view other females in a masculine way because it would mean that women were actively participating in the oppression of their own gender. Assuming that women would not willingly do this, Mulvey excludes this possibility from her argument, leaving her with a gap in her argument. [6] It is worth repeating that Mulvey fails entirely to take into account the Gay male spectator who will respond to Peeping Tom (for example) from neither side of the "gender divide" she posits in her notes to the Criterion Collection DVD of Powell's film. That the homosexual male spectator is actively disinterested in the female onscreen as "sex object" implies that he is reading films through a far clearer lens (again, to reference Peeping Tom), than Mulvey seems willing to allow a male spectator.
B. Ruby Rich argues that women’s relationships with film is instead dialectical, consciously filtering the images and messages they receive through cinema, and reprocessing them to elicit their own meanings. [7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory

How it relates to question?

-Arguments against view-alison seen as more dominant in film

"She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification."- film complies with this idea as alison is predominantly the breadwinner- however, she is also appointed merely due to her appearance thus corroborating Mulvey's theory of female objectification.