The Female Gaze in Magic Mike

Magic Mike is a film about male strippers in which female audiences are encouraged to look at the male characters with pleasure, and is argued to focus almost entirely on the straight female gaze. 

 

The film sexualises the male characters as they are seen as objects, like women are in the male gaze, we are encouraged to look at and watch these characters with pleasure. The male character's job is to be a stripper and sexually please the audience with their appearance.

As the director expected, he made a huge profit with female audiences watching the film at cinemas the first weekend in which it was released, the marketing had clearly hit it’s target. However, many viewers of the film stated that the scenes in which the actors were not stripping bored them, making them restless, and that they wanted to see more of the stripping scenes. Although other women viewers argued that this was not what women want to see within a film and expressed their disappointment with the thoughts of what women want to view, this is quite different though to the amount of women who viewed the film for their own purpose.

It is noticed by many how little male nudity (partically full-frontal male nudity) we see in this film and many other films too, contrasted with the high amounts of female nudity that is shown in mainstream movies. Some audiences question whether this is because women are so used to seeing the female body sexualized on screen, that they are unsure how to react to the sexualized male body.

Other viewers compare the ways in which the male strippers in this film are portrayed and the ways female strippers are portrayed in Hollywood movies. The camera never lingers, pauses or isolates the male body as it does in films that star women. The director did not use extreme close up’s of individual body parts and uses long shots to capture Channing Tatum’s talent and gift when he dances. Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian's film critic, notices that "they are taken seriously even when they get into trouble... it's a movie which takes itself quite seriously and I think that's part of it's success as a massive box office hit", this is showing how the male characters are not only seen as sexualised males but professional men who have jobs. 

Amanda Klimczuk (a researcher at the Institute for Mind and Biology) stated that seeing male strippers is “seen as something ‘naughty’ – like eating ice cream right out of the carton – so doing it with friends may be pleasurable, but may also instill giddiness because they’re all doing something ‘taboo’ together.” 

However, women seemed to enjoy looking at males in a pleasurable and sexualized way, as seen by the reviews of the film and the ticket office sales, so perhaps if it wasn’t so uncommon and rare it would be seen more acceptable.