Everyone claims to know what the female gaze is, which is usually the first sign that no one does. The phrase has become cultural shorthand, slapped onto Netflix shows, indie films, and TikTok reels as if it were self-explanatory. Yet unlike the male gaze, which Laura Mulvey defined with the precision of an architect mapping out patriarchy’s blueprints, the female gaze floats between marketing gloss and academic wishfulness. It is invoked more often than it is explained and celebrated more often than it is interrogated. The result is less a coherent theory than a Rorschach test, reflecting back whatever politics, aesthetics, or desires we want it to carry.

The female gaze has become a cultural buzzword: a hashtag for Bridgerton, a halo for indie films, and a placeholder for feminist critique that never arrives. While John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” gave the male gaze intellectual precision, the female gaze has been treated more like a slogan than a theory. Critics tend to define it negatively, telling us only what it is not: it does not objectify, it does not subordinate, and it does not strip women of interiority. What remains is a vague promise of empathy, sensitivity, and wholeness.

Joey Soloway describes the female gaze as “feeling seeing,” as the act of making visible what it feels like to be looked at, and as the defiant return of that gaze. It is a poetic framework, but one that relies on a directorial environment still overwhelmingly controlled by men. A 2023 USC Annenberg report found that across 1,600 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022, only 88 were directed by women. In other words, the female gaze has been drafted into a game where women seldom hold the camera.

The representation of women across films and streaming shows in India tells an even starker story. According to the 2021 O Womaniya! report, which examined nearly 150 theatrical and streaming releases across eight languages, not a single one of the 56 theatrical films surveyed had a woman as a director or an editor. When the infrastructure of storytelling excludes women so entirely, to speak of a “female gaze” risks sounding less like a theory of vision and more like a fantasy of access. A gaze cannot exist where women are barred from holding the lens. Where Mulvey gave us the male gaze as an architecture of power, the female gaze has often been flattened into an aesthetic. On social media, it circulates like a hashtag—attached to Bridgerton or Fleabag as if softness of light or centering of female desire could constitute a new theory of spectatorship. Feminist film scholars such as Brenda Cooper insist that the female gaze must mock the male gaze, foreground female friendships, and place women’s activities above their bodies. Yet even this formulation admits that the female gaze exists only in tension with the male gaze, never entirely free of it.

The result is conceptual instability: is the female gaze a feminist lens, a female perspective, or merely a style of shooting scenes that eroticizes women’s autonomy rather than their bodies? Mulvey’s original point was that the male gaze is not simply a way of looking but the media-cultural manifestation of patriarchy itself. By contrast, the female gaze remains an unsteady mirage, half-theory and half-marketing gloss.

The female gaze is often framed as a corrective to the male gaze, a way of flipping the camera back on its wielder. But if we look closely, what’s being marketed as the female gaze today feels less like revolution and more like repackaging. It’s soft-focus longing in Bridgerton, delicate indie romances that are applauded for being “sensitive,” and a cultural buzzword that drifts across panels, headlines, and hashtags. The female gaze has become a cultural buzzword: a hashtag for Bridgerton, a halo for indie films, and a placeholder for feminist critique that never arrives. In the process, its radical edge is dulled—it becomes an aesthetic instead of a dismantling.

The so-called female gaze, then, often circulates in absence of women themselves holding the tools of storytelling. Instead of upending power, it’s a softened variation of the same gaze—inviting men to feel progressive, and women to feel represented, without either experiencing the disruption of actual change. If the female gaze is simply rebranding gentleness, empathy, or longing as inherently feminine, it risks essentializing women as vessels of feeling rather than agents of power.

To speak of a true female gaze is not to invert the lens but to shatter its boundaries: to depict women without performance, without tailoring their experiences to be digestible, and without disguising structural exclusion with glittery hashtags. The female gaze should not be the cinematic equivalent of a scented candle to soothe patriarchal fatigue—it should be the fire alarm that wakes us from it.

And this is where the conversation must sharpen: dismantling the gaze cannot mean bending it into men’s narratives of what “liberation” should look like, nor settling for pacifist visions of a gentler patriarchy dressed as feminism. The point is not to grant men a “fluidity” that flatters their progressive image, but to demand standards authored by women themselves. A gaze that destabilizes, rewrites, and reconstructs on women’s terms—not one that functions as an accessory to the existing frame.

The female gaze today is less an active disruption and more a performance dressed as liberation. It appears in camera pans softened by orchestral scores, in heroines allowed to ogle men only when the tone is playful, never dangerous. When women look, their looking is immediately aestheticized, made safe, almost domesticated — a kind of gaze-lite that flatters patriarchal comfort. Consider how desire is permitted: men filmed through silk curtains, drenched in rain, or slowed into fantasy sequences. These moments do not trouble masculinity but reinforce it — because their desirability is framed through vulnerability packaged neatly, rather than through authority or menace. The female gaze in popular culture is allowed to exist only when it is coy, ironic, or consumable. It rarely unsettles. It rarely take.

This hollow version of the female gaze functions like an accessory—much like body-positivity campaigns that feature “acceptable curves” or queer representation limited to side characters. It gestures at revolution without burning anything down. What should be a radical tool of refusal and reimagination instead becomes the cinematic equivalent of mood lighting: decorative, flattering, but never threatening to the furniture of patriarchy.

The truth is crueler: women are not just aware of the gaze, they are welded to it. From TikTok debates over who we dress for, to the silent choreography of crossing streets, femininity is lived as a lifelong performance of being watched. Men never internalize this theatre; their sense of self does not rot beneath the surveillance of others. For women, the gaze is stitched into identity so thoroughly it becomes inescapable—a blue thread woven into a pink blanket that cannot be unpicked without tearing the fabric apart. And here lies the betrayal: the female gaze, as it is packaged today, is not ours. It is a repurposed lens, softened to flatter masculinity, disguised as progress but functioning as yet another instruction manual for self-surveillance. It makes women complicit in their own objectification, selling them “choice” while dictating every angle of how that choice must appear.

So no, there is no salvation in reclaiming the gaze. The gaze is not a tool to polish, not a lens to repaint. It is scaffolding built to cage the feminine, and the only honest response is to dismantle it altogether. Not with the pacifist hand-wringing of men who propose “fluidity” as a balm, but by demanding a world where women’s standards—not men’s anxieties—redraw the lines of power, pleasure, and perception.

The female gaze does not exist. And it should not. What must exist instead is a refusal: the right to live unframed, unobserved, and uninterpreted.

So long as women remain statistical ghosts in the director’s chair, every so-called “female gaze” is still a ghost story told by men—flattering itself with our faces, rehearsing our pain in high-definition, and calling it progress. What we are offered is not vision but illusion: patriarchy in drag, cinema in lipstick, the same old throne reupholstered in velvet. To mistake this for liberation is to mistake softness for freedom, to confuse a candle with a blaze.

THIS IS WHAT I MEAN