One of the debates that emerged from the brutal and vastly covered in media, The Delhi Gang Rape (2012), was if Bollywood promoted rape culture through its item numbers critiquing the male gaze on women’s bodies and questioning whether the hyper-sexualization of Bollywood’s actresses served to normalize sexual harassment. The new trend being, the asexual, good Indian girl (who ultimately is coveted by the hero) constructed against the sexualized item-girl and one instantly thinks of the mother-whore dichotomy in place here. Freud hypothesized the need in male psyche to split the women into mother (nurturing, caring, tender and pure, idealized and of his own class) and whore (sexual, dirty, who he could have sex with) to relieve the anxiety
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So she is an integral factor in the storyline but it is in relation to the main actor, independently she is insignificant. Man is reluctant to gaze his exhibitionist like because of inability of the gender to bear the brunt of sexual objectification, thus women is displayed on two levels of erotic object: one for the on-screen characters and the other for the spectator of the movie. Thereby there is an active/passive division of labor, with the man controlling the film fantasy and being the representative of power, one with who the spectator identifies and feels omnipotent, as things that he cannot do himself, he does through his “screen-surrogate” (Lacanian recognition is overlaid with misrecognition in that the image recognized in the mirror by the baby, as perfect yet not his own produces an ideal ego that is internalized, simultaneously also alienating the subject). But, women also imply a threat of castration (Horney sees this as the “fear of the vagina”) and thus unpleasure, and the male unconscious has two avenues of escape from it: either a voyeuristic investigation demystifying her mystery and devaluing her deriving sadistic pleasure out of it or by substituting it with scopophilic fetishism, that builds up on the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into satisfying in itself (Mulvey, 1975) but it is necessary to note that this doesn’t represent women qua women at all and sets male/non-male instead of man/female dichotomy (Johnson 1973, as cited in Kaplan, 1983). Thus sexualization and objectification of women isn’t only for eroticism but also to annihilate the castration anxiety, the dread that women embody. Men don’t only look, but their gaze carries power and possession, which lacks in the female gaze who receive and react by
So she is an integral factor in the storyline but it is in relation to the main actor, independently she is insignificant. Man is reluctant to gaze his exhibitionist like because of inability of the gender to bear the brunt of sexual objectification, thus women is displayed on two levels of erotic object: one for the on-screen characters and the other for the spectator of the movie. Thereby there is an active/passive division of labor, with the man controlling the film fantasy and being the representative of power, one with who the spectator identifies and feels omnipotent, as things that he cannot do himself, he does through his “screen-surrogate” (Lacanian recognition is overlaid with misrecognition in that the image recognized in the mirror by the baby, as perfect yet not his own produces an ideal ego that is internalized, simultaneously also alienating the subject). But, women also imply a threat of castration (Horney sees this as the “fear of the vagina”) and thus unpleasure, and the male unconscious has two avenues of escape from it: either a voyeuristic investigation demystifying her mystery and devaluing her deriving sadistic pleasure out of it or by substituting it with scopophilic fetishism, that builds up on the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into satisfying in itself (Mulvey, 1975) but it is necessary to note that this doesn’t represent women qua women at all and sets male/non-male instead of man/female dichotomy (Johnson 1973, as cited in Kaplan, 1983). Thus sexualization and objectification of women isn’t only for eroticism but also to annihilate the castration anxiety, the dread that women embody. Men don’t only look, but their gaze carries power and possession, which lacks in the female gaze who receive and react by