Voyeurism aroused from Freud Sigmund the famous psychologist who stated that an audience can gain sexual pleasure within the world of cinema and videos.
Voyeurism within all music videos nowadays is how a wide majority of artists sell their music, giving a sexual appeal. This is mainly aimed at males with a wide variety of females within the music video acting sexual and seductive with the use of facial expressions and body language. Varying by the clothes or lack of clothes women wear, such as Mini skirts, Shorts and Bikini's along with revealing dresses showing bra's and cleavage. This is extremely common now within music videos to keep the audience watching the screen and listening to the song. The Use of camera angles vary from low angle shots which track upwards revealing more of the lady it's sexually filming, There is also a lot of close ups of pacific body parts such as bum,breasts,lips,eyes,face and legs these are used to emphasise the women features which sexually appeal to the male audience. This is shown in the music video “Sweat” By Snoop Dawg and David Guetta. The constant close ups on the female in lack of clothing and doing very sexual poses create the feeling of voyeurism as it pleases the male audience. Within the music video there is a lot of hard cuts of females in different positions being very sexual along with the male singer Snoop Dawg, as she sexually sits on top of him. There is also some Voyeurism from male performance, but not so commonly used compared to female performance, However in the music video “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj there is a male performance of voyeurism as their all very hunky and bulky men with a great healthy looking body and what females find attractive. They use this by having sexual dances and activity such as pink liquid being thrown over one of the male's body.
Laura Mulvey wrote the essay “visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey identifies three perspectives that occur in the film which serve to sexually objectify women. The first perspective is of the male character on the screen and how he perceives the female character. The second is of the spectator as they see the female character. The third joins the first two together such as looking and spectator of the male audience to take the female character as a sexual object through looking to the male character in the film placing that person as themselves.
However there are music videos that can be argued agaisnt Laura Mulvey's theory, such as “Going Under” By Evanescence instead of being sexually objectified we see her being much more covered up compared to the common music videos, also very performance based as if she's performing a live performance. However it is not showing innocence but the red dress could reveal Love and Passion.
My Conclusion: Laura Mulvey's and Goodwin's theories do make sense in the way they can be applied to music videos, As it is happening in a large majority of the common music videos being made with sexual voyeurism being represented in both male and female performances to sexual please the audiences eye and taste. However there are still music video's which go against the theories and use no set of Voyeurism what so ever and are purely music video and vocals only pleasing the audience.
By James Vlahos
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