Unfriendly Male Gaze

The hit NBC sit-com Friends lasted ten seasons, a grand total of two hundred and thirty-six episodes, from September 22^nd 1994 to May 6^th, 2004. The show follows six friends and their relationships with each other, as well as their adventures in miscommunication both in the workplace and romance. The relationship between two of the friends, Ross Geller and Rachel Green, a couple the audience watches constantly in “will they or won’t they” anticipation, is a relationship deeply entrenched in the male gaze. One can truly analyze the entire show for its uses of the male gaze, but for one thing, that would make for a much longer blog post.

The male gaze is the act of media creators in depicting women from a masculine perspective. Women are only depicted for the pleasure of the male viewer, as opposed to considering the female viewer. Women are considered sexual objects through the male gaze, as opposed to complex people.

Ross and Rachel
Season 3, Episode 16: The One the Morning After

This masculine, heterosexual, cisnormative way of depicting women seeps into our subconscious as viewers and affects our daily life, contributing to the support of the patriarchy. In the beginning of Ross and Rachel’s relationship as of Season 1, Ross is constantly depicted as a friend-zoned guy next door type, while Rachel is a dumb blonde beauty who peaked in high school and is trying, and struggling, to make it on her own. In Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the essay that coined the phrase “male gaze,” Mulvey describes that the “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey 837). The male characters are affected by the female characters and this is what drives the plot and effects the storyline. The audience for Friends is urged on, especially by its live audience laugh track, to commiserate with Ross as he pines for Rachel. When Rachel dates other people, it is constantly through the lens of Ross’s suffering. Ross’s pining is important, it drove the plot forward. Rachel is the reason for his actions. She represents love and happiness to him and this is what made her character worthy to depict. When the tables turn in Season 2 and Rachel pines over Ross while he dates other people, the lens is through Ross’s indecision over dating his current girlfriend or Rachel. Rachel remains passive.

The oppositional gaze, a theory developed by bell hooks in the 1990s, is the opposite. It is the gaze that confronts, challenges, and resists. The oppositional gaze realizes that white womanhood is the object of the male gaze and that black womanhood does not equate. The oppositional gaze is a critical space (hooks, 115). Black women watching Friends with the oppositional gaze would realize that, first of all, that there is only one character in a supporting role in the entirety of the ten season run who is black (not even to mention that this supporting role is a love interest of Ross’s and her purpose is to create conflict for his character). And second, seeing as there is only one black woman on the entire show with an actual storyline, every other woman is white. Truly, white womanhood is the object of the male gaze. The oppositional gaze developed from a complete lack of representation. Looking for themselves in media, television and film, was engaging in the very negation of the self. Their presence was absence (hooks, 117). One can make the argument that modern television and media continue to strive for better representation… yet all too popular television shows that continue to have re-runs and are a major part of pop culture… have one black woman, over ten years, as a guest actress. One.  Rachel, an upper-middle class fair skinned blonde blue-eyed white woman is the ideal.

While the analysis presented here is for the television show Friends, these concepts of the male gaze and then the creation of the oppositional gaze are throughout our experience as media consumers.  


Academic texts referenced:

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Film Theory and Criticism " Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Ofxford UP, 1999: 833-44.

Hooks, Bell, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115-31

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