Chick Flicks and the Straight Female Gaze: Sexual Objectification and Sex Negativity in New Moon, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Magic Mike, and Fool’s Gold

Laura Mulvey’s seminal work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema reveals the existence and impact of the (heterosexual) male gaze in classic Hollywood cinema. Despite the prevalence of this gaze today, the binary Mulvey posits—man as subject/woman as object—is dated as it fails to account for the emerging presence of the heterosexual female gaze in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Indeed, the practice of male sexual objectification is trending and little research has been done concerning the erotic spectacle of the male body on screen. My essay examines this trend in chick flicks, which more than any other film genre are created for a heterosexual female audience. As Marcia Pally’s Object of the Game points out, such spectacle is not necessarily negative; however, an analysis of the genre reveals that sexual objectification is often linked with sex negativity. Chick flicks like Magic Mike (2012), New Moon (2009), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), and Fool’s Gold (2008) demonstrate that the sexual objectification of the male body actually weakens the desirability of his character. In New Moon and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it is the nice guy who ‘gets the girl’ and the sex object who does not. In Magic Mike and Fool’s Gold, the sex object does win over the woman in the end, yet the films designate the sexuality of these characters as a flaw they must overcome to achieve this aim. Case studies of these movies thus show that chick flicks increasingly indulge in male spectacle, yet condemn the practice of sexual objectification via sex negativity.