In Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she discusses the idea of scopophilia in cinema and how cinema plays a role in sexual pleasure. According to Mulvey, scopophilia is the pleasure of looking where the person gains sexual pleasure from the use of sight, very similar to the concept of vouyerism. Cinema allows for the concept of scopophilia flourish due to the fact that cinema allows the viewer an opportunity to be in this anonymous space where they can watch the others, others being the people on the screen, without them knowing so. Typically, in cinema, this sexual pleasure is established through the female roles within the film. These women are then labeled as the temptress for both the male characters and the viewers to draw a larger audience to the film. This normalizes in today’s films that women in cinema are always portrayed as a love interest or an object of the leading man’s desires. A great example of this is Sofia Vergara. An incredibly gorgeous Latina actress that is well known for her looks in film. Historically in cinema, women roles tend to exist to make the leading male character appear “good” and add to his social status, in the film, by essentially acting as a trophy that emphasizes his masculinity.  Mulvey discusses that another way women are illustrated as inferior to men is through the phallocentric system. This suggests that women envy men because we physiologically lack a “penis” thus we are unable to have a fetish. However, in media this portrayal of inferiority in women is adopted and continues to be carried on as a tradition.

Additionally, Mulvey relates scopophilia to Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Mulvey explains Lacan’s idea of recognition and misrecognition. According to Lacan, misrecognition is where we as the person looking at our image in the mirror, although we aspire to be that image that we see, we tend to mistake ourselves to be that image. Mulvey applies this concept to cinema by stating, “… demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like” (1958). This supports my belief of sexual desires being rooted from the ego, meaning in my opinion the sexual desires of men are stimulated through the ego of men because their ego is boosted through the validation and praise that is gained through winning over a girl way out of their league. Essentially, ego and sexual desires have a common ability to produce this form of fantasy for men as their sexual impulses are projected onto the actors in a film. This now allows for the spectator to have an experience where a sense of control and satisfaction through the actions of the protagonist as if they, the spectators, were to be performing the acts themselves. The characteristics of a male actor now represents an idealized version of themself, rather than merely serving as a figment of imagination.