Reading Laura Mulvey- Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

"Cinema as a system of representation poses the question of the form and manner in which the collective subconscious structures ways of seeing and pleasure of looking. Mainstream Hollywood cinema has represented the erotic realm using the language and images of the patriarchal culture. it satisfies and reinforces the masculine ego and represses the desire of women.
Cinema offers a number of possible sensual pleasures, among them, scopophilia, or love of looking, and its opposite the pleasure derived from being looked at.
According to Mulvey, the screen plays with our scopophilia and voyeuristic plantasies. It gives us a world which to submerge in which our gaze wonders free. The audience also represses its exhibitionism and projects the repressed desire to the performer. Cinema, she feels, satisfies our basic need for pleasurable looking.
Mulvery goes on to say that in our society pleasure of looking shows the very imbalance of the patriarchal system. the male gaze is active and the female gaze is passive. Women, in the world of images, are displayed as sexual objects. The presence of women is an indispensable element in spectacle.  Traditionally, the displaying of women in the world of cinema has functioned at two levels:
1. as erotic objects for male characters in the screen story, and
2. as an erotic object for the spectator in the auditorium."