ABSTRACT
Whenever the movie screen holds a particularly effective image of terror, little boys and grown
men make it a point of honor to look, while little girls and grown women cover their eyes or
hide behind the shoulders of their dates. There are excellent reasons for this refusal of the
woman to look, not the least of which is that she is often asked to bear witness to her own
powerlessness in the face of rape, mutilation and murder. Another excellent reason for the
refusal to look is the fact that women are given so little to identify with on the screen. Laura
Mulvey’s extremely influential article on visual pleasure in narrative cinema has best defined
this problem in terms of a dominant male look at the woman that leaves no place for the
woman’s own pleasure in seeing: she exists only to be looked at.1
