Clodagh Finn: We need to talk about the male gaze

Georgie Purcell, of the Animal Justice Party in the state parliament of Victoria, posted an unedited image of herself alongside the doctored one: “Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing. Can’t imagine this happening to a male MP,” she tweeted.

Hugh Nailon, director of Nine News Melbourne, blamed “automation by Photoshop” and said it happened when the network’s graphics department was resizing the image. As a one-time user of Adobe’s Photoshop who has resized many a photograph, I never knew it had a ‘bigger boobs button’, but technology moves on.

Now, I’m almost inclined to believe Nailon because there is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme called a “generative expand” tool that fills in parts of the photo that aren’t there. When the network asked it to generate a bigger version of a cropped photo of Georgie Purcell, the tech responded by adding to the bustline and revealing her mid-riff.

The software apparently draws from a vast library of stock images and it is here, it seems, that you’ll find the “sexualise, fetishise and undermine” setting.

Generative AI “routinely sexualises images of women and girls”, according to journalist Tracey Spicer author of Man-Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future. That is a subtitle that should make us sit up and take notice.

To give one unsettling example. When Spicer was looking for a design for her book cover, she put in the prompt: “Strong robot woman looking to the future with hope but concern.” The AI generator gave her an image of a sexy gold robot with huge breasts and a tiny waist.

She has warned that we are on "the verge of a tsunami” when it comes to the weaponisation of AI against women.

What’s the point of making strides in the 21st century if the cutting-edge technology of our brave new world is pulling us back into the 1950s?

There was an upside to the News Nine gaffe (I’m erring on the side of benign), though. It gave Georgie Purcell a global platform to talk about every single young person’s struggle with body image, not to mention her own campaign to end recreational duck shooting in Victoria.

“I want women’s words to be enough, without bringing our bodies into it,” she wrote earlier this week. And so say all of us.

There are no words, though, to describe the level of misogyny behind the deepfake porn images, probably AI-generated, of Taylor Swift that the platform X (or should we say X-rated?) took far too long to take down.

Again, there was, if not quite an upside, an uplifting display of loyalty by fans whose message ‘Protect Taylor Swift’ trended on X.

It’s cold comfort for the many others — mostly women, though no surprise there — who are being targeted in posts designed to undermine anyone with the temerity to put their head above the parapet. The mental age and mindset? Disgruntled, hormonal (most likely male) teenager.

There is no doubt about it: artificial intelligence is going to intensify the male gaze.

It’s worth revisiting the origin of that phrase to illustrate how little has changed. In her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term to explain how, in Hollywood cinema, the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure” and then styles the film accordingly.

The man is active; the woman passive. She is there simply because of her “to-be-looked-at-ness eroticism”, as Mulvey put it.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, she explained that hypersexualising women was one way of rendering them less threatening to men.

She also spoke about a three-way gaze: the camera’s gaze focused on woman as erotic object; the male character in the screen story treated her as an erotic object and, most potently of all, their combined way of looking influenced the spectators in the auditorium. They looked at what they were seeing through the ‘male gaze’ without even realising it.

What better way to make a male-centric view of the world seem normal?

If film-making has changed over the decades — though sometimes, you’d have to wonder — any nuance or sensibility gained in the process is entirely lost in the blunt instrument of AI.

The same kind of three-way gaze operates in social media but with even fewer checks or controls. There is no cinematography, no crew, no production debate; just citizen techie, or citizen social-media user who is free to formulate any kind of content at will.

If we have any power at all, it is as citizen spectator. And that power is not to be underestimated. Georgie Powell called out the news channel or the technical ‘error’ — you decide — when it tried to turn her into a ‘to-be-looked-at’ object rather than a ‘to-be-listened-to’ elected politician.

She wasn’t having it. In the same way, fans of Taylor Swift gathered around to say this is not on. There was uproar. And we need to raise our voices for all people affected, not just the high-profile ones.

It feels like the right time to start talking about the male gaze again, this time applying it to AI and social media.

Social media also has three gazes: the camera as it films/photographs; the person it captures in the frame, and the people who scroll and see it. How often do all three undermine women? Or indeed men? Because the male gaze affects men too, undermining the millions of good, decent men out there who are guided by the principles of respect, no matter what your gender.

The ‘male gaze theory’ also provides a useful framework to explain why the leader of an Irish political party, Holly Cairns, was forced to close down her constituency office in Bandon, Co Cork, after security concerns.

Or why female local councillors are most likely to encounter direct and online abuse from the public. They said they faced “deeply problematic” biases, both from the public and in the workplace, according to research conducted by Maynooth University for the Association of Irish Local Government.

It really is time to develop a new way of seeing.