Their eyes on his six pack: Magic Mike XXL and the male gaze in disguise.

The following paper is an attempt to review the new eroticized male as represented in the film Magic Mike XXL and investigate whether the eroticized male becomes an object of the female or male gaze. Although at first glance, the film targets mainly a female audience and many articles have celebrated how the film introduces a new female gaze and acceptance for female sexual pleasure, I will argue that the dominant gaze upon the muscular six pack is the male gaze in disguise. In order to do so I will review three scenes from the movie Magic Mike’s XXL through Lauren Mulvey’s famous essay Visual Pleasure and the Narrative of Cinema and use them as an example of how representations of the eroticized hypersexual heterosexual male are a new code interpellating male subjects into new trends of masculinity.

Magic Mike XXL, directed by Gregory Jacobs follows Magic Mike (Channing Tatum), an ex-male stripper and his fellow muscular coworkers from the crew Kings of Tampa on a road trip to a stripper’s convention in Myrtle Beach where they will put on a final performance. In the beginning of the film, Magic Mike has resigned from stripping and lives happily with his girlfriend in the suburbs, managing a furniture business. When his friends invite him to a fake funeral which turns out to be a party, he decides to follow the group, abandon his conservative life and enjoy stripping for one last time. Although the film has been celebrated for its feminist angle and how it celebrates the female sexual pleasure, the film is still directed by a man and produced by a big Hollywood company as part of a franchise. Both Setzler Sara in Flavorwire and Webb Beth in Dazed Digital argue in their articles that a film such as Magic Mike XXL finally empowers the female gaze and allows women to celebrate their sexuality. Beth Webb writes in her article that “Women ultimately drive this film — and not by emasculating men, but enjoying them; using them as an enabler to greater things.” This statement though is far from the truth. The film combines a male-centric road trip comedy with male strip dance numbers and choreographies. The film pretends to demonstrate what women like, and celebrate the female gaze, but it turns out to be another film with a group of male protagonists in the center and underdeveloped or masculinized female characters on the side.

In her famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative of Cinema, Lauren Mulvey uses the tools of psychoanalysis to introduce the male gaze in mainstream Hollywood film and deconstruct the erotic pleasure that is placed upon the objectified female. As she writes, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”(Mulvey,19). Towards the middle of her essay she discusses how this idea of active/passive expresses itself in the narrative structure of film (Mulvey p.20). According to Mulvey the role of a man in a film narrative is “the active one, advancing the story, making things happen” (Mulvey p.20), whereas the female form is displayed as a spectacle of sexual pleasure(Mulvey p.21). As we will see forward in a film like Magic Mike XXL, the male protagonists always remain the center of attention throughout the entire narrative. The Kings of Tampa are the main protagonists that the audience is expected to identify with and they are the only developed characters who will push the narrative forward. In the aspect of narrative, the male protagonists are the ones who are active and all the females presented in the narrative take on a passive role.

At around minute 4 of the film, the men are catching up after a long time in a hotel room (00:03:30–00:06:35). A woman enters the room in a swimsuit, wearing a helmet. She never talks, only goes around the room flirting with the Kings of Tampa, while they casually carry on their conversation (fig.1). The “unknown woman” is one of the many faceless women the audience encounters during the film, whose only function in the narrative is to worship and adore the male spectacle without ever owning a voice or a personality. The woman with the helmet behaves almost childish, jumping around in the room and acting as an element of the set design. The Kings of Tampa are having a proper male discussion not really paying attention to her but always following her with their gaze. The male protagonists are moving the narrative forward and explaining to the audience what has happened in the past three years, since we left of in the previous film. They show their real faces and personalities, how they really behave when they are not a sexual spectacle for females. The woman has no other function, other than to conflict sexual pleasure for the characters and the audiences.

According to Mulvey the cinematic form not only satisfies scopophilia through the voyeristic phantasy projected in the dark but contemporary develops a narcissistic identification with the image seen. (Mulvey p.18). The viewer gets pleasure from the sexualized image on screen, the gaze of the viewer matches the gaze of the protagonist and when the protagonist conquers the sexualized image on screen, the viewer experinces the satisfaction as well. The viewer peeks on the sexualized object and identifies with the protagonist who peeks too, the gaze of the protagonist becomes the gaze of the viewer, the experience is interorized. In a film like Magic Mike XXL both scopophilia and narcissistic identification get messed up. There is no strong female subject that leads or bears the female gaze upon the sexualized masculine image. The only female gaze that takes place within film, is that of the dazzled consumer, the “unknown woman” throwing dollars on the six packs or that of the masculinized woman organising the spectacle and covering plot gaps. The protagonists who have an active part in the plot, the active narrative figures the audience is expected to identify with are male. The spectacle that takes place within the film is based on a sexualized masculinity as well.

In another scene of the film, the protagonists, after going through many challenges in the course of their road trip and being left out without an M.C. decide to reach out to a friend of Magic Mike, who now owns a private strip club somewhere in Tampa. When the audience first meets Rome, she is disturbed from a personal sexual encounter with one of her employees in her private suite. The black over sexualized topless male serves as both her bodyguard and sex toy. Her behavior shows no difference with the representations of a male strip club owners, despite the fact that she has some feelings for Mike, who suddenly disappeared from her life. Rome has to be masculinized in order to be able to own a business and present the sexual spectacle of masculinity to other women. Rome is one of the few developed female characters in the film. Rome shows Mike around her club and then as part of the show explains to her female customers, whom she calls the queens, her past history with Mike. Then she introduces Magic Mike or White Chocolate to the audiences, objectifies him and challenges him to dance for the other women to look. Mike first denies, but once another stripper is called to replace him, he jumps in and becomes the protagonist of the stripping spectacle.

In “Is the gaze male?” E.Ann Kaplan discusses Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative of Cinema” and Christian Mentz’s theory through different films and positions of the gaze, only to arrive to the fact that all structure of pleasure is based on the domination of patriarchy. Kaplan sees pleasure in films as a structure related to the dipole dominance-submission structure and just like Mulvey relates it a discourse of passive/active looking (Kaplan, 135). As Mulvey writes in her essay, men actively look while women take on an exhibitionist role “to connonote to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 19). As we can see in the case of a film like Magic Mike XXL , the Kings of Tampa celebrate their “to-be-looked-at-ness” performing an exhibitionist role for the choreographed parts of the film. Their film performance as protagonists is hybrid, they move from an active masculine position in the narrative to an exhibitionist performance that sexualizes the male body and represents it as an image.

According to Kaplan’s essay, the gaze is active and the action of “to-be looked at ness”, first introduced in Mulvey’s essay is passive. She states that “to activate the gaze is to be in a masculine position.” (Kaplan, 135) When she discusses musicals and sexualized males such as Robert Redford or John Travolta she states that “when he is set up as a sex object, the woman then takes on the masculine role as bearer of the gaze and initiator of the action”(Kaplan, 129). In Magic Mike XXL the only women who move the action forward, are the masculine females like Rome who appear right before a strip-dance scene. Even the girl that Magic Mike himself flirts with is an independent girl that dresses and behaves in a masculine way in comparison with the “unknown women” who are usually only customers, objects or a faceless audience. However, even the gaze of those masculinized characters does not have the same penetrating power that is placed upon the male gaze through patriarchy.

Steve Neale in his article “Masculinity as a spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema” uses Mulvey’s essay as a reference point to discuss images of men in film. When Neale describes the male body on screen as an object of the erotic look and how the gaze can be laid upon it he describes those moments as “instances of feminization” (Neale p.263). He also brings up in his text the musical as “the only genre in which the male body has been unashamedly put on display in mainstream cinema in any consistent way”(Neale p.263) It is obvious that the film incorporates musical and choreography moments, in order to place semi naked male bodies on display. When the Kings of Tampa start their strip performance, the narrative pauses. The men in the film start dancing sexually and become feminized while performing. The masculinιzed females substitute them in their masculine role, for some brief moments before and after the performance. When the performance is over they adopt again their heterosexual male roles and the narrative resumes. The heterosexual norms are never disturbed.

According to Ann Kaplan “women have been permitted in representation to assume the position defined as masculine, as long as the man steps into her position so as to keep the structure intact”( Kaplan,129). In a film like Magic Mike XXL, where the protagonists become a hybrid between passive objects of a sexual gaze and active initiators of narrative action, the female characters are either completely absent or without any narrative function. The epicenter of the narrative, the bearers and the images of the gaze, are all male. However a dazzled consuming gaze has been created to render the masculine power invisible, some call it the female gaze. If there was a female gaze in the film, this gaze should belong to a well-developed character or subjectivity that takes the active role in the entire film, not to uknown faceless females that appear in the background of the narrative.

When Mulvey describes the representations of women in early Hollywood , we can see how voyeurism, scopophilia and narcissistic identification are played out in both Steinberg’s and Hitchcock films. It is important that the woman portrayed in Hitchock films is usually unaware of the voyer looking at her. She behaves in terms on to-be-looked-at ness, she adjusts her behavior in order to become a sexual object but she pretends not to know that she is being looked at. What is different from the Hitchcock and Sternenberg’s films described in Mulvey’s essay ( Mulvey p.23–25), is the fact that the men in Magic Mike XXL are a part of a spectacle, they are placed on some form of stage and it is obvious that they perform.They are not accidentaly gazed by some intruder during an intimate moment. Τhe Kings of Tampa become sexual objects only when the performance begins. They transform themselves into sexual objects out of choice, as we can see in the beginning of the film when Mike abandons his business and girlfriend to follow his crew.

There is no voyeurism taking place throughout Magic Mike XXL. The Kings of Tampa become sexual objects, only when they desire and their ability to connotate “to-be-looked-at-ness” strengthens their masculinity and brings more women and money into their arms. Dancing becomes a repition of sex moves. Magic Mike lifts the women and throws them into the air or he settles them in sexual positions like on all fours and then pretends to have a sexual encounter with them. (fig.2) In a sense, the uknown women from the audience are forced to be sexualized and participate in the spectacle as well. Unlike representations of strip club scenes with female strippers, they are not observers who can lay back and relax. Magic Mike deliberately becomes the center of their attention, as he has been placed in such a context where all eyes are on his abs. The women in the crowd are not voyeurs but they are the audiences of a spectacle they have paid to view. The element of peeping has been completely erased. The unknown women in the crowd don’t have developed personalities, they are only present in the background as females to scream and be pleased by the sexual body and dance of Mike. The women in the crowd have no power over the spectacle with their female gazes.

Magic Mike and the male protagonists of the film are not objectified at all; they are just placed in a different condition. From an active position of moving forward the diegesis, they move into a feminized position for a few minutes and become the spectacle, celebrating the looked-at-ness of their muscular male bodies. The real objects, though, in the film are all the “unknown women” in the crowd who are treated like the woman in the helmet just like props, clapping for the spectacle, rolling their eyes and throwing their money on his Magic Mike’s six pack. The “uknown women” are an objectified consumer of the spectacle, thirsty for hot male bodies.

Lauren Mulvey towards the end of her essay breaks down the voeyristic-scopophilic look. According to her theory there are three different looks that take place in cinema the look of the camera recording the pro-filmic event, the look of the audience watching the final product and the look of the characters within the illusion. Narrative film tries to render the look of the camera and the look of the audience and place them all in the look of the characters within the illusion. Magic Mike XXL provides a specific scene where the game of the gazes inside and outside of the frame is visible.

In this scene the wolf pack forces a member of their crew to perform a challenge and make the employee in the convenience store at a gas station smile. (00:33:40–00:38:40). Big Dick Richie is supposedly the one from the crowd who has both the biggest heart and the biggest phallus. However, he has a really hard time to have sex with women and he also has different dreams for his stripping career, performing different roles that go beyond the classic firemen sketches. In order to find his true self the other men challenge him to dance at the gas station. He dances Backstreet boys while undressing and throwing consumer goods such as Cheetos and water on himself and on the floor (fig.3). The woman is looking at him in disgust and surprise,(fig.4) while the rest of the heterosexual males from the wolf pack are gazing and clapping from the window his attempt to “make the woman happy ” and help her forget her miserable life by flashing some six packs in her eyes.(fig.5).

This scene can help us deconstruct the gazes throughout the entire film. The woman in the convenience store observes the sexual performing body, out of context full of doubt. She looks embarrassed and in the end she smiles uncomfortably on his ridicule. This is the female gaze that is available for women to identify with within the film. Male nudity and sexual performance should make women feel uncomfortable and naughty, cause a smile from within. On the other hand, the male gaze is way more visible and celebrates with joy, the male friend who is being challenged with the performance. The men behave like peacocks in an attempt to gather female sexual attention, but what they mainly achieve is the gaze of each other upon their heterosexual bodies. The film is dominated by a narcissistic scopophilia, where male audiences are expected to identify with the protagonists and women become the speechless audience, observing masculinity in its spectacular form. This is the dominant male gaze in the entire film. The female gaze is either completely absent because there is no female subjectivity represented strongly enough to bear the gaze or the consumeristic gaze of an audience that watches a performance.

However, although the dominant gaze of the film is a gaze of a male man on another male body, Magic Mike XXXL offers plenty of scenes that clarify that the gaze is not homoerotic. The script addresses as often as possible, the fact that the strippers are heterosexual everyday men and not gay from the early beginning, not only with heterosexual jokes and sexual encounters with females. When placed in a queer drug show, the Kings of Tampa take over the stage for fun and vogue together with queer men. This scene demonstrates how the protagonists of the film are able to perform and dance while keeping their masculinity intact. They are not homoerotic but at the same time they are also not homophobic. One thing is for sure though , all stages belong to their masculine sexual spectacle.

Magic Mike XXL presents a narrative based on muscular males with developed personalities on a road trip with a musical aspect that celebrates exhibitionism in its masculine form. The male protagonists of the film are performing a spectacle and they can move from a position of masculinity/action in narrative to a position of feminization/ sexualized spectacle. It is clear that the men move from one position to the other with the goal of celebrating “to-be looked at ness”. There is no element of voyeurism, the men are neiter fragmented nor penetrated by the camera and the power of the gaze is never handed to the females, mainly because they don’t have developed enough characters to become the bearers of the gaze. Magic Mike and the Kings of Tampa are a hybrid between masculinity and feminization, they move forward the narrative with their masculine personalities and then become the spectacle themselves with their muscular bodies.

Both Magic Mike and his cohort manage to succeed in everything. They can be sexualized lovers, sexual performers and at the same time intellectual personalities with interests and capabilities beyond stripping. Throughout the film we see the Magic Mike XXL actualizes the idea that men, who can earn a spectacular body, can become objects of the “gaze “and have more success with astonished women. The film celebrates hotness and concurrently instructs a new code of masculinity, for the male who will identify with the protagonists. The males who will identify with the protagonists of the film, will buy into the idea that by becoming fit and performing sexually males can have as many women as they want. There is no limit for the sexual masculine man, he can be active and heterosexual and at the same time celebrate his beauty and become a worshipped image. Although the film proposes an idea of a female gaze and female sexuality, it still promotes the male gaze in disguise and a celebration of narcissistic identification.

Works Cited

Kaplan, E. Ann editor. Feminism and Film. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kaplan, E.Ann. “Is the Gaze Male?” Kaplan, pp.119–38.

Magic Mike XXL, Directed by Gregory Jacobs, performances by Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Warner Bros Pictures, 2015.

Malvey, Laura.”Visual Pleasure and the Narrative of Cinema”,(1973), Visual and Other Pleasures. 1989. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009., pp14–27.

Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle. Reflections of Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Kaplan, pp.253–64.

Seltzer, Sara. “‘Magic Mike XXL’ and the Rise of the Female Gaze.” Flavorwire. Flavorpill Media, 6/29/2015, http://flavorwire.com/524930/magic-mike-xxl-and-the-rise-of-the-female-gaze, Accessed on 4/29/2017

Webb, Beth. “How Magic Mike is empowering the female gaze: Turns out thongs, baby oil and straight-up cheese are doing it for the feminist cause”. Dazed, 2016, http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/28389/1/how-magic-mike-is-empowering-the-female-gaze, Accessed on 4/29/2017

Table of figures

Figure1: The “uknown female”, Magic Mike XXL, (00.04.35), 2015, Author’s screenshot.

Figure 2: A celebration of male to-be-looked-at-ness, Magic Mike XXL, (00.44.35), 2015, Author’s screenshot.

Figure 3: Male strip dance, out of context, Magic Mike XXL, (00.33.19), 2015, Author’s screenshot.

Figure 4: The female gaze in Magic Mike XXL, Magic Mike XXL, (00.33.48), 2015, Author’s screenshot.

Figure 5: The male gaze in disguise, Magic Mike XXL, (00.34.50), 2015, Author’s screenshot.