For generations, popular culture often showed women through someone else’s eyes—usually as objects of beauty, romance, or fantasy rather than fully formed people with inner lives, desires, and contradictions.

A recent article from The Guardian argues that this is beginning to change. Across film, television, and fiction, the female gaze—storytelling centred on women’s emotional reality, agency, pleasure, and perspective—is becoming more visible and commercially powerful.

What Is the Female Gaze?

The phrase is often used as a response to the older idea of the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1973 to describe how women were frequently portrayed as objects for heterosexual male viewers.

By contrast, the female gaze focuses less on how women look, and more on:

• What women feel
• What women want
• How women experience intimacy
• The complexity of women’s inner worlds
• Realistic bodies, flaws, humour, and contradiction

Where We’re Seeing It Now

The article points to a wide range of modern examples, including:

• Bridgerton, which brought female-centred romance and desire into mainstream prestige television
• Dying for Sex, praised for showing illness, sexuality, friendship, and female pleasure without shame
• Girls, Fleabag, and I May Destroy You, which presented women as messy, sexual, complicated, and fully human
• The booming romantasy genre, where emotionally rich heroines and mutual desire drive billion-view online fandoms and major book sales

Why It Matters

This shift is about more than entertainment.

When women see themselves represented as subjects rather than objects, culture expands what womanhood is allowed to look like. Desire becomes less taboo. Ageing, illness, trauma, friendship, motherhood, child-free life, queerness, ambition, and uncertainty all gain space.

Stories shape permission.

The article also notes that female-led stories are proving commercially successful—challenging the outdated belief that women’s experiences are niche or less valuable.

But Progress Is Fragile

Despite success, creators interviewed in the piece warn that funding remains inconsistent. More complex female stories—especially those centred on menopause, queer identity, race, or lives beyond romance—still struggle for support and distribution.

Representation has improved, but it is not complete.

The Lydia™ Perspective

For many women, this cultural moment feels quietly validating.

To be shown as desiring rather than decorative. Complex rather than convenient. Human rather than symbolic.

That matters.

At Lydia™, we believe women do not need to be simplified to be loved—or edited to be understood. The female gaze, at its best, reminds culture of something obvious but long neglected:

Women are not scenery in their own lives.

A Gentle Reminder

Choose stories that let women be real.

They often help us do the same.

Full Citation

Thorpe, Vanessa. “‘Women want to experience pleasure’: how the female gaze caught the attention of film, TV and fiction.” The Guardian, April 19, 2026.