Sexual objectification in the context of "Body image"

Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy.

Feminist theory often focuses on analyzing gender inequality. Themes often explored in feminist theory include discrimination, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, patriarchy, stereotyping, art history and contemporary art, and aesthetics.

In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one's self. In Marxism, the objectification of social relationships is discussed as "reification".

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The concept was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period, where the female form was often idealized and presented from a voyeuristic male perspective.

Art historian John Berger, in his work Ways of Seeing (1972), highlighted how traditional Western art positioned women as subjects of male viewers' gazes, reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative. The beauty standards perpetuated by the male gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized black women due to an attraction to their physical characteristics, but at the same time punished them and excluded their bodies from what is considered desirable.