# Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17158/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

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- [Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06939/) (2018)
- [Theories of "Gender" in NLP Bias Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02526/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Language-Vision AI Models Pretrained on Web-Scraped Multimodal Data Exhibit Sexual Objectification Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11261/) (2022)
- [Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01601/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification: the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.