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

Kexin Luo, Yue Mao, Bei Zhang, Sophie Hao

Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1205
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
13803–13812
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1205
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kexin Luo, Yue Mao, Bei Zhang, and Sophie Hao. 2024. Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 13803–13812, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels (Luo et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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