Do you devour the steamy romantasy bestsellers by Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros? Or flood your group chat with breathless recaps of the latest episodes of TV series like Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton? Or perhaps you lose yourself in the provocative cinematic worlds of Emerald Fennell? If so, you’ve likely noticed that in pop culture, the female gaze—storytelling that delves into the intricate, textured, and wonderfully messy inner lives and desires of women—is having a major moment.
On television, it’s everywhere: in the rich interior lives and desires explored in Big Little Lies, Sirens, or Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s Little Fires Everywhere. Romantasy novels embrace it through powerful heroines and fantastical romance in fairy realms. Meanwhile, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Promising Young Woman are marketed with the promise of transforming women’s experiences into compelling, darkly beautiful cinema.
Is this a cultural shift, a fleeting moment, or a commercial juggernaut? That depends on how closely you look. But the portrayal of internalized female perspectives—and, crucially, female desires—has moved from guilty pleasure to the heart of the zeitgeist. Today, the idea of centering the subjectivity of women’s experiences, agency, and emotions is more visible than ever across our cultural landscape.
This growing body of pop culture challenges society’s conditioning to view women’s lives through the lens of male storytellers—or the “male gaze.” Coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1973, this theory explains how women in film, art, and literature have long been reduced to objects of desire from a heterosexual male perspective. Subverting this male gaze—rejecting voyeurism to portray women’s bodies as lived-in and real—isn’t new, at least in arthouse cinema. Defining examples include Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, which achieved mainstream crossover success with Oscars and the Palme d’Or; Andrea Arnold’s 2009 coming-of-age tale Fish Tank, which won the Prix du Jury at Cannes; and Céline Sciamma’s 2019 slow-burn romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
However, in the mainstream, the female gaze has taken decades to gain significant traction. Today, it’s finally proving to be commercially successful. Consider Fennell’s box-office hit adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which retains the classic trope of Emily Brontë’s heroine seeking male affection but filters it through a female-centric psychological and erotic lens. Meanwhile, romantasy has buoyed publishers with $610 million in annual sales in 2024, while generating billions of views on TikTok’s BookTok, where romance, world-building, and “spice” captivate emotionally invested readers.
So, how do you authentically portray what women feel and desire today? One of the best recent examples is last year’s nine-time Emmy-nominated series Dying for Sex. It centers on Molly Kochan (Michelle Williams), who, while dying of metastatic breast cancer, embarks on an end-of-life sexual awakening—exploring bondage, dominance, role-play, and more with her lover. Iris Brey, author of The Female Gaze: A Revolution on Screen, hails the show as “super important,” explaining, “It tackles extremely taboo subjects—women being sick and still wanting to experience pleasure. It makes us feel seen.”
The show was directed and executive produced by Shannon Murphy, who has also worked on other female-focused dramas like Killing Eve, The Power, and…Dope Girls. “I’m drawn to projects that are less formulaic. I like something more meandering and holistic, which I think aligns with the feminine way of thinking,” says Murphy, contrasting this with mainstream depictions of female interiority, including sexuality and desire. She also notes a nuanced, and in some ways less judgmental, space in female storytelling compared to more “obvious” male depictions. “I think if we start telling more stories like that, it will, culturally, help us to not see things in such a black-and-white way,” Murphy adds. She recalls receiving the script for Dying for Sex: “It was tonally very delicate and quite confronting. I loved that it was playing in this place of sublime tension between raw emotion and brutal comedy.”
This unvarnished reflection of how women process their worlds captures “a delicate balance,” says Murphy. In episode six, for example, Williams’s character, having revealed her plans to orgasm by Christmas while on the cancer ward, discloses her sexual abuse to her best friend on the bathroom floor before unintentionally farting, prompting the pair to laugh and cry together. Their friendship is central; the moment works because it feels real. “All of us have encountered trauma, and it’s very hard to recount without that emotional distance because you’ll fall apart,” Murphy says.
Murphy’s own cultural upbringing was against a backdrop of ’90s female-fronted stories such as Ally McBeal. “On screen, when I think about shows that really grabbed me, that was a huge one,” she says. “I’d never seen this powerhouse lawyer with this wild feminist imagination.” Operating in the same era was Sex and the City‘s Samantha Jones, whose sexual confidence was initially critiqued as scandalous before ultimately being considered empowered—”I will not be judged by you or society. I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe… and kneel,” goes one of the character’s most famous lines.
Its successors went further: “The first time I saw Lena Dunham’s Girls, something in me just blew apart, and I was so elated that I’d seen my sensibilities of what female creativity could be,” Murphy remembers. “Girls was, for me, the first time that the wildness, messiness, real bodies and brains and comedy were put on screen.” From Dunham’s first emotionally distant sex scene onwards, the bodies and sex in the series are unglamorized, unstylized, and unapologetic.
Like Girls, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You illustrated the kind of yearned-for female agency on TV that set group chats alight, alongside Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Killing Eve. Meanwhile, the success of female-focused stories in Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy and then, lustfully, her later series Bridgerton—among Netflix’s most-watched shows ever—have made the case for greater commercial investment in the female perspective. It’s a baton intriguingly taken up by Heated Rivalry, this year’s raunchy, gay ice-hockey drama, which framed slow-burn intimacy in a way that garnered a massive female fan following. Straight women found themselves enjoying the sex and Adonis-like naked bodies while celebrating the show’s emotional depth and its male leads enjoying love and sex as equals.
These mainstream successes serve the point that “women can bring money to the industry; they’re telling studios we can have bigger budgets and ambition,” Brey says. “I want to see the money going to female characters where men are not looking at them. Most subversive are those works that don’t need to ask the question of whether he loves me or not. To show women who talk to each other about anything other than men.”Indeed, Murphy argues that another relationship—female friendship—might be the most important in this ascendant era for the female gaze. “We have so many films with almost entirely male casts, male friendships, and male stories, but we still don’t have many that authentically portray that female connection. As a result, for a long time, people didn’t really understand its potency or just how deep a love affair it can be.”
Brey tracks the prevalence of the female gaze in pop culture alongside other societal movements: “What has happened is similar to feminism—we’re going through waves. I think after #MeToo, a lot of people in positions of power thought, ‘Let’s give this another try.’ The industry goes where they think they can make money.”
Still, those waves make investment fragile and inconsistent, and Brey warns of a “receding moment” on the horizon. She points to this year’s The Chronology of Water, a turbulent, Kristen Stewart-directed arthouse coming-of-age drama based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name. The film tackles rape, incest, and the reclamation of desire, both confronting and invigorating in its aim to return women’s confessional stories to the canon. As such, Stewart has described the “tough sell” to get it funded; it spent eight years in development before being shot outside the U.S., in Latvia and Malta.
When it comes to distribution, films that capture the most complex aspects of the female gaze are at a premium. “There are movies, but they’re not circulating,” says Brey. “We haven’t seen the full range of what it can mean to experience menopause or not, motherhood or not. I want to know what a lesbian character is going through, or a Black woman.” The representation of pleasure can remain “limited”: “My take is that desire can do a lot more things.”
Things didn’t used to end well for women in fantasy—you’d die or become the mad queen.
Less subversive in Brey’s estimation, but wildly successful, is romantasy. Female desire has partly driven the genre’s phenomenal appeal, delivering readers fantastical worlds, female protagonists, and explicit sex, while delivering publishers seductive profits. (Bloomsbury added £70 million to its market value when it announced two new books for Sarah J. Maas’s top-selling A Court of Thorns and Roses series last month.) Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, adapted for TV as Heated Rivalry, hit 650,000 sales for HarperCollins after the show aired, with a seventh installment due next June—and a second season for TV instantly commissioned, too. It follows in the footsteps of Outlander, another smash romantic novel saga turned TV success, now airing its final series on Prime Video.
Jennifer L. Armentrout, author of the internationally bestselling romantasy series From Blood and Ash, explains how the genre has altered the way female worlds are received. “I wasn’t the only one who thought that if you were female in the fantasy world, it wasn’t going to end well: if you fall in love, it’s going to be used against you; if you have any sort of power, you’re going to die or become the mad queen,” she says. “You never really saw female characters represented in any way where you felt safe, thinking they’re going to be here in the end and not have to give up their sense of identity to do so. People have almost been waiting for these books to come.”
Reminiscent of the hushed way E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey was talked about 15 years ago, romantasy novels are often downplayed—and reclaimed—as “fairy porn” or “smut.” “I hate the word smut,” says Armentrout. “You label things smutty for the general readership, and they’re automatically dismissed.”I automatically think, “This is wrong.” Whenever something is dominated by women—whether it’s created by them or consumed by them—it’s always seen as lesser.
Armentrout credits BookTok with removing the “guilty pleasure” stigma, allowing readers to freely immerse themselves in richly detailed worlds with complex heroines. “You’ll see main characters with mental illnesses, disabilities, who aren’t stereotypically super-thin,” she says. “These books address serious, real-life issues, from handling depression to assault. They become so relatable. Even if you’re dealing with dragons or vampires in a world that doesn’t look like ours, the characters are going through the same things many readers are.”
While romantic pairings vary—whether male-female, female-female, or male-male—Armentrout notes that “by the end of the series, they’re almost always on equal footing, so one person’s growth doesn’t overshadow the other’s.” This helps reframe the old trope of male conquest. “Women don’t want to see their significant other being steamrolled.”
The progress has been dramatic, but Brey believes there are still many stories to be told for this explosion of the female gaze to become a lasting shift. “I think we are deprived of representation and narratives that could really change the way we view relationships and love.”
Murphy has found herself on panels where “male directors get to talk about the work and creative process, while we end up talking about being women.” True progress will mean reaching a point where the female gaze is simply the norm.
“I’m never making work for women more than for men,” says Murphy. “But, of course, as a woman, I’m very proud that the work resonates with women in ways they haven’t seen as much before. I do think that’s something that just has to keep happening.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about how the female perspective on pleasure is transforming film TV and fiction designed in a natural conversational tone
Beginner Definition Questions
1 What does the female perspective on pleasure even mean in stories
It means centering the story on what women genuinely find satisfying fulfilling or enjoyablenot just what looks good to an outside viewer It shifts the focus from being an object of desire to being the subject of ones own experience
2 How is this different from just having more sex scenes
Its not about quantity its about purpose and perspective A scene focused on female pleasure prioritizes her subjective experienceher desire anticipation touch and emotional connectionrather than just showing bodies for visual appeal
3 Isnt this just a trend or woke messaging
While its gaining more attention now its a longoverdue correction For decades most mainstream media was filtered through a male gaze This shift is about authenticity and representing a fundamental human experience that half the population has always had
Examples Impact Questions
4 Can you give me a clear example from a recent show or movie
Sure Think of Normal People Its intimate scenes are famous for focusing on communication consent awkwardness and Mariannes subjective pleasure Contrast this with many older films where a sex scene exists primarily to showcase the female body for the male audience
5 What about in books and fiction
Authors like Rebecca Yarros and Chloe Gong write fantasyromance where the heroines desire and satisfaction are central to the plot Even in literary fiction writers like Sally Rooney explore the nuances of female want in a way that feels internal and real
6 Does this only apply to sexual pleasure
Not at all Its expanding to include other forms of pleasure and desire the joy of ambition the satisfaction of rage the pleasure of deep friendship and the quiet joy of selfdiscovery
