Cinema has always been an art form that revolves around the concept of looking, seeing and observing. Over time, film critics and scholars have explored this concept and what drives it. What exactly defines the charm of the look? What motivates the viewer? What does the looked at object mean? These are all questions that have been examined and discussed since the beginning of the film; however, one question that has yet to be answered is how gender affects appearance. Most psychological theories applied to cinema focus on the desires deriving from the male gaze towards women. But where is the female audience going? This is a topic that is explored in depth in two articles, one by Laura Mulvey and the other by Constance Penley, located in “The Nature of the Gaze” in Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Film and Theory: An Anthology. Here, both authors address the question of sexual difference by challenging the theories already established by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. In her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey approaches the fascination of viewing through a psychoanalytic lens. He begins by commenting on the concept of phallocentrism, which “depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to her world.” Mulvey further explains that “the woman's function in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: first, she symbolizes the threat of castration with her actual absence of a penis, and second, she elevates her son to the symbolic.” According to this vision, women cannot exist without castration. Therefore, Mulvey's belief is that the woman "is found in patriarchal culture... at the center of the paper... of use, Mulvey reminds us that, "it is the place of the gaze that defines cinema, the possibility of varying and expose it. She goes on to summarize all the other points and states: “Yet, as this essay has argued, the structure of the gaze in narrative fiction films contains a contradiction in its very premises: the female image as castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts into the world of illusion like an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two gazes materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego.” She concludes her argument by declaring that “women, whose image has been continually stolen and used for this purpose, cannot view the decline of the traditional cinematic form with anything more than sentimental regret” (Stam and Miller, 492-494).