You've probably heard of the male gaze, but what exactly is the lesbian gaze?

A new YouTube from verilybitchie attempts to answer that question and it's gone viral, currently sitting at over 477,000 views. Turns out they're actually more similar than you think.

The phrases usually refer to film and TV. Oftentimes when female characters come on screen, we see the women as a man might see them, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize. Just take a look at Megan Fox in TransformersTransformers if you need an example.

But even when the movies are about a romance between women, they can still struggle to escape this gaze. Especially if they're directed by men.

That's what the YouTube video by Ada Černoša and Verity Ritchie is concerned with. First, it dives into the sapphic classic Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche.

While the 2013 drama is groundbreaking in many ways and formative for many queer people, its graphic sex scenes stirred up its fair share of controversy at the time. All these years later, they're looked at a bit differently as Kechiche was a straight man telling a story about two young girls. It was also later revealed "that the working conditions on set were brutal and unfair" and Kechiche "was scrutinized for his behavior on set, and allegations of sexual assault were levied against him" by the lead actresses, YourNextShoes reports.

Here lies the lesbian gaze. While the story is about women, it's still through the optics of a man and suddenly all the nudity makes sense. But what does it mean to be completely free of the male gaze?

The video uses the example of the 2019 romance drama Portrait of a Lady On Fire, where the female gaze isn't just subtext. It's literally about a female painter trying to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman and falling in with her.

The female gaze isn't about the objectification or lust that men project onto women, the video concludes, but women simply existing outside of that objectification completely. Perhaps this is the future of The Lesbian Gaze.

The video has elicited thought-provoking comments from viewers. "I think this also illustrates the fact that many men only associate passion with sex, and that, is terrifying," one person wrote. Another shared, "I'm writing a lesbian love story at the moment. Someone told me, "if your characters have to kiss to seem like they're in love, they're not in love." Trying to generate non-sexualised love and intimacy that isn't just 'gals being pals' is tricky."

Watch the video below:

The Lesbian Gazewww.youtube.com