The prevalence of the male gaze, as outlined in Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” focuses on the objectification of women onscreen. Most often, this manifests through making the female characters conventionally attractive, stripping them of their clothes, and placing them in peril for the benefit of the male characters, the male audience, and the male filmmaker. Naturally, the opposite ideal to this, the “female gaze,” has been introduced in tandem, though without a constitution to exactly outline what it means, often used to simply describe movies from female perspectives, be that a female filmmaker, female protagonist, or female audience.

However, this egalitarian-minded, unofficial definition of “female gaze” can be seen as a bit iniquitous given the male gaze functions as describing both the empowered subject (male) and disempowered object (female), with most analysis of it emphasizing the objectification. A concrete reversal on female exploitation would be the objectification of men onscreen, fully incorporating that those men are also conventionally attractive, stripped nude, and put in legitimate peril. Jennifer’s Body has a terrific bite but not all boxes checked (no glorified male nudity). Promising Young Woman makes an attempt but doesn’t go nearly as far as men go to exploit women onscreen. No movie seems to punish men, exploit them for viewing pleasure, and push these objectifications to a disgusting extreme — with the odd and fascinating exception of Jackass.

Related: These Are the Funniest Stunts in the Jackass Franchise

Jackass: Pleasure & Pain

Jackass 2
Paramount Pictures / MTV Films

Jackass began when journalist Phil Clapp was writing articles for pennies. In investigating the impact of police-grade weaponry, severe asthmatic Clapp pepper sprayed himself and wrote in-depth on the physical impact, though without any magazines willing to publish his gonzo findings. Magazine editor Jeff Tremaine suggested filming the experiments, Clapp agreeing and including a taser and a stun gun, the tapes going pre-internet viral given how comically Clapp celebrated the pain. Soon, Tremaine and Clapp were able to sell a show to MTV as a documentary-style home video collection that took advantage of viewers’ morbid curiosity on such events, Clapp starring under his middle name of “John” and taking after his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Throughout the TV shows and movies, Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O are recognized as the faces of the franchise — the most conventionally attractive pair (a sentiment that, while culturally decreed, remains objective if not objectifying). Their athletic bodies are often displayed for viewing pleasure, more likely to be adorning banana hammocks than anything else. Knoxville has long noted that the homoeroticism of Jackass isn’t accidental, with Steve-O appreciating it as a “humanitarian attack against homophobia.”

These men are just about permanently in peril, the idea that there is full autonomy and consent to their objectification vanishing the moment Knoxville pulls out a stun gun. Furthermore, the documented male peril isn’t meant to be to the audience’s dismay like in Free Solo or disgust like in When They See Us, but to our absolute and ferocious delight. Just as male gaze cinema can be embodied in Carol Clover’s analysis of Final Girl tropes in horror films — where the women who seek to be clever and usurp male ideals are the ones who get punished the worst — Jackass puts its largest punishments on the men who seem most vocally defiant against being punished (often Dave England, Bam Margera, or cameraman Lance Bangs). Just as outdated Freudian theories of castration anxiety is taught in film schools to outline how male gaze cinema protects terrifying images from male viewers (an example being that if a man is attacked onscreen, the assailant would break a phallic surrogate, like a cane, rather than directly ever harm the man's nether regions), Jackass has made genital torture the soup of the day for the past two decades.

Male Objectification in Jackass

Steve-O Responds After Bam Margera Claims Jackass Family 'Betrayed' Him

Jackass made its name doing the unthinkable and objectifying men to a nearly pornographic level, though just as female objectification was designed to be for male pleasure, is there a reasonable claim that the male objectification in Jackass is for female pleasure? Jackass Forever’s viewership was 68% male, the producers and directors are male, and the cast is almost entirely male. However, comedian Sarah Sherman is a new writer and Rachel Wolfson is a new jackass, these two fitting like gloves into the general masochism and mayhem of the franchise and even leaving the viewer wanting to see more of their contributions over others’.

Is the opposite of male gaze cinema “female gaze” cinema, or is this a cisnormative and reactive interpretation of how gazes should be divided? Rather, shouldn’t the opposite of male gaze cinema be “non-male gaze” cinema — obviously not just including non-binary and agendered perspectives into the analysis, but more accurately portraying the origin as being a hierarchical and gendered construct, thus its opposite being any retaliation that would undo those hierarchical and gendered goals. The antithesis of cinema that emboldens white supremacy couldn’t be specifically Black cinema or Latin cinema or Indian cinema, etc., but any and all cinemas that deactivate the fabricated ideals of white supremacy. Could non-male gaze cinema be created by men, star men, and be predominantly watched by men, assuming they’re advocating against the hierarchical goals of the male gaze? Does Jackass do that?

For one, the general nature of self-harm at the egging on of male friends is a longstanding and grim pillar of traditional masculinity. The refusal to acknowledge the consent of unwilling participants is another. Much of Jackass can play off like a locker room or a Steinbeck-esque male utopia where men are free from seemingly feminine constraints of egalitarianism, instead given a green light to fight to be the alpha male or to serve one. However, the cast is simultaneously always ensuring one another is doing okay after stunts or making sure anyone asking to stop doesn’t actually evolve into pleas. Drug rehabilitation is a common and encouraged theme among jackasses, as well as animal rights, veganism, Queer rights — the goals of the company can be plausibly recognized as against many structured injustices, with recent developments pointing to that including patriarchal ones.

Related: Jackass Forever is Franchise's Highest-Rated Film on Rotten Tomatoes

Female Gaze Versus Non-Male Gaze Cinema

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Ultimately, whether Jackass advocates for a non-male gaze is an ouroboros: they promote the non-male gaze given they promote the objectification of men’s bodies, but they also offer some level of comradery with these targets given they are themselves the bodies; the implementation of placing the male gaze onto one's male self no longer qualifies it as a full male gaze, but doesn't give it much opportunity to be anything else. One could talk in circles for hours trying to organize Jackass into a concrete sociological entity rather than appreciate it for what it is: so much fun. Jackass rips. It retaliates against bureaucracy, structure, hierarchy, it doesn’t have an agenda because it can't maintain a planner, and it remains one of the most outspoken and ferocious Queer ally fronts in entertainment — its production company’s logo a literal rainbow. While Jackass could probably not be recognized as "female gaze" cinema — at least not in its current iteration, given the shortage of female figures in its creation and digestion — it most definitely decries the majority of the rules of male gaze and masculine-minded art, firmly planting itself as a delightful and still promising question mark in the world of gender theory.