Do you voraciously read the pages of steamy romantasy bestsellers by Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros? Or flood your group chat with breathless recaps of the latest goings-on in TV series such as Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton? Or even immerse yourself in the divisive and challenging cinematic worlds of Emerald Fennell? If so, you surely can’t have failed to notice that in pop culture, the female gaze – storytelling that highlights the meandering, textured, sublimely messy inner worlds and wants of women – is enjoying an explosion.
On TV, you can see it everywhere, in the interior lives and desires taken up by Big Little Lies, Sirens or Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s Little Fires Everywhere. Romantasy harbours it in the shape of powerful maidens and sex in fae (fairy) realms, while Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Promising Young Woman are marketed with the promise of converting women’s experiences into dark beauty on the big screen.
A shift, a moment or a commercial juggernaut? That depends how deeply you look. But the portrayal of internalised female perspectives – and, crucially, desires – has gone from guilty pleasure to middle of the zeitgeist. Today, the idea of centring the subjectivity, rather than objectivity, of women’s experiences, agency and emotion is as visible as it has ever been across the cultural canon.
This emergent body of pop culture takes on society’s conditioning to experience women’s lives through the lens of male storytellers – or the male gaze. Coined in 1973 by film theorist Laura Mulvey, the theory is used to explain how women on screen, in art and literature have long been reduced to objects of desire as viewed by heterosexual men. Subversion of this male gaze, rejecting voyeurism to portray women’s bodies as lived-in, is not new – at least in arthouse cinema. Jane Campion’s 1993 The Piano is a defining example that gained mainstream crossover, winning Oscars and the Palme d’Or; so too, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, an Essex housing estate coming-of-age tale that won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 2009; and Céline Sciamma’s 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a slow-burn romance between a French aristocrat and the woman commissioned to paint her.
But in the mainstream the female gaze has taken decades to cut through in any measure. Today though, finally, it is making bank. See Fennell’s box office-topping adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which retains the puristically male trope of Emily Brontë’s heroine seeking male affection, but filters it through Margot Robbie’s female-centric psychological and erotic lens. Meanwhile, romantasy has buoyed publishers to the tune of $610m in annual sales in 2024, while generating billions of TikTok views on captivated BookTok, where romance, story-building and sex – or “spice” – draw in emotionally invested users.
So how do you world-build what women feel, and desire, in 2026? One of the best examples of the burgeoning female gaze on screen is last year’s nine-time Emmy-nominated Dying for Sex. It centres on Molly Kochan (Michelle Williams), who is dying of metastatic breast cancer and enjoying an end-of-life sexual awakening, trying bondage, dominance and role-play, and even a golden shower moment with her lover (and neighbour), while he is dressed as a cartoon dog. Iris Brey, author of The Female Gaze: A Revolution on Screen, heralds the show as “super important”, explaining: “It teaches things that are extremely taboo – women being sick and wanting to experience pleasure. We feel seen.”
The show was directed and executive produced by Shannon Murphy, who also worked on such female-focused dramas as Killing Eve, The Power and Dope Girls. “I’m drawn to projects that are less A+B=C. I like something more meandering, holistic, which I do think goes with the feminine brain,” says Murphy of the usual mainstream depictions of female interiority, including sexuality and desire. She also notes a grey “and in some ways less judgmental” area in female storytelling compared with more “obvious” male depiction. “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 remembers 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.”
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I want to see bigger budgets and ambition for female characters where men are not looking at them
This unvarnished reflection of how women process their worlds nails “a delicate balance”, says Murphy. In episode six, for example, Williams’s character, having revealed on the cancer ward her plans to orgasm by Christmas, 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 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 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 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 was put on screen.” From Dunham’s first emotionally distant sex scene onwards, the bodies and sex in the series are unglamorised, unstylised and unapologetic about the fact.
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 buy-in for 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’ve got so many films which are almost all male cast, male friendships, male stories but we still really don’t have many that authentically portray that female connection. As a result, for a long time people didn’t really understand the potency of it and just how deep a love affair it can be.”
Brey tracks the prevalence of female gaze in pop culture alongside other societal movements: “What has happened is the same as feminism – we’re going through waves. I think after #MeToo a lot of people in power positions were like: ‘Let’s give this another try.’ The industry goes where they think they can generate money.”
Still, those waves render 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 takes on rape, incest and the reclamation of desire, both affronting and invigorating in its aim to return women’s confessionals 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 US, 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 had the multiplicity of what it can be to experience menopause or not, motherhood or not. I want to know what a lesbian character is going through or a Black woman.” Representation of pleasure can remain “limited”: “My take is that desire can do a lot more things.”
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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. It is female desire that has part-driven the genre’s phenomenal appeal, delivering readers fantastical worlds, female protagonists and explicit sex, while delivering publishers seductive profits. (Bloomsbury added £70m 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, the book series adapted for TV as Heated Rivalry, hit 650,000 sales for HarperCollins after the show aired, with a seventh instalment 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, almost, have been waiting for these books to come.”
Reminiscent of the hushed way EL 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, they’re automatically thinking: ‘This is something wrong.’ Any time something is dominated by women, in the sense of being written or consumed by them, it’s always seen as less than.”
Armentrout credits BookTok with “removing the guilty pleasure”, leaving readers free to immerse in textured worlds navigated by complex heroines. “You will see main characters with mental illnesses, disabilities, not stereotypically super-thin,” she says. “These books address some serious, real-life issues from handling depression to assault. They become so easily relatable. Even though you’re dealing with dragons or vampires in a world that doesn’t look like ours, they’re going through the same things that many readers are.”
Romantic set-ups vary (female-male, female-female, male-male) yet, says Armentrout, “they’re almost always, by the end of the series, on equal footing so you don’t see one person’s growth overshadowing the other’s”. It goes some way to reframing the male conquest trope. “Women don’t want to see the significant other being steamrollered over.”
The progress has been dramatic, but Brey says that there are still many stories to be told for this female gaze explosion to become a sustainable 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 and here we are talking about being women”. Progress would be reaching a point where the female gaze simply is.
“I’m never making work for women more than men,” says Murphy. “But, of course, as a woman, I’m very proud that the work is accessing feelings and thoughts for women that they haven’t seen as much of. I do think that’s something that just has to keep happening.”
