“Internet crit lingo”
https://twitter.com/jscottcampbell/status/1389924668606357506
Laura Mulvey outlined and defined the concept of the male gaze in her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975. Any self-respecting person in film and media is aware of it as a fundamental theoretical concept.
“Male gaze” often gets misconstrued bc ppl a) don’t bother to fucking read Mulvey and therefore b) assume it means only men derive pleasure by seeing women’s bodies. That’s not what the term fucking MEANS!!!!!
It refers to the visual and narrative conventions in mainstream Hollywood cinema (which, in turn, influences a lot of other media) in which the audience is placed in the position of the straight white cis male, and thereby is made o view women from that position.
E.g. In THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, the camera first shows Bond + another man looking at Denise Richards’ character “Christmas Jones,” then cuts to a pan of Richards getting out of a jumpsuit, then cuts back to Bond. 
As a classic editing technique, this shot-reverse shot places us in the shoes of Bond viewing the woman’s body. It is not the woman’s body alone that invites a “male gaze” but rather these longstanding film techniques that put us in that position, regardless of who we are.
(So many ppl get the wrong idea about the term “male gaze” just from the way it sounds, but also bc Mulvey’s work is super Freudian/Lacanian and talks about castration anxiety and it all feels v far fetched for ppl who go into the essay wanting to hate the term)
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