5G will allow us to do amazing things, like power self-driving cars, enjoy virtual reality experiences and even provide remote health care. But there’s growing concern over what it might do to us, too — like weaken our immune systems, and even cause cancer.

Alarmists are claiming a conspiracy, comparing big telecoms to Big Tobacco, or blaming Bill Gates (and linking it all to COVID-19). Meanwhile, scientists liken 5G scaremongers to anti-vaxxers and quacks.

The result is an ugly public battle, with well-meaning journalists giving credence to both sides in the name of “balanced reporting.” This muddles the truth even further.

Thankfully, we have scientific rigor to cut through the noise. In the debate over whether 5G causes cancer, opinions don’t matter — we have to look only at the science to determine fact from fiction.

How does radiation work?

Public alarm over radiation exposure is nothing new. Microwaves, high-voltage power lines, and cell phones have all led to panic and paranoia over radiation exposure some point or another.

“Radiation” is a loaded term meant to scare, but in reality, it’s all around us; from the sun’s cosmic rays to trace amounts of radioactive minerals found in our food and drinking water. (Fun fact: bananas are slightly radioactive.)

Not all radiation is created equal. Radiation levels and their potency are categorized on an electromagnetic spectrum, which is divided into two categories: Ionizing and non-ionizing.

Ionizing radiation — which we’re exposed to during air travel, in X-rays and tanning beds — can damage the DNA in your cells, either killing them or mutating them in ways that can lead to cancer.

Non-ionizing radiation, on the other hand, is too weak to break chemical bonds. WiFi and cell phones, which currently operate in the microwave portion of the spectrum, fall into this category. For radiation to be considered dangerous, it needs to be ionizing, which 5G (and 4G and 3G) is not.

By harnessing millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum technology, 5G promises faster data speeds at a higher electromagnetic radiation frequency than 4G — triggering consumer anxiety over increased exposure to radiation and cancer.

But…we’re not talking Chernobyl here. Visible light emits more radiation than cell phones. And even at these higher frequencies, the skin acts as a barrier, protecting us not only from visible light (not including ionizing, harmful UV rays) but from microwaves, too.

I asked Dr. David Robert Grimes, an Irish physicist and cancer researcher, if the current health concerns over 5G radiation had any merit.

“I find 5G so boring,” he said. “Unlike most topics where you can have an interesting, nuanced discussion, there’s literally no evidence for any of the things [alarmists] say, and plenty against it.”

Scientifically speaking, he thinks we should be more concerned about radiation emitted from our light bulbs than our cell phones. And yet…

Is 5G a ‘carcinogen’ ?

I wondered: If we know cell phones and 5G are non-ionizing, then why are they listed as “possible carcinogens” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)?

Currently, there are four levels of carcinogen classifications.

Class 1 is carcinogenic to humans. This includes everything that we have evidence causes cancer. Tobacco, X-rays, drinking alcohol and eating processed meat are all in this category.

Class 2 is essentially a dumping ground. “It’s stuffed with everything,” says Grimes. “It’s basically, ‘maybe causes cancer but we don’t have any evidence for it,’ which is basically everything in human creation.”

To complicate things further, Class 2 is subdivided into two categories: 2A (probably carcinogenic) and 2B (possibly carcinogenic). Red meat, shift work and hot beverages over 65 degrees Celsius fall in the 2A category. The 2B list is significantly longer, and includes things like the aloe vera plant and radio frequencies, such as those associated with our wireless phones.

Class 3 includes things like water, which we are quite certain isn’t carcinogenic, even though it hasn’t been definitively proven. Half of the world’s substances fall into Class 3.

And in case you didn’t get the idea of how low the bar is: As of August 2019, there are no materials on earth that fall into Class 4, which means there is nothing that we can know for sure doesn’t cause cancer.

What people don’t realize is these classifications describe the strength of the scientific evidence about an agent being a cause of cancer, rather than assessing the level of risk.

Unfortunately, the IARC is notoriously bad at communicating this.

So what does this all mean, as far as our risk of developing cancer? Essentially, we don’t know what we don’t know. There’s no concrete evidence we can point to that tells us cell phones (or aloe vera, or hot beverages) cause cancer or to what extent. But there’s also not enough evidence to prove there’s no link whatsoever, either. This is true for everything that is currently not in Class 1, and virtually all around us.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t be wary or conduct further research. “Given the potential consequences for public health of this classification and findings, it is important that additional research be conducted into the long‐term, heavy use of mobile phones,” IARC Director Christopher Wild said in a 2011 statement.

“While we don’t know of any mechanism now, we do have to keep our minds open,” Grimes said. “Maybe there’s something really weird that we should be keeping an eye out for, continue researching and running studies for potential harms.”

Thankfully, that’s what scientists have already done for decades regarding microwave radiation, and indeed, all types of electromagnetic exposure.

The research: What we know — and don’t know

Epidemiological research on 5G and cancer

As far as the laws of physics and ionization are concerned, 5G shouldn’t worry us. But that’s only one field of scientific study. After all, we can’t rely on physicists to inform our knowledge on biochemistry. What about epidemiological evidence?

In health research, randomized controlled trials (RCT) — where researchers take test subjects and randomly assign them to either treatment or placebo — are considered the gold standard of evidence. Unfortunately, it’s impractical, if not impossible, to conduct an RCT on cell phones and cancer on humans. We’d have to assign particular levels of cellphone use to thousands of people, and trust they’d all maintain that level of use for at least five years, to get accurate data.

The next best thing are cohort studies. A massive, 13-country INTERPHONE cohort study conducted by the IARC found no elevation of gliomas or brain tumors in populations that used phones heavily, except perhaps at the highest level. Even then, they concluded that “biases and error prevent a causal interpretation with regard to the increased risk of glioma observed at the highest exposure levels.”

Even if mobile phones caused some brain cancers, what you’d expect to see is something similar to smoking — the heavier the smoker, the more likely they are to develop lung cancer — the more cell phone usage, the more likely cancers would manifest.

According to Grimes, “that dose-response relationship doesn’t exist for cell phones. It isn’t there. It’s just noise. That would imply, from an epidemiological standpoint, that there’s no evidence of harm.”

As cell phones have become more and more ubiquitous, brain tumor rates have not been going up in the United States. If cell phones cause brain tumors like cigarettes cause lung cancer, we should have seen an alarming increase by now.

Nonetheless, the scientists involved in the study could not agree on how its results should be described. John Niederhuber, the then-director of the National Cancer Institute, said that INTERPHONE “illustrates how difficult it is to identify and corroborate, or definitively rule out, any possible association between [cell phones and cancer].”

Adding to the confusion: the INTERPHONE study was partially funded by the mobile phone industry, though it was subject to guarantees that the study would remain scientifically independent. This garnered significant skepticism over its results. Consequent cell phone radiation studies funded by telecom companies have, understandably, led to well-placed concerns about bias, while adding fuel to the conspiracy fire.

Still, we can point to at least five other high-quality cohort studies — published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the European Council of Cancer Prevention, the International Journal of Epidemiology, and Bioelectromagnetics — that overall, found no increased risk for cancer, but perhaps a small increased risk for the non-cancerous tumor neuroma. (Researchers noted these tumors were so rare that they were uncertain about the link.)

The five studies, published between 2009 and 2016, were not funded by the cell phone industry and are less likely to be biased. But it’s important to note that how we use cell phones has changed dramatically over the last decade. The data could be outdated. It’s possible that longer-term studies will find larger cancer effects in another five or 10 years, but until then, the research so far has one thing in common: lack of evidence. This is a major problem with cell phone science at the moment.

‘If you torture the data, it will confess to anything’

Biological research on radiation with rats

What about animal studies? By studying cell phone radation effects on rats and mice, we can supplement our understanding of cell phone radiation’s effect on human biological functions. But animal research has its limits, too.

A series of studies that were released in October 2018 by the National Toxicology Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), went to great lengths to study the effects of cellphone radiation in rats and mice. They suggested there may be a link between noncancerous heart and brain tumors in male rats. But there were problems.

For one thing, the rats were exposed to more radiation and for longer durations than humans typically experience. There was also no consistent pattern found for exposed female rats or the male and female mice — only the male rats. The rats exposed to cell phones strangely seemed to outlive the rats in the control group. And unlike tobacco, there was no clear linear relationship between higher levels of cell phone exposure and more cancer at tissue sites.

So, non-ionizing radiation from cell phones may not be completely harmless, and could perhaps cause biological changes in animals in some circumstances. But but the evidence is weak and results ambiguous, at best.

Nonetheless, in a phone interview with Dr. Anthony B Miller — a former oncology professor from the University of Toronto, and an outspoken advocate against 5G and all wireless communication technology — he warned, “we are potentially on the edge of a major human disaster.”

He said numerous studies have shown a clear link to human brain cancer. (They haven’t). And that we “already know this form of radiation damages other biological systems” (we don’t), and that in animals, we’ve seen “cancers with nerves of the heart,” (citing the rat study, which only found weak links with noncancerous tumors — and no link to cancer). He further predicted 5G will result in “major problems in the brain, with most people developing an early form of Alzheimer’s disease.” But there hasn’t been any conclusive evidence linking microwaves to Alzheimer’s. Some studies even curiously suggest cell phone use might actually fight the disease.

Here’s the thing: 5G alarmists don’t ignore the current data. Quite the opposite. They cite the current research out there and draw their own conclusions, sometimes differing from the original researchers’. Grimes calls this, “massaging a lack of evidence into evidence.”

“To me, that’s very similar to how anti-vaccine cranks operate. They will take all of this positive safety data and analyze it in a certain way, so they can say, ‘Aha, look at that!’ But the kind of tests they are doing are called post-hoc tests. It’s cheating.”

Post-hoc testing is a particular sore spot for Grimes. He’s decried this practice to call out charlatans who take advantage of vulnerable people using pseudoscience, particularly autistic people and cancer sufferers.

“There’s an old saying that goes, if you torture the data, it will confess to anything.”

Why evidence is everything — and more is needed

When an epidemiologist sets up their study, they pre-specify what outcome they’re looking for and what they’re looking to measure. They can’t just disregard data points that don’t suit them. But if someone has their own agenda, they can, and frequently do.

Scientists are not immune from human psychology, and there are plenty of scientists that engage in motivated reasoning. The classic example is Andrew Wakefield, who had data about the fake link between vaccines and autism, which still does huge harm today. His motivation was financial, but a lot of people’s motivations can be ideological.

“You get people with very strong opinions,” says Grimes. “I call it, ‘retired professor syndrome,’ in that they decide they no longer need evidence for those opinions. And I would argue, they’ve forgotten what science is.”

So what’s the evidence? Where’s the science? Here’s what we know: The most consistent studies we have linking mobile phones to cancer have been thoroughly researched and proven insufficient.

5G’s radiation is fundamentally no different than WiFi or 4G networks, as far as the microwave spectrum is concerned. However, it will be more pervasive and at higher frequencies, and with our cell phone habits constantly evolving, it is certainly worth studying further. Just because there hasn’t yet been any solid epidemiological evidence to suggest it’s harmful, doesn’t mean we should abandon harm-reduction research as we enter into the 5G era, but based on what science tells us, there’s no need to panic.

Many anxieties over 5G technology are cause for immediate concern — like the political and ethical ramifications of data storage and privacy. But radiation exposure simply isn’t one of them.

Leonardo Da Vinci hid a musical arrangement in The Last Supper. Michelangelo incorporated scientific references into the Sistine Chapel. Alfred Hitchcock made regular cameos in his own films. Disney’s parks and resorts are full of hidden Mickeys.

Obviously “Easter eggs,” or hidden messages in media, predate the digital age by many, many years. What’s new, however, is to the extent to which some modern-day Easter eggs — especially those found in video games — have evolved into transmedia treasure hunts worthy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Ready to discover more? Let’s get cracking.

The first video game ‘Easter egg’

Unlike painters, who proudly sign their names on their works of art, early video game programmers weren’t credited for the games they built. Many of the first Easter eggs hidden in games were included by creators who yearned for a little recognition.

Legend has it that the term “Easter egg” was first coined from a 1979 maze video game called Adventure made by Warren Robinett, a programmer at Atari. Robinett put his secret stamp on his work by creating a sequence of moves that would allow the player to enter a room that contained the phrase, “Created by Warren Robinett.”

“I figured the powers that be would not be happy about that little trick, and would remove it from the game as soon as they found out that the signature was in there,” Robinett explained in an interview. “By the time some kid or kids had discovered the secret room and Atari found out, I didn’t work there anymore. So they couldn’t really punish me, and the manager of game software at that time decided little hidden surprises in games, which he called ‘Easter eggs,’ were kind of cool.”

Though Robinett invented the term, his Easter egg may not have been the first. The Fairchild Channel F console, launched in 1976, came with a Pong game that would post the coder’s name (Bradley Reid-Selth) on screen if you punched in a particular keystroke sequence.

Today, Easter eggs in video games are expected. The often-imitated Konami code (that’s “up up down down left right left right B A”) is, without question, the most famous of the bunch. Japanese company Konami built this code into 1998 Nintendo game Contra, which would gift the player 30 lives instead of three. Consequently, the Konami code has been incorporated into hundreds of games (and other media as well), giving players some fun surprises and pretty sweet cheats over the years.

Alternate reality games: Beyond the video game

As Easter eggs in gaming became more and more common, they also grew more complex. Bored with the usual jokes and cheat codes, a few enterprising programmers have created layers upon layers of Easter eggs that produce “a game outside the game.” These hardcore treasure hunts, or alternate reality games (ARGs), traverse medias — and sometimes, even cross over in the real world.

No one’s ever done it quite like Trials Evolution. To say the 2012 bike stunt game took things to a whole new level would be a serious understatement.

Here’s how the insanity went down. A series of unbelievably complex riddles in the game eventually led players to a website. There, they were invited to submit a code by solving a riddle. When entered correctly, the code unlocked GPS coordinates, which revealed buried boxes in Helsinki, San Francisco, Sydney and Bath in the United Kingdom.

These boxes existed in real life, with gamers going to great lengths to visit the exact coordinates. In one instance, a player had to use a literal pickaxe to dig up a buried box.

It gets crazier. Inside each box was a golden key, one of which can apparently be used to open a final box, “Underneath the Eiffel Tower,” — but only at midday on Aug. 1, in the year 2113.

“You’ll be daydreaming about it on the train and thinking about it at night,” explains Brad Hill, a gamer who had a hand in finding the Easter eggs in Trials. “Some days, your mind is just messed up. It’s been amazing.”

What began as an Easter-egg hunt within a video game expanded to a website, and eventually led to a real-world treasure hunt that continues through time. The discoverers of those keys say they plan to pass them along to their descendants so that they can finish the puzzle in the next century, long after they’re gone. (The developer/mad genius behind the puzzles, Antti Ilvessuo, won’t even be alive to see the big reveal, but he says he’s made specific, posthumous arrangements to make sure it all pans out.)

The best Easter eggs keep players engaged through real-world interactions that go beyond a game’s original story. Akin to old-world adventurers, treasures await, to be passed down from generation to generation — gamers just need to join the hunt.

Whether you love or hate fan theories, they’re a part of the modern TV viewing experience, and if show writers want to keep audiences interested, they better listen up.

Fan theories present themselves as both an opportunity and a challenge for creators. On the one hand, writers can encourage theories and generate buzz with intentional cliffhangers and tricky non-sequiturs. On the other hand, fans are now guessing major plot points online, which means writers have to be on their toes.

Creators can no longer deny or ignore the existence of popular fan theories. A good storyteller should allow viewers the space to play with fan theories and pivot wherever possible.

Let’s compare two very different story worlds, both of which have some of the most prolific fan-theory subreddits happening right now: Game of Thrones and Rick and Morty. Both series abound with fan theories, but where one has become painfully predictable, the other keeps audiences guessing… and guessing and guessing.

Unlike Game of Thrones — with its deeply important backstory and a nominally pre-existing plot to unpack — the Rick and Morty universe (or should I say, infinite universes) has endless possibilities. Even if a fan theory hits on a provisional plot point, the writers can take the show in virtually any other direction.

Its writers pay close attention to fan theories online and are proud of the fact that they thwart them on purpose.

“The fastest way to make sure your Rick & Morty fan theory is wrong is to tell me about it, because then I’ll make sure it never happens,” writer and producer Mike McMahan tweeted. “I can’t guarantee that I’ll have the sway to 100 percent keep it from happening, but I’ll try. I’ll try until I’m dead.”

Mike McMahan on Twitter

It's no fun if somebody guesses a secret plot line, I'd rather be surprising than prove someone guessed right. Also: I'm a jerk.

So far, McMahan has been true to his word. One of the best examples is the Evil Morty subplot. In season 1, episode 10 (“Close Encounters of the Rick Kind”), fans were introduced to Evil Morty, who — in a twist ending that left fan theorists salivating (spoiler alert) — disguised himself in a sea of Mortys to potentially wreak havoc on the multiverse.

Finally returning in season 3, episode 7 (“The Ricklantis Mixup”), Evil Morty becomes President of the Citadel of Ricks, starting a revolution that upends the existing class structure. Fittingly, it also subverted the dominant fan theories that had proliferated online.

Creator Dan Harmon is very good at leaving narrative breadcrumbs for viewers, while not allowing any one of them to have too much importance on what could happen next. Evil Morty was a fun subplot, designed to spawn theories and titillate fans. But even if he had never returned, it wouldn’t have really mattered. There were other subplots to explore, other adventures to be had.

Compare this to the most recent season of Game of Thrones. In the earliest seasons, viewers got a rush out of not knowing what was going to happen next or who was going to die and when. Any character was fair game, every episode another possibility that your whole world was about to be turned upside down.

As the series plodded on, things changed. Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss perhaps too heavily foreshadowed how everything was going to pan out. Viewers rushed to fill glaring holes. And now, with one season to go, there aren’t a lot of subplots left. In this respect, Game of Thrones falters where Rick and Morty succeeds.

As audiences become more engaged with their favourite shows, producers and creators are becoming more knowledgeable about the importance of fan engagement. Some, like Game of Thrones, forge dutifully on, determined to see their tidy narratives realized to the bitter end. Others, like Rick and Morty, watch gleefully as audiences struggle to play the guessing game, refusing to hand over the storytelling baton without a fight.

I’m still hoping for a life-shattering plot twist from Game of Thrones, season 8 that will remind me of its season 1 and 2 glory days — one that even the most clever redditors failed to see coming. In the meantime, I’ll keep tweeting my Rick and Morty theories. I know it’s one of the few places on television left where delightful surprises are, well, inevitable.

Fan Theories: How Show Writers Use Them Against Audiences was originally published in Storyworld on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Liberties must be taken when adapting a novel to the big screen. A film has limitations that a novel doesn’t, yet it can also accomplish things that novels can’t.

But this list isn’t about whether a book-to-film adaptation was good or not. After all, Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie, was a fairly loyal adaptation of the book… not that I would know, or anything.

No- this list is about analyzing how faithful the film version is to its source material. So, which film adaptations are most true to how the story played out on the pages? Read on.

1. To Kill A Mockingbird

“Compare and contrast the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, with the film,” was probably one of your most dreaded high-school essay questions. In a perfect world, a film adaptation complements the book. It upholds the basic plot, main characters and overarching themes. In this respect, To Kill a Mockingbird (the movie) succeeds with flying colours. The novel may be more of a coming-of-age tale, while the film focuses heavily on courtroom drama (and cuts out Atticus’ sister, Aunt Alexandra, entirely), but the themes of racism, prejudice and justice prevail.

2. Gone With the Wind

Running almost four hours long, the movie adaptation of Gone With the Wind is remarkably faithful to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of more than 1,000 pages. With a few minor tweaks here and there, the themes, characters and sweeping visuals stay true to the original story. The book is one of the best-selling novels to date and the film remains one of the most successful films at the box office of all time, which proves that a good love story is a good love story — no matter the medium.

3. The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption was written and directed by Frank Darabont for the big screen from Stephen King’s prison novella. Several minor characters were altered, expanded, or combined with other characters for clarity and timing. Other than that, the story follows King’s book pretty much scene by scene. Oddly enough, the movie-version ending was actually grimmer than King’s original, which had the Warden resign after his escape. In the film, the Warden shoots himself in the head.

4. The Green Mile

In the book, Paul is writing memoirs instead of telling his story to someone else, plus they took out a very minor character called “the president.” Otherwise, Stephen King’s The Green Mile — once again transformed for the big screen by Frank Darabont — is pretty spot on. Not to mention the genius casting of Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan. Though King admitted the film was, “a little soft in some ways” compared to the original, the author was ultimately delighted with the film’s feel-good, “praise-the-human-condition” message. Who knew a story about death row could be so sweet?

5. 300

Love or hate 300, you’ve got to admit it’s extremely faithful to Frank Miller’s original graphic novel of the same name. That’s because Miller served as executive producer, ensuring his vision was on-point for the big screen. Using green-screen technology to capture the comic-book feel, both film and novel were panned for their historical inaccuracies and over-the-top dialogue — but that didn’t stop 300 from earning $456 million worldwide.

6. Mystic River

Directed by Clint Eastwood, this drama was adapted from a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane. Readers and critics alike thought Sean Penn’s Oscar-winning performance conveyed troubled ex-con Jimmy perfectly. The screen version nails the characters and the plot, but also does an excellent job of portraying the foreboding Boston setting and atmosphere of the book, capturing both the style and substance of the original work.

7. No Country For Old Men

Directed by the Coen brothers, the Oscar-winning 2007 film follows two men: one with a briefcase full of money, and another, who is tasked with finding it. Bolstered by powerful performances from Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones, the film version follows the plot of the novel to a tee. Much of the menacing dialogue is lifted directly from the book verbatim, including the famous “coin toss” gas-station scene. And the frustrating ending? That’s exactly how it played out in the novel version, too.

8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Transforming Hunter S. Thompson’s, shall we say, colourful stream-of-consciousness into a pseudo-psychedelic film must have been no easy feat for director Terry Gilliam. It plays out very similarly to the book in terms of pacing, scene selection and drug-induced surrealism. Roger Ebert, however, was less-than-enthused by the film, giving it a one-star out of four. “Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a funny book by a gifted writer, who seems gifted and funny no longer,” he wrote, bemoaning that the lack of perspective they have of themselves in the film that he claims was present in the book. I rarely disagree with Ebert, but Thompson was no Shakespeare. Yes, there are a few additional scenes in the book, which are able to dive deeper into themes like drug-induced paranoia, but ultimately, the film does well to keep things light.

9. The Godfather Part I

With a film this epic, it’s not hard to conceive that The Godfather was pretty true to its original material. In fact, the differences between the Oscar-winning film and New York Times-best-selling crime novel are so minor — a few bodyguards and minor characters actually survive (or die), depending on the scene — they hardly bear mentioning. The largest omission is the backstory of Vito Corleone’s earlier life, including his emigrating to America, his murder of Don Fanucci, and his rise in the Mafia, which are all discussed in flashbacks in the book. Thankfully, we were given The Godfather II to fill in the blanks. The book also had a more upbeat ending, in which Kay Corleone happily accepts husband Michael’s decision to take over the “family business.” In the film, Kay is faced with the dark realization of just how cold-blooded Michael has become, laying the groundwork for the sequels.

10. Silence of the Lambs

Thanksgiving will never be the same. (Don’t forget your liver, fava beans, and chianti!). Jonathan Demme’s classic horror-thriller is an astonishingly faithful adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel, which gave me nightmares for a week. The story of FBI trainee and murdering genius Hannibal Lector follows most of the same beats, especially the key scenes between Hannibal and Clarice. In the book, we have access to her inner monologue and her struggling to be taken seriously in the male-dominated FBI Academy, but the movie does a good job of showing this through exposition. There is one notable deviation from the film to screen — the movie’s iconic Chianti reference (in the book, it was Amarone). Doesn’t have the same terrifying ring to it, does it?

The Most Accurate Film Adaptations of All Time was originally published in Storyworld on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The camera hungrily lingers on Megan Fox’s bare midriff in Transformers. You remember that scene? (Of course you do.) There’s the obligatory shot of an unnamed, topless stripper in whatever mob movie, buddy comedy, or heist flick is on. Like clockwork. And don’t forget the jiggly blonde holding a cold one in every light-beer commercial. Every. Single. Time.

You don’t need a women’s studies degree to understand “the male gaze”— a term coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 to describe how women are objectified in Western media. You just need eyes.

The male gaze is so omnipresent, it often goes unnoticed — until you do notice, and then you can’t unsee it. But now a new term is gaining traction: the female gaze. And while it’s trickier to define, that’s exactly what makes it so compelling.

The Hollywood boys’ club is alive and well. Women only account for 2% of producers, 19% of executive producers, 16% of editors, 11% of writers, 11% of directors, and only 4% of cinematographers. In 2018, only 24% of protagonists in the top 100 grossing films were women.

This imbalance means male characters dominate screens — and the stories, aesthetics, and values usually cater to male viewers. Even when filmmakers attempt to give female characters depth, the male gaze often remains the default.

Take Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in Iron Man 2. She’s introduced as a hyper-sexualized femme fatale (“I want one,” Tony Stark says, as if she’s a product). Her deeper character arc doesn’t emerge until later films, not because the studio planned it, but because audiences responded — and the (mostly male) writers realized they could capitalize on her popularity. The growth wasn’t intentional; it was reactive.

Megan Fox’s Mikaela in Transformers is an even starker example. On paper, she has a real backstory — her father’s in jail, she knows cars, she’s underestimated. She proves people wrong. But on screen? Michael Bay’s camera reduces her to slow-mo struts and glossy close-ups. As YouTuber Lindsay Ellis puts it, Mikaela should’ve been the protagonist. Instead, we forget she’s a person.

Some argue men are objectified too. Fair. But not nearly with the same consistency or intent. The Hawkeye Initiative hilariously illustrates this by swapping male and female superhero poses — and revealing how absurd female objectification really is.

So, if the male gaze objectifies women, does the female gaze just flip the script — objectifying men with feminist abandon? Cue close-ups of rippling pecs and glistening abs?

Not exactly.

The female gaze isn’t about reversing the power dynamic or “man-jectify” men. (Magic Mike XXL, while fun, isn’t quite it.) The male gaze isn’t solely about objectification — it’s about centering the male perspective, making others serve his narrative.

In 2016, Transparent and I Love Dick creator Jill Soloway explained at the Toronto International Film Festival that the female gaze emphasizes feeling — using the camera to bring viewers inside the emotional world of the characters, especially women. If the male gaze is about seeing, the female gaze is about experiencing.

That’s why it’s so hard to define — it’s more about what it doesn’t show. What it refuses to linger on.

Take Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter). There’s no glamour shot of her strutting in a skin-tight dress. Her PTSD is central to the narrative, but we don’t see the rape — because the story focuses on her perspective, not the voyeuristic act. As showrunner Melissa Rosenberg told Variety, “We’re looking at what happened to her from her viewpoint.”

The problem with defining the female gaze is that it’s often defined by what it doesn’t show, what it refuses to linger on.

“[We] have this rich, complex female lead and we are looking at what happened to her from her perspective,” explained series showrunner Melissa Rosenberg in an interview with Variety.

“We are looking at the aftermath of what happened to her from her viewpoint.”

Or consider The Handmaid’s Tale. In one harrowing scene, Offred (Elisabeth Moss) lies blankly during the “ceremony” — a ritualized rape. The camera doesn’t titillate. It focuses on her detached face, eventually panning to her torso. We experience her disassociation. It’s uncomfortable. It should be.

We still have a long way to go. But in the era of #MeToo and #AskHerMore, the male gaze is no longer going unchallenged. More women are speaking up — and being heard. And with more female directors, producers, and writers gaining power, the female gaze is finally finding its place in mainstream media.

Yes, there’s such a thing as a ‘female gaze.’ But it’s not what you think. was originally published in Truly. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.