Gaze (college app film)

this too

for those interested here's the explanation for the film i gave nyu:
I decided to make this film while brainstorming how I could portray the concept of the male gaze and the way that it plagues women and other female-socialized people. The male gaze is often defined as the way that women are portrayed to be sexual objects, but the term is made more broad in some feminist theory as the internal need to appease to society’s expectations of female perfection, even when one is by themselves. As quoted by Margaret Atwood, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
I decided to center the film around a male protagonist to emphasize how foreign this presence is to men, to ponder what it would be like if men could temporarily experience the feeling women experience throughout their entire progression into womanhood.
This begins with him experimenting with makeup and more feminine clothes. Doing so introduces him both to the satisfaction of conventional female-appeal, as well as to the strange viewers who begin to follow him wherever he goes. As unsettling as these mannequin heads may be, he also finds himself performing for them: reading to appear smart, dancing in front of his window. This need to appease the male gaze is one of temporary fulfillment, one that can’t always be upheld. When he does decide to wear his masculine attire, relax his shoulders from the pressures of being feminine, the heads turn away from him.
At the end of the film, when the protagonist looks at himself in the mirror, a mannequin head appears back. This is to remind the viewer that he himself is a man, he is a part of the culture that the film focuses on.