In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The concept was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period, where the female form was often idealized and presented from a voyeuristic male perspective.