LAST September, Jill Soloway, creator of the hit television shows Transparent and I Love Dick made a speech at the Toronto International Film Festival about what she calls “the female gaze”. One of her points was that, while for decades, film-makers, artists and feminists have been freely banging on the "male gaze" - a phrase coined by feminist film critics and academic Laura Mulvey in the 1970s - no one talked about the female gaze. It was a phrase, in fact, rarely used. As Soloway put it, “Nobody’s taken the female gaze yet, so I’m taking it now.”

Since then the female gaze has been getting more and more attention. Mostly what media theorists and academics are focusing on is the rise of the female gaze in film and TV. It’s there, for instance, we are told, when we watch a shirtless Poldark scything, there, in The Night Manager, as we thrill to a sizzling sex scene whose central feature is Tom Hiddleston’s bottom, and there in Soloway’s I Love Dick when the central character obsesses and fantasises over Kevin Bacon playing macho sculptor called, yes that is his name, Dick.

But it’s not all sweaty pecs and buttocks - not all about how women sexualise men, it's also about how women look at the world in a way that is different to men. So we can see it in buttoned-up dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s there in Prevenge, a horror film about a pregnant woman guided, by the voice of her unborn baby, to kill, directed by Alice Lowe, while she was pregnant. And it’s there in Harlots, a series about an 18th century brothel, for which producer Alison Owen made the almost revolutionary act of having all its episodes directed by women.

So what is this female gaze? Is this the tip of the spear of some new visual media feminist revolution? Or just another way of promoting what female directors, artists and photographers have long been trying to do? Indeed, is there even a definable thing called the female gaze?

In order to understand what the female gaze might be, first you have to take on board what the academic Laura Mulvey, in 1975, was referring to when she coined the term “male gaze”. She wasn’t, after all, just describing the fact that most films were being made by men – she was also looking at the way the power imbalance in society was visible on the screen, and female characters were passive, powerless and objectified.

In her Toronto speech, Soloway, reversed one of Mulvey’s phrases to suggest that the female gaze might be “visual arts and literature depicting the world of men from a feminine point of view, presenting men as objects of female pleasure.” And certainly, in I Love Dick, the main character, is chiefly just an object of pleasure.

But the female gaze is often about more than that. Frequently films and television shows, like Lena Dunham’s Girls or Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, also feature an honesty about the reality of the female anatomy and their bodily processes. Wonder Woman, by female director Patty Jenkins, has prompted feminist raptures, and not just because finally the big screen has a bold, self-determining female superhero. At the webzine Refinery 29, in a piece titled “How Wonder Woman shatters the Male Gaze”, Caitlyn Flynn wrote of how even the fact that Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggled when she did a superhero move was revolutionary.

Not every feminist and critic, however, is particularly happy with this new craze for talking about the female gaze. The former Edinburgh International Film Festival director Hannah McGill says: “Do I think women directors see things significantly differently in terms of bodies/attraction? Or that women are suddenly looking more at men? No. I tend to think that how sexualised your gaze is comes down to how sexual you are as a person, and that's a huge spectrum.”

Dr Katharina Lindner, who lectures in Media and Culture at Stirling University, says that she doesn’t like the term. “I don’t like it. I don’t use it in my work and I don’t come across it that much in academic circles. What makes me a little uncomfortable about it is that it almost suggests a reversal of power relations.”

One of the things that bothers her is that gender equality is reduced to being simply about putting women in power positions that men used to be in: “As if,” she says, “sexualisation and objectification are good things and as long as women are doing them it’s kind of fine.”

The rise of body-consciousness culture among men certainly suggests that they are beginning to feel more objectified. A recent news story revealed concerns over the protein shakes which many men are using in a bid to create a sculpted six-pack body.

But, as Lindner points out, female directors don’t necessarily create films where the male gaze is reversed. Often they are doing something entirely different. Among the examples she gives of this are The Handmaid’s Tale, and Edinburgh-based film-maker Hope Dickson Leach’s film The Levelling, a powerful tale of family tensions set in Somerset. “I think The Levelling is amazing. It’s one of those examples of putting female characters at the centre without reverting to these very well-worn structures of 'looking'.”

Dickson Leach is a film-maker who is not only bringing to the big screen her vision, but also a co-founder of Raising Films, a campaign to make the film-industry more parent-friendly. She described the feeling of relief she's had, over the years, when she has seen films by female directors, and felt “oh thank God, there’s a world that’s full of people like me.’ Representation matters. It really does.”

For her, films by Jane Campion - most famous for The Piano - were hugely influential. “When I started to watch her films... my breath was taken, this was a whole different way of seeing the world which feels more real to me.”

Though the statistics still suggest that both film and television industries are dominated by men, this does seem to be a moment in which female film-making is being embraced. “I’m pretty sure,” Dickson Leach says, “I’m getting more calls now than I would have done had my film came out five years ago, because I do think there’s a strong conversation around projects needing a female director. It’s something that people are taking seriously.”

But, as she points out, this has been an issue that’s been discussed for years, and in fact, numbers of films directed by women has gone down in recent years. A report earlier this year found that, in the United States, women were behind just 7% of the top 250 films of 2016, down 2% from the previous. At Cannes, this spring, while there was ecstatic enthusiasm for Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (which won best screenplay) and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (best director), the competition selection was still dominated by a string of familiar male auteur directors.

Jessica Chastain, Cannes jury member, complained: “The one thing I really took away from this experience is how the world views women from the female characters that were represented,” she said. “It was quite disturbing to me...I hope when we include female storytellers they will be more like the women I know in my day-to-day life. They are proactive, have their own point of view and don’t just react to men around them."

Nevertheless, Dickson Leach believes things are shifting. People are more interested in a plurality of voices. “This year we’ve had Get Out which is the big horror movie, by Jordan Peele, a black man, and then Wonder Woman has just blown every record apart, and you realise that the money-people who are in charge of the industry are going to lose their jobs if they don’t start embracing diversity.”

On one level some of the talk about the female gaze is really just another way of expressing this growing interest in diversity – except that, rather than talking about having more female directors, the focus is on the way of looking at the world.

One film-maker who frequently talks about her films in terms of female gaze is Anna Biller, director of the sumptuous and mesmerising horror-thriller, The Love Witch. “I really hadn’t heard anyone else talk about the female gaze,” says Biller, “until I started talking about it in interviews about a year ago when The Love Witch came out, but it’s possible that it was just in the air. I’ve been talking about this stuff for years.”

But it’s not only within film-making that the female gaze is being more discussed. In fashion photography there has been talk of a trend towards a female gaze among the new generation of predominantly female young photographers. In 2011, the photographer Cecilie Harris created the magazine Boys By Girls which attempts to “tell the story of the young male”. She said: "For me it is important that the journey from boy to man is documented beautifully, in a relatable, yet artistic way to our audience.”

One of the problems, however, with the notion of a female gaze is that it suggests a stereotyping of what it might be as a woman to look at an object of desire. The author and photography curator Susan Bright observes: “I think women are just as capable of a typically ‘male gaze’ (especially Ellen Von Unwerth, Lee Miller or Diane Arbus, to think historically) and vice versa. To suggest they are softer, more sensitive, more ‘feminine’ is totally essentialist.” There’s also something very complex going on when the very person who has claimed the term “female gaze”, Jill Soloway, is also someone who has recently come out as having a non-binary sexuality, and no longer uses the pronoun she.

On one level, the female gaze seems like nothing particularly new, a remarketing of something that has been going on for decades. There has, after all, been plenty of lustful looking at men in cinema and art, though few female directors have managed to penetrate the mainstream of Hollywood. Jane Campion’s In The Cut (2003) or Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) could easily have been described as examples of the female gaze, yet the phrase was not then a branding buzzword. And what was Germaine Greer’s controversial photo and essay book, The Boy, other than an exploration of the female gaze? "Women,” she wrote, “have now claimed the right to look and to derive pleasure from looking.”

But the current trend for the female gaze is also just another way of saying that we need more female directors, more stories that aren’t white, straight male, gazes that are black, queer, disabled, working-class. It also reflects the current state of gender politics. A female gaze may be on the rise, but it’s still a minority gaze within the mainstream cultures of Hollywood blockbusters and high production television, and when it’s there, mostly, it’s white and middle-class.