Laura Mulvey's account of the male gaze named a structural failure mode in how visual culture organises the relationship between viewer and viewed. The framework has been generative, but its popularised form is one-dimensional: it treats attentive looking as a single variable on a single axis, with a man's visual attention to a woman's body coded as transgression as such. This paper argues that attentive looking is at least three-dimensional, varying independently along sexual desire (hidden or unhidden), curiosity about the person (present or absent), and concern for the looked-at party's response (present or absent). The third axis is load-bearing: configurations that combine desire with absent concern constitute a distinct ethical failure that the one-dimensional framing collapses into the male-gaze category without isolating, while configurations that combine desire with present concern describe a non-predatory attentive looking that the literature has theorised mostly by its absence. The paper contrasts two attentional architectures, transactional and monitoring; formalises the three-dimensional space and its eight configurations; and offers an expected-value critique of universal-threat framing, arguing that permanent vigilance contaminates its own probability estimate and may, at the margin, manufacture the threat it tracks. It closes on the monitor's power problem: monitoring and manipulation are externally indistinguishable, the difference is internal and motivational, and that asymmetry preserves rather than dissolves the question of trust. The argument is offered as a refinement of Mulvey, not a replacement.
Storm Bjørn Temte (Thu,) studied this question.