Scopophilia or scoptophilia, from Greek "love of looking", is deriving pleasure from looking. As an expression of sexuality

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

, it refers to sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects: erotic photographs, pornography

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

, naked bodies

Nudity

Nudity is the state of wearing no clothing. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic. The amount of clothing worn depends on functional considerations and social considerations...

, etc.

Alternatively, this term was used by cinema

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 psychoanalyst

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

s of the 1970s to describe pleasures (often considered pathological) and other unconscious processes occurring in spectators when they watch films. The term was borrowed from psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...

 and Otto Fenichel

Otto Fenichel

Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation".Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud...

.

Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks

Bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist....

, David Marriott, and Shannon Winnubst, have also taken up scoptophilia and the scopic drive as a mechanism to describe racial othering.