US Stockmarkets & The Male Gaze

I read an interview with Scarlett Johannsen, and it introduced me to a concept called The Male Gaze, which was new to me, though it was invented in 1975. She is both smart and beautiful, and always has interesting things to say.

The “male gaze,” a concept introduced by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, refers to the way women are often depicted in visual arts and media from a masculine, heterosexual perspective, primarily for the enjoyment and objectification of the male viewer. It suggests that women are often portrayed as passive objects of male desire, rather than as independent and complex characters. 

Here’s a breakdown of the concept:

Objectification:The male gaze often reduces women to their physical appearances and sexual attributes, prioritizing their visual appeal for male viewers. 

Passive vs. Active:Women are frequently depicted as passive objects of the male gaze, while men are shown as active and in control. 

Heterosexual Male Viewer:The male gaze is often associated with the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer, shaping how women are represented in media. 

Impact on Representation:The male gaze can lead to stereotypes and limited portrayals of women, affecting how they are perceived and treated in society. 

Beyond Film:The concept of the male gaze extends beyond cinema and can be seen in various forms of visual media, including photography, advertising, and even everyday interactions. 

Mulvey’s theory highlights the ways in which visual media can reinforce patriarchal power structures and contribute to the objectification of women. 

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I had never thought about it, but it is so true. Women are continually portrayed as they are viewed by men. An extreme example from my youth was Playboy magazine, where the fewer clothes a female wore, the more appeal she had. Girly calendars were another example. The Pirelli calendar was famous for the quality of the photography, but the women were superhot and in various states of undress.

The Sun newspaper built a huge circulation and made Rupert Murdoch a rich man with one simple feature, the page three girl, who was scantily dressed, usually with bare breasts. In horror movies from the 1950s and 1960s, when Dracula sank his teeth into a lady’s neck, she was invariably young, beautiful and with plenty of cleavage on display.

In my life, one way or another, I have seen many women take their kit off for an audience of one or an audience of many. I have never noticed any great reluctance to do this. Women are exhibitionists; they have much to exhibit, and they don’t generally do this for other women. On the contrary, my impression is that women don’t like undressing when there are women in the audience. Despite what Johannsen says, many women thrive on the male gaze, and I could even imagine that includes her.

My take on this is, what is the point of being young, hot and sexy if you don’t have guys buzzing around you like bees around a pollen-loaded flower? I suspect Scarlett Johannsen would have less to say about the male gaze if she had not been so attractive to men (and still is, smart, beautiful, what’s not to like). Easy to disparage what you have. How many women would love to be as alluring to males as Johannsen?

Dollar-cost averaging as a core strategy

Imagine $-cost averaging this share. I sometimes think Broadcom (AVGO) may be the greatest stock many people have never heard of. It is a consistently fabulous performer. Over 15 years, it has barely paused for breath and is up almost 200 times since 2009.

Broadcom is on a journey to becoming an AI stock.

Q1 Semiconductor revenue was $8.2 billion, up 11% year on year.

Growth was driven by AI, as AI revenue of $4.1 billion was up 77% year on year. We beat our guidance for AI revenue of $3.8 billion due to stronger shipments of networking solutions to hyperscalers on AI. Our hyperscaler partners continue to invest aggressively in their next-generation frontier models, which do require high-performance accelerators, as well as AI data centers with larger clusters. And consistent with this, we are stepping up our R&D investment on two fronts.

One, we’re pushing the envelope of technology in creating the next generation of accelerators. We’re taping out the industry’s first two-nanometer AI XPU packaging 3.5D as we drive toward a 10,000 teraflops XPU. Secondly, we have a view toward scaling clusters of 500,000 accelerators for hyperscale customers. We have doubled the RAID X capacity of the existing Tomahawk sites.

And beyond this, to enable AI clusters to scale up on Ethernet toward 1 million XPUs, we have tapped out our next generation 100 terabit Tomahawk 6 switch running 200G studies at 1.6 terabit bandwidth. We will be delivering samples to customers within the next few months. These R&D investments are very aligned with the roadmap of our three hyperscale customers as they each raise toward 1 million XPU clusters by the end of 2027. And accordingly, we do reaffirm what we said last quarter that we expect these three hyperscale customers will generate a Serviceable Addressable Market or SAM in the range of $60 billion to $90 billion in fiscal 2027.

[An XPU integrates CPU and GPU alongside memory in a single package to better serve AI workloads.]

Hock E. Tan, CEO, Broadcom, Q1 2025, 6 March 2025

Q2 2025 shows the momentum continuing.

Q2 semiconductor revenue was $8.4 billion, with growth accelerating to 17% year on year, up from 11% in Q1.

And of course, driving this growth was AI semiconductor revenue of over $4.4 billion, which was up 46% year on year and continues the trajectory of nine consecutive quarters of strong growth. Within this, custom AI accelerators grew double digits year on year, while AI networking grew over 70% year on year. AI networking, which is based on Ethernet, was robust and represented 40% of our AI revenue. As a standards-based open protocol, Ethernet enables one single fabric for both scale-out and scale-up and remains the preferred choice by our hyperscale customers. Our networking portfolio of Tomahawk switches, Jericho routers, and NICs is what’s driving our success within AI clusters in hyperscale.

And the momentum continues with our breakthrough Tomahawk 6 switch just announced this week. This represents the next generation 102.4 terabits per second switch capacity. Tomahawk 6 enables clusters of more than 100,000 AI accelerators to be deployed in just two tiers instead of three. This flattening of the AI cluster is huge because it enables much better performance in training next-generation frontier models through a lower latency, higher bandwidth, and lower power. Turning to XPUs or customer accelerators, we continue to make excellent progress on the multiyear journey of enabling our three customers and four prospects to deploy custom AI accelerators.

As we had articulated over six months ago, we eventually expect at least three customers to each deploy 1 million AI accelerated clusters in 2027, largely for training their frontier models. And we forecast and continue to do so a significant percentage of these deployments to be custom XPUs. These partners are still unwavering in their plan to invest despite the uncertain economic environment. In fact, what we’ve seen recently is that they are doubling down on inference in order to monetize their platforms. And reflecting this, we may actually see an acceleration of XPU demand into the back half of 2026 to meet urgent demand for inference on top of the demand we have indicated from training.

And accordingly, we do anticipate now our fiscal 2025 growth rate of AI semiconductor revenue to sustain into fiscal 2026. Turning to our Q3 outlook, as we continue our current trajectory of growth, we forecast AI semiconductor revenue to be $5.1 billion, up 60% year on year, which would be the tenth consecutive quarter of growth.

Hock E. Tan, CEO, Broadcom, Q2 2025, 5 June 2025

Also impressive is what is happening to dividends.

Broadcom does so many things that it is hard to understand what they are all about. This can be an advantage when it comes to acquisitions because there are so many opportunities for economies of scale. Plus, AI is becoming ever more important to the business.

The key to Broadcom as an investment is its record. These guys deliver, again and again and again.

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Broadcom is a Top 20 share.