The Gaze…
The gaze is male. Ah, how that brings back memories. Theoretical bane of my existence during my college years, concept that makes me want to smack whoever invented it over the head with a mallet…oh, how I loathe that phrase.
Here’s why. I am, by nature, a lustful creature. I am also very, very visual. Trust me, you don’t even want to know how much space on my hard drive is dedicated to picture of sexy people (mostly men, a few women) being their sexy selves. None of this is actually porn per se, but I’m not so sure that one could say that the way I look at those pictures isn’t pornographic in some sense. And if anyone were to offer me actual porn featuring the same people…why thank you kindly, sir/madam, I’ll be happy to take that off your hands.
To be perfectly blunt I’m fairly certain that the only reason my hard drive doesn’t have any actual porn on it is that most porn does not cater to my specific tastes, and they are indeed rather specific. When it comes to men I have a very specific type, and that type is not commonly featured in either het or gay porn, although I’m fairly certain that if I was able and willing to really do some digging in Japan I could find things that do cater to my particular tastes. There are after all VK host bars (and no, I’m not kidding).
So, I’m a visual person. I like to look at people I find attractive. I’m also bisexual, which may give me a somewhat unusual perspective on the whole gaze issue that may be worth listening to.
Firstly, a definition. From Wikipedia…(whole page is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_gaze)

“Laura Mulvey, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", introduced the concept of the gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry, hypothesizing about what she called the "male gaze". The theory of the male gaze has been hugely influential in feminist film theory and in media studies.
The defining characteristic of the male gaze is that the audience is forced to regard the action and characters of a text through the perspective of a heterosexual man; the camera lingers on the curves of the female body, and events which occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. The male gaze denies women agency, relegating them to the status of objects. The female reader or viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.
Mulvey's essay was one of the first to articulate the idea that sexism can exist not only in the content of a text, but in the way that text is presented, and in its implications about its expected audience.
Some theorists also have noted the degrees to which persons are encouraged to gaze upon women in advertising, sexualizing the female body even in situations where female sexiness has nothing to do with the product being advertised.

And if this theory had stayed in the realm of film theory it would have been fine, but they had to go and generalize, didn’t they?
Now, first of all…how charmingly hetero-normative. What about lesbians, you may ask? And what about gay men, who have no particular reason to wish to gaze upon the female body in such a manner? Well, as always, a good academic can explain away any amount of reality that doesn’t fit their nice, neat little theory. And yes, I’m being snarky, but really, I’m willing to bet I’m not the first person who sat through every class in which this theory was discussed rolling their eyes, and I’m willing to bet that I won’t be the last either.
Basically I think this theory is bunk. Not because of the idea that sexism can lie hidden in subtext, mind – I’m with them on that part. The part of the theory I have a problem with is the idea of objectification.
At the risk of being thrown out of the sisterhood forever I’m going to say it – I objectify people. In fact, I look at people in an objectifying way all the time. By this I don’t mean “I look at people I find sexy”, I really do mean I watch people passing in the street and think “nice ass, shame about the face”. I do exactly what those evil, objectifying men supposedly do – I pick out specific body parts to admire with no regard for the personhood of the individual they are attached to. I look at people in movies, in music videos, in magazines, and to be honest, I’m looking at them as objects, not as people. I do it in the street, too – there’s a little running tally in my head of fuckable versus unfuckable into which every man I pass falls, and a goodly number of the women. And I do this all the damn time. Anyone who knows me in real life knows this, since I have a habit of sharing my internal monologue with my buddies. For some reason it seems that gay men are the most comfortable with this, proving to me at least once more that the prissy straight folk could learn a lot from gay culture if they could just get over their homophobia.
So, there you have it. From the point of view of this theory, I am essentially a man. The fact that I am lacking a penis and blessed with an abundance of boobage makes this a little confusing, but here’s the thing.
I think that everyone objectifies people. Not all the time maybe, and not people we actually know and have relationships with – in fact one’s ability to truly objectify another person may well be inversely related to how well one knows that person – but in some circumstances and at some times we all do it. I don’t think it’s a male thing particularly – I think it’s a human thing.
I also think that society does it’s best to program women not to do it, but that in the end there’s a limit to the extent that programming can override biology. The messages are definitely there, though, but here’s the interesting part (and the part that academic theory about The Gaze does a lousy job of explaining) – lesbians are apparently immune.
I remember that part of class quite clearly. It was printed right there in the textbook – women do not have the gaze, unless they are lesbians.
My reaction was basically, WTF? Lesbians are women too, why should such a basic, fundamental thing be different just because they’re attracted to women? So I started asking questions. It seems that my professor wasn’t used to students who asked questions, because she got rather cross with me. Basically she told me that women aren’t like that (nasty, superficial, objectifying), to which I replied, if that’s the case then what about the lesbians? Are you saying they’re not women? Or that the fact they supposedly have The Gaze makes them evil? Because I’m bi and if that’s what you’re saying…
Then she changed her tune. It’s because lesbians grew up in the same society as everyone else that they have learned to act like men, she said. To which I said – hang on a minute. Why do you assume that these women are just exhibiting learned behavior? How do you know that’s what’s going on? Have you asked them what it feels like from their perspective? And if that were the case, why wouldn’t straight women pick up the same behavior, being raised in the same society and all?
Well, no, apparently. Which is when things got really nasty. I said, what gives you (meaning the generic you as in academics) the right to speak for a group of people without even asking them how they feel, or what their lives are really like? Would it kill you to ask and then listen to what they have to say?
The conversation pretty much ended at that point – stuttering professor saved by the bell. The rest of the seminar group had basically been sitting around staring the whole time, mouths agape. Apparently people didn’t argue with that particular professor very often.
So then I went away and mulled it over for a while, digested if you will. And here’s the conclusion I came to.
None of this actually has anything to do with the gaze being inherently male, really, or else lesbians wouldn’t “have it” no matter how much brainwashing they were exposed to. Also note that how gay men look at each other is glossed over, although there’s plenty of theory about them being trained to look at women in an objectifying way.
What I think is really going on here is a prohibition against anyone looking at men in an objectifying way. The idea seems to be that being the object of The Gaze is demeaning, therefore it shouldn’t be directed at men – that in fact the very idea of it being directed at men is inconceivable. There’s also the idea that women don’t have enough sexual agency of their own to have any desire to look at other people in that way (except lesbians, somehow, don’t forget them!). The theory of The Gaze reinforces that idea, in my opinion, that women are without agency in a sexual sense, that we’re naturally receptive rather than active, that we’re not visually oriented, and I think that idea is nonsense. Sexist nonsense, too, which is why it continues to irk me that so many feminists accept it.
The other unspoken thing here is that if one is to be judged as an object, one can then be judged as an object that is flawed, or damaged, that doesn’t measure up, and I think that’s really at the heart of this theory. Male sociologists love it because it allows them to bask in the illusion that they are not being assessed and sized up on a daily basis, and in many cases found wanting. I actually had this conversation with my male professor in another seminar group, and it drove both him and several of the male students to frothing at the mouth fury. Now note, I’m not a very physically imposing or threatening person – I’m small, I’m soft and girly looking, I smile a lot. And yet those men reacted as if I was actively threatening them. Why?
I think it’s because I’m onto something. Because really, the idea that women don’t look at men in exactly the same lustful, objectifying, thoroughly lacking in regard for the content of their characters way that men look at women? Ridiculous. Go to any boy band show and watch the audience if you don’t believe me. Pick up a teen magazine. Tweener and teenage girls most definitely have the gaze, they just get taught to suppress it as they get older. It’s still there, though, just below the surface, waiting for its chance to break free, and in some of us it never got suppressed at all. Personally I think that’s a good thing.
So, to sum up this long and rambling entry…women have The Gaze. It’s not a male thing, it’s a human thing. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing either. It’s just how human sexuality works. Sure, at a certain point we form pair bonds and all that good stuff, but the initial impulse? Purely physical. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The only reason we think there is anything wrong with it is because we’re all steeped in weird dualistic ideas about the body being in opposition to the mind, soul versus flesh and all that crap, and the sooner we realize that in the end we’re all flesh the better off everyone will be.


And for those who share my tastes, something to gaze upon, produced for and marketed at women.

Still think we don’t have The Gaze?