I think it was a lesbian friend who first talked to me about the male gays, as opposed to herself, one of the female gays – a play on words, of course, referring to the male gaze, which I think it will serve us to have a definition of before we proceed with this conversation that I’m really surprised we haven’t really begun sooner. The term was coined – much more recently than I’d have thought – by British Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Matthew Henry’s, “The Eyes of Laura Mulvey,” he summarizes her position:
According to Mulvey, mainstream Hollywood film "coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order" (16). Mulvey implies that this coding is, in essence, the establishment of the “male gaze.” Narrowly construed, the male gaze refers to the act of looking upon women as objects, of adopting the role of spectator. . . . In a section of “Visual Pleasure” entitled “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look,” Mulvey succinctly states her organizing principle: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.”
Among others weighing in on the gaze, I also found Camille Paglia weighing in on Salon.com back in 1998 (those halcyon days when I was in San Francisco and everyone but me seemed to be getting rich by making badly-drawn rodents wiggle on a screen. ):
As a pop Warholite and pornographic apostle of the 1960s sexual revolution, I found the "male gaze" to be a reactionary, puritanical idea, needlessly destructive of artistic connoisseurship.
Readers of this blog already know a fair amount about some of my more flagrant watching of women, naked ones. Nothing is more attached to my oft-tortured masculinity than my gazing, my objectifying of women. And it really is object-ifying and nothing else. The way it feels when I almost can’t prevent myself from looking, and looking again, at a woman, head to toe, lingering at all the cliche spots, is very similar to the way I feel when I see a work of art, a cute animal, or, yes, a sexy automobile: transfixed, tantalized, moved, stunned. I spent many many years fighting what I felt was this part of my psychology that didn’t meet my values. I’d grown up learning and inferring, perhaps a tad excessively, that women are supposed to be peers, equals, friends, to be looked at without lust, without any valuation based on appearance (See Hugo Schwyzer for one who continues the struggle I’ve at least somewhat abandoned.). Only when first loved for their intellects and personhood (which for some reason I thought meant something that had nothing whatsoever to do with their having bodies), I’d always thought, could women then, perhaps, be really looked at, let alone lusted after. This thinking led me from being a furtive gazer adolescent to a guilty leerer adult, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron for ya.
It’s only been in the past five years or so that I’ve, more or less, come to terms with my need to look, to be that male gazer (or is that “geezer”?), regardless of whether I may agree with theory that demonizes me for it. I’ve also come to realize that, if I’m to be in a relationship, it has to be with a woman who likes being gazed upon, and also one who can accept that I will never succeed at not looking at other women. Ideally, though, it goes even one step further, I’ll be with someone (Oh heck, I am with someone) who likes/needs to look nearly as much as I do. This theoretical woman and my actual special woman friend Anja may well look at men the way that I look at women (although she doesn’t) – while it doesn’t turn me on sexually, it can aesthetically please me and amuse me to look at men, and it doesn’t tend to make me jealous. But I find that that hasn’t even been an issue. Most women I’ve known just don’t look at men the way heterosexual men look at women, the way gay men look at men, and the way all men also look at, say, cars, or whatever object in the world their eyes fixate on (“Imprinting,” I believe is the term that refers to the are-you-my-mother syndrome by which so many men lock in to whatever it is – breasts, buttocks, ponies, pistols – they will then sexualize and obsess over for the rest of their lives.) at some critical formative stage. The women with whom I’ve been involved who not only tolerate but actively participate in my gazing and want me to appreciate theirs have all liked looking at women a whole lot more than looking at men. One might argue it’s because they’ve been co-opted by the eternally dominant paradigm, but that isn’t the way it feels to me. It feels more as if they just appreciate that women are just really really great to look at – all them curves. I also want to emphasize that this very male fixation is an entirely visual one – it’s not about taste or smell, or touch, which is to say it’s not about fucking, it’s about looking – delicious, unquenchable looking.
Here are some web tidbits on the gaze:
- Interesting site that addresses the gaze and other masculinity issues:
- This site that includes this John Berger quote, from the now canonical Ways of Seeing: “Men ‘act’ and women ‘appear.’ Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
- This’n, which includes: “Females are shown offering up their femininity FOR THE PLEASURE OF AN ABSENT MALE SPECTATOR.”
- Finally, a 1997 Swarthmore College Women’s Studies I final project.
That said, let us proceed.
