![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Brief Reflections on the Male Gaze
Sep. 26th, 2024 03:36 pmI was watching a YouTube video essay on girls being acculturated to the male gaze and learning to perform for it from a very young age—and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I didn’t experience this. I don’t think I had any awareness of a male gaze until well into my young adulthood (maybe 25-30), when I did become aware of occasionally being catcalled or—on the nicer end—being praised by a passing guy for looking nice today.
But from my earliest memories all the way through puberty, all of high school, and well into college, I never had a sense of males “gazing” at me or a sense that I should perform for their benefit.
I wanted to be a pretty girl. I had a sense of what that meant aesthetically and enjoyed dress-up. But my sense from childhood through high school was mediated almost exclusively by my social feelings about other girls. I wanted to be as good as they were (or better, let’s be honest). I wanted to be acceptable to them—not sexually, but socially. I didn’t want to look sexy; I wanted to look cool, not necessarily chasing-the-latest-trend cool (though I pegged my jeans like everyone else) but what I considered to be looking good in my own body.
Much this, though, happened as solitary dress-up “play,” even into adulthood. In public, I mostly wanted to look nice but not attract attention. And I wanted to be comfortable, so I wore pants and T-shirts as much as I was allowed and mostly based “looking nice” on whether I felt things fit well. This dressing down may have been a large part of why the “male gaze” never imposed itself on me: and the glasses and being a skinny bean. But I wasn’t “ugly,” and teen boys being teen boys, I expect some of them “gazed” at me (and probably everything else female), but I was literally never aware of it. I was so unaware of it that by the time I graduated high school, I was painfully convinced that no guy would ever find me attractive or ask me out. But my solution to this was not to dress sexy; it was to “stop being so shy” and start asking out the guys I liked. (Yeah, that didn’t work.)
Thinking about this now—how totally oblivious to the ubiquitous “gaze” I was—I wonder if this is a sign that I have always been a friendship bonder (and maybe asexual-adjacent), that bonding through sexuality just never occurred to me. The idea that a guy would find me sexy on a purely physical level always has felt uncomfortable and, frankly, insulting to my personhood. And while I definitely had a physical taste in guys, I couldn’t imagine ever crushing on them without admiring them personally, mainly for what I perceived as their moral values and intellect. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, my central relationships, the ones that mattered and sustained and were real and badly scarred me, were always friendships, with girls, guys; it didn’t matter.
I wonder how genuinely uncommon my experience is, or is it just one that doesn’t get talked about?
But from my earliest memories all the way through puberty, all of high school, and well into college, I never had a sense of males “gazing” at me or a sense that I should perform for their benefit.
I wanted to be a pretty girl. I had a sense of what that meant aesthetically and enjoyed dress-up. But my sense from childhood through high school was mediated almost exclusively by my social feelings about other girls. I wanted to be as good as they were (or better, let’s be honest). I wanted to be acceptable to them—not sexually, but socially. I didn’t want to look sexy; I wanted to look cool, not necessarily chasing-the-latest-trend cool (though I pegged my jeans like everyone else) but what I considered to be looking good in my own body.
Much this, though, happened as solitary dress-up “play,” even into adulthood. In public, I mostly wanted to look nice but not attract attention. And I wanted to be comfortable, so I wore pants and T-shirts as much as I was allowed and mostly based “looking nice” on whether I felt things fit well. This dressing down may have been a large part of why the “male gaze” never imposed itself on me: and the glasses and being a skinny bean. But I wasn’t “ugly,” and teen boys being teen boys, I expect some of them “gazed” at me (and probably everything else female), but I was literally never aware of it. I was so unaware of it that by the time I graduated high school, I was painfully convinced that no guy would ever find me attractive or ask me out. But my solution to this was not to dress sexy; it was to “stop being so shy” and start asking out the guys I liked. (Yeah, that didn’t work.)
Thinking about this now—how totally oblivious to the ubiquitous “gaze” I was—I wonder if this is a sign that I have always been a friendship bonder (and maybe asexual-adjacent), that bonding through sexuality just never occurred to me. The idea that a guy would find me sexy on a purely physical level always has felt uncomfortable and, frankly, insulting to my personhood. And while I definitely had a physical taste in guys, I couldn’t imagine ever crushing on them without admiring them personally, mainly for what I perceived as their moral values and intellect. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, my central relationships, the ones that mattered and sustained and were real and badly scarred me, were always friendships, with girls, guys; it didn’t matter.
I wonder how genuinely uncommon my experience is, or is it just one that doesn’t get talked about?
