Brief Reflections on the Male Gaze
Sep. 26th, 2024 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI 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?
no subject
Date: 2024-09-27 04:28 am (UTC)Certainly I'm sure that there were girls around me who felt that kind of pressure, and certainly I'm sure that being a girl (and raised as one) affected details of my presentation and affect and so on. But I don't remember ever feeling like I was being gazed at or catcalled or expected to perform girliness/sexiness/etc for men specifically, or anything like that. I was both miserably and defiantly aware that I wasn't cool and would never be cool and was an awkward nerd, but that was about social groups my age, especially (though not exclusively) other girls. I didn't want to wear makeup as a daily thing, and didn't do so, but I wanted to know how to wear makeup and dress up just because those were adult skills and I liked the look of them on other people, not because I felt required by or for men to do so. The few times that anyone commented on the possibility of sexualizing me or my peers, or suggested that it would be better to not have any boys along for X activity, I was utterly taken aback, and embarrassed, and kind of offended by the very idea.
How much of this is because my parents believed in letting us be kids and not giving us body issues? (Which they did believe in; I am forever grateful to my mom for absolutely refusing to let my father or brothers ever tease me about my body or weight, because she did not want teen me to have any reason to feel self-conscious about myself.) How much of this is because I was enough of a social outcast at some key ages to be oblivious to signals other girls were getting, and assume they were irrelevant to me? How much of this is because I'm asexual, and still have something of that startled offense at the idea of introducing sexiness into a situation that I didn't think involved it? I have no idea! Almost certainly some mix of the three, and maybe other factors I haven't thought of, besdies.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-27 09:47 pm (UTC)It's also a weird, if you think about it, to discuss the "male gaze" as pretty much aimed at all girls/women while simultaneously having a long and storied tradition of "plain Janes" and "wall flowers" who specifically don't get looked at. (I guess one could say they are looked at and found lacking.)
Parents are no doubt a huge part of this. I'm glad your mom took a firm stand against letting you be objectified in any way. My parents also never put any pressure on me to be "feminine" or attract guys. On the contrary, they were absolutely useless as a source of ideas for how to get a date. :-) But it strikes me as salient that my dad--the main male figure in my life for all my growing up--was probably, by today's standards, asexual. I don't recall ever seeing anything "gaze-y" from him, not even a response to a TV character.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-28 12:12 am (UTC)I've always been oblivious to anything like that, seeing people as people and gender as irrelevant. Apart from not being thin, I'm with you on all of this, comfy androgenous clothes and all. I think men may have flirted but I just haven't realised. I've occasionally been told that some male or other fancied me but I never had any idea.
I've only recently realised that I'm aro-ace and Greg is also on the ace spectrum, but not aro. He likes romantic gestures so I try to figure out some for him.
Because I like to wear makeup, which started around age 12 because I was born without eyebrows and wanted to look normal, people may have thought that was for the male gaze, but it's to please myself and to feel more confident.
I've rarely been hassled on the street, and I used to think it was because my mother taught me early that dogs scent fear (I was afraid of them as a kid till we got a puppy) and I just carried that over to humans. I've travelled around the world with almost no problems, and I wonder if it's because I don't give off any unconscious cues.
BTW I only just found out that "Netflix and chill" doesn't mean watching our favourite shows with a cup of tea. Oy. I'm also now suspecting that the sexual attraction depicted in books and on screen that I thought was ridiculously exaggerated, might not be. I'm so glad my life is simple and and uncomplicated by hormones hijacking my brain. Being ace is ace!
no subject
Date: 2024-09-28 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-28 11:55 pm (UTC)It's taken a while to realise why I don't care for slash and only write friendship. All my characters (and there are many original ones who have never left my head) are ace, and I used to have to think up all sorts of twisty reasons why they didn't have relationships, but now I'll just make the awareness and acceptance of aces part of my fantasy worlds. Maybe that will happen in RL one day, but we seem to be unusual, not just in numbers, but in how so many of us just don't realise.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-30 01:33 am (UTC)You know, as I get older and more asexual I find my ficcish relationships have less sex too. A lot of my casual mental fic these days consists of people in bed together being really tired--go figure.