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| Image by Pitsch from Pixabay |
{You have a keen eye for the obvious, sir. Doesn't everyone already know this?}
One would think so, but what was once considered simply a fact, basic biology, is now considered yet another outrage perpetrated by the patriarchy in certain circles.
I taught my daughter that all men are pigs in heat, including me, so she should live life accordingly. A woman I know, who accepts that this is true but likes men (in general) anyway, told me that for various and sundry reasons, she thinks dog is a better word choice, and I've come to agree.
I prefer to think of myself as a dog because I'm a bit of a clean freak, and I think of dogs as being much cleaner than pigs.
{You should think of yourself as a cat then.}
No, Dana, definitely not, please stop stepping on my metaphor. Anyway, we don't choose to be this way; we are this way. We also all share another, related fundamental characteristic: we are visually oriented creatures. We are visually oriented creatures with our dials turned all the way up.
{Once again, your keen eye for the obvious is on display! See, what I did there? Cool, right?}
Recently, the term male gaze wandered into my personal awareness zone but got away before I could capture and interrogate it.
{Huh?}
I had clicked on a link, male gaze, via the open in new tab option that had turned up in something I was reading online, intending to get to it later, but it escaped before I had a chance to do so. This is the price you pay for being a would-be polymath. One link leads to another, that link leads to...etc...and then someone tells you dinner is ready, and before ya know it...
{You're seventy-something and regularly subject to getting lost in the links?}
I'm fascinated with (and by) the power of this phenomenon, but it turns out that the male gaze can also be just male gaze (without the the) and doesn't refer to exactly what I thought it did. I know this now because I've since done a bit o'-googlin' on the subject; please stay tuned. In the meantime...
I've been a biologically male H. sapien (a.k.a. man) for almost 72 years now. I've had a lot of straight, gay, and confused friends and acquaintances over the years who are also men.
I've never known a hormonally captured biological male who didn't automatically react to visual cues that coincided with their personal sexuality. Coach Skynyrd confirmed this in high school health class. He also told us that while we can't help but look, a gentleman should attempt to be discreet and not be a pig about it.
Granted, this was a long time ago. Society was still suffering under the illusion that male and female H. sapiens are radically different creatures separated by more than mere plumbing. This was so long ago that boys and girls in my high school attended same sex health classes, even though my school was coed.
{Seriously?}
Now, most (alright, many) men aren't as dumb as women think we are and are quite aware of the fact that many women don't think twice about exploiting our visual obsession for fun or profit, both benignly and malignantly.
Of course, this is unlikely to be true of most of my female gentlereaders; I'm certain the majority of them are above that sort of thing. For example, they would never wear that dress/outfit to a job interview just because they knew they were going to be interviewed by a man.
I'll wager that most of the happily married/"partnered" ones wouldn't be caught dead dressing a certain way for "girls' night out" just to see how much attention they might get, and/or how many men might hit on them.
More importantly, I'm sure none of them are the irrational sorts who claim that women, and even girls, have the right to dress as provocatively as they please and then call men who get caught looking, pigs dogs.
However, being a more or less responsible columnist with millions of gentlereaders, I went a-googlin' to see what the worldwide web of contradictory knowledge might have to say about this sort of thing. I thought I might sniff around and discover what female H. sapiens (a.k.a. women) might be saying about this matter to enlighten myself and my male gentlereaders.
{What are you...}
I figured out how to write an echo. Cool, right?
It turns out the male gaze is a RBFD, and I had it all wrong. It's such a big deal that when I googled the term, the male gaze, the first hit returned was a lengthy Wikipedia article, Male gaze.
"In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer."
Right... So if you're a straight dude and you depict women and the world, in art and literature, from your masculine perspective, it's not just because that's how you see the world, it's because you deliberately sex everything up for your, and other straight dude's, personal enjoyment?
Since my interpretation might be wrong, I read on. No joy. But I only have 39 documented college-level credits, so the fact that I found the article poorly written as it wanders all over the place...
{Wanders all over...are you calling the kettle black, your garrulousness?}
The Wikipedia entry credits one Laura Mulvey, "British feminist film theorist and filmmaker" (you've no doubt seen one of the handful of avant-garde movies she made back in the '70s and '80s), with this concept, which she explored in her famous (in certain circles at least) 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".
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