The Male Gaze is like, a Prison
By: Nat C
Tags: Feminism, Society, Women, Media, Sociology

A few months ago I was sitting in the corner of an inner-suburbs cafe with some university friends. We’ve graduated, three of us have jobs in finance and two others are finishing masters, we’re not just pretty faces. The conversation turned to power, and the question was posed: “What type of power, that women have, is most effective in society?”

There are many answers, but the one that comes to mind is sexual power. (Before I proceed, the ideas discussed tackle the very heteronormative view of sexuality as per my own experiences. Obviously, there exists a whole other experience of womanhood, beyond the cis experience that I don’t touch here).

Power and sex, there hasn’t been a better combination since…never? Of course, women have more purpose than sex, but it has been the narrative that we are defined by. If we consider the four main portrayals of women in popular media; virgin, slut, mother, bitch, the first three are defined by each character’s ability to provide or withhold sex. Bitch is the easy catch-all for women who don’t fall into these stereotypes and make men uncomfortable.

It was on my mind since watching a round table that the Hollywood Reporter had published mid last year. Filmed in the humid climate of the brewing Weinstein storm, the actresses were discussing their experiences of their own sexual power. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was there for her work acting and producing “The Deuce,” where she acts as a porn star, was reflecting on her own experience of utilizing her sensuality, look at the rest of the table and asked, “haven’t we all? ” To which, Angela Basset says, “I have not been asked to use my sexuality in my career… as a black woman,”

Sandra Oh echoed “I don’t think I’ve gotten any job based on (gestures to her body) As nice as it is” She then went on to say one of the key takeaways of the roundtable, “There is a different type of weight when you are not seen. And you are not seen that way and you are not given power that way, because it is power.

If the greater community at large tells you “We don’t even want that from you…” these things that I realise now, have hurt me for a long time” What the interaction prompts is the question, what is sexual power and, is it ever a positive thing?

The politics and feelings concerning sexual power have become murky in a post #MeToo, “Fourth Wave Feminism.” Sexual power is the ability to use other people viewing you as a sexually desirable being, to empower yourself sexually, doesn’t feel savoury. Sexual power can be exercised individually and societally. Individually, someone’s sexual power depends on the other person: their preferences, their past history and the way that their brain is wired. In society, there exists the Barbie-stencil, a majority wins model of what is desirable. The Round Table interview encapsulates the society definition and invites us to question whether the possession of sexual power is positive. When you fit the definition of the mass wet dream valuation, you are objectified for the gratification of the viewer. In extreme cases, present in the production of popular media, you lose depth and become your sexual power. Sometimes this value system can be weaponised, as Maggie Gyllenhaal has done. However, the use of sexuality is still at the cost of being reduced. You must first be objectified to turn yourself into a weapon.

When you are not viewed and objectified in this way, you are protected from the costs of sexual power, but there is pain in not being accepted. The pain of not feeling valued and therefore, not being valuable. Sexual power becomes a terrible curse. Pain when you have it, pain when you don’t.

The zero-sum gain incongruity is put into the every day by my friends’ experiences of catcalling. One of my friends gets catcalled regularly and she hates it. She’s been put in dangerous situations as men have followed her to her car at night. While the intention of the admiring gaze may be intended as complimentary, she describes it as “surveillance.” Another friend added the reverse of this. She has never been catcalled and used to feel that there was something wrong. She knows that catcalling is not a good thing, it’s a disrespectful claim of ownership over a person. But she still wonders, is she somehow less when she is not being Looked At.

The concept of surveillance and being viewed is not new. ‘The Male Gaze,’ was coined by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” It refers to the way in which women are depicted in cinema, to satiate the sexual appetites of the heterosexual man. Look at women, from her neck to her breasts to her butt to her thighs. This is sexual power or sexual vulnerability, experiences which are on either side of the scale demonstrating the volatility of the power. Sexual power is not possessed by the woman. It is borrowed power, leant to the recipients. When a group of men yell (or do not yell) at a woman they are affirming her sexual power. Sexual power is not the same as financial power. It is not the same as a professional position, a degree or a skill, where the power is owned. Sexual power is fleeting. It is for others to decide, to give and to take away depending on your adherence to certain aesthetic procedures (makeup, clothes), weight, and age, if you are seen, or not. I say this again, sexual power is fleeting, it is hard to earn, harder to maintain and easy to lose.

But in a cruel trick, when a woman is invisible, when she loses the sexual power (which is inevitable), there is a quiet voice which tells us we should pity her as “unworthy” of the male gaze. As participants in society, we are aware of how society views us. Margaret Atwood says it best, as she is prone to do, in the “Robber Bride”

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

When you are invisible, you must live in awareness of this apparent shortcoming. And despite the rationale that this shouldn’t matter, the constant, measuring surveillance is debilitating.

To draw a dramatic parallel, the male gaze is like a prison. Foucault, a 20th-century academic, studied the concept of the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a prison structure where the prison cells are built in a circle, in the centre of which is a guard tower with tinted windows. The prison cells are open but due to the tinted windows of the guard tower, the prisoners are unsure whether they are being monitored, whether they are being watched by ten guards or none at all. This uncertainty heightens the power of surveillance. When the prisoner assumes they are being watched, they become both the prisoner and the guard, internalising the surveillance. The prisoners become individualised weakening the likelihood and success of a group revolt, strengthening the institution. Surveillance is paralyzing.

The male gaze works same way as the Panopticon. Even though we may reject the sexual power society gives us, even though there may not be men around, as individuals we turn the male gaze on ourselves. It is present in the way you angle yourself for a selfie, the clothes we wear, the feelings we have when we receive or do not receive catcalls. We are individualised and continually weakened by the institution of sexual power.

The claustrophobia of the male gaze comes into immediate focus and the next question is posed, is there an exception to the narrative?

The answer lives with the Panopticon’s namesake. The Panopticon was named after the Greek myth of Argus Panoptes, the giant with hundreds of eyes that could look in every direction and sleep at different times, maintaining constant surveillance. The exception to that narrative is the first bitch or “Nasty Woman,” Medusa. Raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena, her beauty was cursed and she was made to have a head of snakes so terrifying that she turned all men who gazed on her to stone. She is the automatic victor of Panoptes, literally unable to be looked at, invisible, and safe, and quiet. Our treatment of Medusa becomes interesting and the questions we ask, indicative of the male gaze panopticon. Is she the monster? Should we pity her for her loneliness, that she may never feel the glow of the borrowed power of being an object of sexual desire? Or, should we envy her, that she is the only known survivor of the Male Gaze?

Sexual power is no longer the only power that women possess, but as Maggie Gyllenhaal said, “A hundred years ago, the only way you could support yourself is connecting with a man…” Women may have more effective avenues and variations of power, but sexual power continues to be the defining feature of our experience and valuation. As the weaponisation of sexuality starts to penetrate mainstream popular media, the constant touchpoint of sexual power should be that it is a borrowed power. It is not a resource that grows from a woman. It is of the image of woman. The conversation beyond this is unwieldy and difficult, but I believe that it is time for our power to come from us, to take steps to evict the male voyeur behind our eyes. It is time to grow snakes for hair and to be uncomfortable.

References:

Atwood, M 1993, “The Robber Bride”

The Hollywood Reporter, 2018 “Drama Actresses Roundtable: Angela Bassett, Elisabeth Moss, Claire Foy, Thandie Newton | THR” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvfzWFl5q9E