Our Cultural Value as Women Is Decided by the Male Gaze
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Television, Women, Culture, Feminism, Equality

“Do I not exist?”

Grace and Frankie is one of my favorite Netflix shows. It’s about two women who are thrust into the same uniquely challenging circumstances when they discover that their husbands have been having an affair for 20 years.

The female character’s experiences speak quite loudly. As women age, society’s response is to make us frustratingly invisible.

In the show, Grace and Frankie are not only living through their seventies, they are rediscovering themselves. It would be challenging to find two more outwardly different woman, but at their core, both are on journeys that bring them closer together. The obstacles they face paint an egregious picture of what our super-progressive American culture values in women.

One scene of this show illustrates women’s invisibility particularly well.

Grace and Frankie are at a grocery store. As Frankie tries to get just one store clerk to respond to her, she and Grace are repeatedly ignored. Even when they yell for help, no one seems to hear them.

When a clerk finally begins to walk in their direction, it turns out that he actually has his eyes set on a young woman who arrives at the register much later than Grace and Frankie. As he proceeds to flirt with this customer, Grace loses her cool and screams, “Do I not exist?”

We like to pretend misogyny and sexism are culturally extreme values that don’t regularly permeate the lives of women. That’s just not true.

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The pressures of staying valuable in the male gaze

Even for women who haven’t yet reached their seventies, or their sixties, or even their fifties, this pressure of eventual invisibility reinforces in us that what matters in our culture is the male gaze. When we are no longer appealing to it, we will also be stripped of our worth.

This is why young women are pressured into getting married. What man’s going to want an old maid?

Even women learn to look at other women through the lens of the male gaze. This is one of the sicker victories of the patriarchy. It’s why dividing women even when it comes to our shared traumas is so easy.

There is a sickeningly common saying that “men age like fine wine and women age like milk.”

The male gaze values our sexual attractiveness. The male gaze values what we can do for men. So much of our social structure is dependent on this unequal distribution of power.

In a patriarchal structure like ours, all of the other valuable traits we women possess do not matter if men are not attracted to them. This is exactly the same logic that compels women with thriving professional careers and solid friendships to feel like they haven’t achieved anything worth having because there isn’t a man to validate it all with his existence. He doesn’t even have to be a particularly worthy one.

When we dissect what attractiveness means, we find that men and women have unequal claims to it.

While men are crowned with charming titles like “silver fox,” women are pushed out of professions due to their “advanced age.” Men are allotted decades longer to be considered attractive and handsome, while women’s attractiveness is dependent on their youthfulness.

There is a sickeningly common saying that “men age like fine wine and women age like milk.” This quote can stand alone in undressing exactly how the patriarchy seeks to diminish a woman’s worth. Years are stolen from women. We are reduced to the decades where we can be of service to men.

Things need to change, and not just a little bit

There’s always someone who comes out of the woodwork with the boring response that “things are changing. It’s just going to take some time.”

How much time? Can you tell me? Will sexism cease to exist during my lifetime? How about the next generation’s? Should I thank you for this comfort that you have tried to provide?

We like to pretend misogyny and sexism are culturally extreme values that don’t regularly permeate the lives of women. That’s just not true.

There are ways forward.

Our culture must actively and mindfully act on the knowledge that a woman’s worth is manifested in multitudinous other ways than how she can serve a man. Society’s definition of beauty must be literally overhauled. There is not way to be beautiful. Unattainable standards are just there to disempower us by keeping us visible only if we adhere to oppressive standards. No thanks.

A society that ignored women “of a certain age” is sexist. We must not accept the status quo of a culture that steals time and dimensionality away from women. We deserve more.

We always have. We are more than our looks and our beauty cannot be contained by the tired, needs-to-go definition put forth by the patriarchy.

As Grace says at the end of this scene, “I refuse to be irrelevant.”