🧿 DUSTING OFF THE MALE GAZE 🧿

By Radical Girlsss

Coined in 1975 by film critic Laura Malvey in her essay Visual Pleasure, the term male gaze denotes the portrayal of women as objects to be viewed and, by extension, portrays men as the subject of said viewing. Transposed to cinema and the artistic visual world, the male gaze dehumanizes women and subjects all viewers to the masculine lens, by which women do not have full ownership of their bodies and have to abide by the idea that their essence is for human consumption

The Male Gaze knows no boundaries as it preys upon women regardless of age, ethnic background, beliefs, sexual preferences and physical appearance. From the eight-month old baby girl to the disabled woman tied to her wheelchair, no woman escapes the gaze and its effects. No woman escapes the gradually unbearable weight of the darting of those eyes, the scrutiny of those pupils. From the thirteen year old teenager to the grandmother.

Such is the burden of the male gaze, present in all spheres of a woman’s life, that it conditions our own existence. We all learn, or interiorize, that our appearance is a social currency, and that it doesn’t belong to us. We endure so much of it that we assimilate and try to blend in as to avoid it. We start to monitor and question ourselves from the moment we dress in front of the mirror until we come back home at the end of the day. We enter in self-monitoring, self-judging and criticizing dynamics. We blame ourselves, we blame other women. We don’t blame men. We unconsciously spend more time keeping track of ourselves than to rebel against the foreign forces that want to colonize our body. We don’t combat shame, fear, hiding, all by-products of this gaze.

As Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Second Sex, it is time to take back the male gaze through the (re) appropriation of our image as a private experience. In a society that tells women that their external appearance is not theirs to keep, is not theirs to hide, gazing at yourself in a drastically different way than men do, claiming yourself as full and as one independent force, is key. The vessel that makes all of your organs work, the brain that allows you to learn and develop, the eyes that cry and the mouth that speaks and resists for you, with you. Loving yourself is a punch to the gut of patriarchy.

Boy, man, dust off that acquired misogyny. Deconstruct your masculinity and the idea that men have the right to look at us.

Girl, woman, dust off that male gaze. Give it the finger. Leave your jacket full of eyes at the door. There is no art in making a woman feel guilty for her own existence and the body that she carries. There is no art in undressing women.

RadicalGirlsss

In solidarity and sisterhood

Yuko Shimizu: "Dusting off the Male Gaze"