The 'male gaze' as a female fantasy

Part 1: Men evaluate physically, women judge totally

When the male gaze is mentioned in feminist discourse, it’s usually acting upon women as a disembodied force, divorced from the man training it on you. A man need not be staring at you to feel it. It may not even be from a specific man but ephemeral, an unnameable agent of patriarchal control via sexualization of the female body. It may be through the phone, a man gazing at the picture of a woman, in which case she isn’t aware of it other than the gaze she has pre-applied to herself while taking the photo. It may be a man actually evaluating you, and it’s always an act of power in the feminist parlance. Here, I’m distinguishing between a man simply looking and the feminist reinterpretation of looking as domination.

Like any woman, I’ve experienced unwanted male attention. I can’t stop a man from evaluating, but I don’t have to react or acknowledge. And the indifference takes Herculean effort to cultivate. The gaze acted on me because I allowed it, and it destabilized my life in my twenties. The literal act of a man evaluating and then being attentive cannot be allowed to derail me, especially in this particular lane I now occupy. But, I also will not hold men morally culpable for harming me because they looked. A loud contingent of women claimed that looking itself was harmful, not unlike the expansion of violence to include words.

The male gaze is demonized, but the most feminist women fear losing it. They will decry sexual objectification, but then lament not having a man. They will say they like the absence of men ogling them, so they don’t maintain their appearance and eschew femininity. But then they’re sad they don’t have a man. Of course, they will want a wealthy one so they can stop working. These are conversations I’ve had recently with women in person.

The gaze can be destabilizing, but if we want to pair off, it’s counterproductive to pathologize men for looking. Scott Galloway, for all his milquetoast defenses of masculinity, states correctly that male sexual desire has been pathologized. What he does not dare say is that a subset of women pathologized it and transmitted those norms to their children, and this is the message I got growing up from the media: men objectify women, and it’s always an act of evil, one step away from rape. But also, buy this thing we’re selling you because the advertiser’s gaze is fine.

Women crave the gaze — from high-status men.

An example of feminist assumptions about the gaze is the following paper: “Exploring Women’s Embodied Experiences of ‘The Gaze’ in a Mixed-Gendered UK Gym.”¹ The author invokes Laura Mulvey’s authoritative definition of the male gaze:

According to the Gaze Theory—as described by Mulvey—women have the ‘to-be-looked-atness’ characteristic. The gaze is directed at the female body, commonly by a male and it actively projects the man’s fantasy upon the women’s body. Within this relationship, women are both an object to be gazed at and a showpiece to be displayed. The ‘gaze’ can be defined as ‘the act of observation on the one hand and internalisation on the other’. The ‘male gaze’ is frequently used among feminists who argue that the role of a female is purely for the sexual objectification of a male spectator. For Mulvey, gazes can be determined as rational, voyeuristic, sadistic, controlling and controlled.

First, let’s contextualize Mulvey and her coinage. She wrote “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” about classic Hollywood film,² and the notion has since escaped and expanded, as have so many other critical theoretical concepts. The gaze is now taken to mean patriarchy’s omnipresent scrutiny and control, while Mulvey originated it in a narrow context. The gaze metastasized because feminist theory needed a universal explanatory frame for women’s dissatisfaction, and male desire was the easiest target.

I contend that the gaze-as-sexualized-control is a feminist construction that women in the professional class internalized. It has little or nothing to do with an individual man’s attention. The gaze describes the professional class female fantasy of male attention, by which they are simultaneously disgusted and which they crave.

The female status hierarchy is predicated upon (high-status) male attention. We want it and hate ourselves for it. Women in the professional class often say men approaching them in the grocery store are creeps. But, they would be glad for a man they perceive as high-status to do so. Calling men creeps becomes a class sorting mechanism disguised as self-protection.

The act of a man looking at a woman is always already sexualized, precluding the possibility that a man may just be observing a woman without sexualizing her. The act of observation is collapsed with sexualization, but not every man who looks at a woman is doing the latter. The gaze is about evaluation in either context, though it is presumed to be dominating. Women’s revealed preferences, however, are for dominant men even as they say they want sensitive and egalitarian ones.³

On the other hand, let us consider the female evaluation of male mating potential. A woman doesn’t just consider the man’s physicality but trains her gaze on his entire life. He is also subject to the exact arbitrary requirements, like height, that women say men have. She must determine if he’ll be a protector and provider even as she might consider these concepts to be patriarchal control (or not see the cognitive dissonance at all). A man in a room full of professionals is evaluated by his clothing and presentation more than by his actual body. This is how wealthy, unattractive men attract a parade of young women. Those same women will be burned when that man invariably cheats because he always has options.

The female gaze evaluates men’s whole lives, not just their bodies.

The expectations a woman has of a man in the dating process often far exceed the expectations of the man. The female gaze is far more ruthless, and any woman would admit it because it evaluates both a man’s physicality and his life. The difference is that male physical preferences are moralized as evil, while female physical preferences are just fine.

I contend that we shouldn’t moralize mate preferences, which both the femosphere and manosphere do in the name of status defense. The issue is that men cannot ever be morally innocent in the feminist context. They are always already oppressive, while women can moralize mate preferences because we monopolize moral authority. We can never be wrong.

The problem is not that women evaluate men’s whole lives. Instead, the collapse in marriage and skyrocketing loneliness can be traced back to demonizing men for looking at and approaching women. They stopped, yet most women still expect men to make the first move.

Demonizing the gaze had a predictable outcome.

The male gaze is less discernible now because men have withdrawn into entirely separate social worlds. Overall, I’ve noticed that men and women aren’t socializing with each other in real life. Look no further than the New York Times for a lament about men disappearing. And because men have withdrawn, competition for their attention is even fiercer than before, but it’s all underground. We may never admit we actually want it because merely desiring a partner is now mocked online.

Women also want to ensure that their rivals do not receive any male attention, high or low status, because attention for a woman is a signal of her value. I will share a personal story about this in the next installment about the gaze as a disciplinary tool in female intrasexual competition.

Though I know being a woman today is often about endlessly chasing youth and the associated beauty standards, meaning it’s also about coveting and fearing the loss of men's attention. It’s this trap I’ve worked so hard to avoid since I left feminism behind and started chasing truth.

In the next installment, I will explain the gaze’s function as a tool of intrasexual discipline for women. We use it to delegitimize rivals and maintain hierarchy among ourselves.

1. Clark, Amy. 2018. “Exploring Women’s Embodied Experiences of ‘The Gaze’ in a Mix-Gendered UK Gym” Societies 8, no. 1: 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8010002

2. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–28.

3. Edward K. Sadalla, Douglas T. Kenrick, and Robert Vershure, “Dominance and Heterosexual Attraction,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 4 (1987): 730–738.