The 'male gaze' as intra-sexual policing

Part 2: Male attention as a commodity in female competition

Welcome to those new here. I’ve been fortunate to reach many more people lately thanks to several writers' generous support. In part 1, I argued that the male gaze is actually a bourgeois female fantasy of high-status male attention. This argument examines the gaze as a mechanism by which women control each other.

The gaze as a tool of female intrasexual competition

Women judge each other based on sexual behavior, so to a certain extent, being a woman is also about policing other women’s sexuality; this is well documented in evolutionary psychology. Everyone knows, however, where they and others stand in the beauty hierarchy regardless of what’s publicly asserted. The assertion is required so other women don’t exclude you, even if you know it’s false. Being a woman is also about lying to yourself and others about your true motives to maintain your self-concept as morally innocent.

However, the gaze in its feminist denotation applied to the white man is both a female fantasy and a tool of bourgeois social control for female rivals who get male attention. Bourgeois women can use this to not only delegitimize their rivals for receiving male attention but also discipline men by accusing them of objectification. They can thus maintain their place in the hidden female hierarchy, which is determined based on the male gaze, specifically the volume of attention a woman gets in real life and online. The men's status matters not in this case; attention is a commodity. Are we being commodified, or are we commodifying men and ourselves?

The goal is to dampen any signals an attractive woman gets from a high-status man and then moralize that attention as a betrayal of the sisterhood. It was a status preservation move, for example, for girls to mock me in my first year of college because men they deemed unattractive had a crush on me. So they were policing the attention of low-value men for another woman because they know it’s a signal of value regardless of the source — a form of intrasexual competition.

I learned that I was unattractive because of this mockery, while the sexual marketplace was sending me different signals. I didn’t have a first boyfriend until I was twenty. As you can imagine, this lack of attention until later in life and the dampening of earlier signals fucked with my self-esteem. I suppose you can say that I’m weak for this, but it’s worse for a woman to think she’s utterly undesirable than to get an equivalent amount of attention as the women around her.

In another instance of female competition and social control, my first boyfriend (lasting three months) was the ex of a girl in my extended social network. She and I were not friends, but perhaps she truly believed we were. She had broken up with him, to boot, months earlier. When she found out we were dating, she called me, and I stood there mute while she yelled. She then ensured my social isolation, so that I was not invited to gatherings where she was present. Our overlapping friends chose her, and most of the men went along. I remain grateful for the handful of men who didn’t care, but I could never be part of a male group; I've always been on the outside of both men and women.

The gaze is present as a control mechanism in professional life when a woman is said to have advanced because she’s pretty. While beauty can help make an initial impression, incompetence eventually comes to light. A woman is deemed a ‘pick-me’ for getting attention, regardless of whether she’s trying, as I experienced just last week here. These are both examples of the same principle and incentive structure — neutralize one’s sexual competition.

If women do openly try to get male attention, they’re pathetic traitors to the sisterhood in a predictable remonstration based on female competitive tendencies. But perhaps the most insidious form of intrasexual competitive suppression is the widespread notion that women are being pressured to couple up when they’d rather be single. This, I suspect, is a case of preference falsification to dampen competition.

The gaze as a tool of matriarchal control

The treatment from these female ‘friends’ and my mother led to bad sexual decisions later on, though I recognize those decisions were my own. When I was a child, the gaze was always already directed at me by my mother and, occasionally, by her mother, who policed my appearance to ensure I wasn’t trying to attract boys.

While I have long been against policing and thereby sexualizing girls, I nevertheless understand that adult men sexualize girls before they may even realize it. It was my mother’s job to protect me from potential sexual contact. Child sexual abuse is rampant in Indian families because there’s such a silence enforced on victims. The family’s reputation becomes more important than the child’s physical safety. This is because Indian culture is highly hierarchical and collectivist. I’m pretty sure my own mother was abused by men in her family as a girl, which is why she was so vigilant and overbearing.

As a child, my mother in particular policed my clothing and associations so I couldn’t be friends with boys, nor could I wear tank tops or shorts. Even ankle socks weren’t allowed. I seized my freedom from her, and she told herself the story that she’s liberal as a post-hoc justification.

In hindsight, I understand why I was policed. That said, it still feels like the attention of lecherous men is made the problem of young girls. On the other hand, as a middle-aged woman, I feel as though young girls are dressing and acting like adult women, and mothers in particular have become highly permissive in this regard because there’s been such a strong reaction to shaming that was prevalent in decades past. But the answer to victim shaming isn’t to then go in the opposite direction and encourage one’s daughter to lean into her sexuality in elementary or middle school. If I had a daughter, I’d be constantly concerned about her clothing, too, and would probably find myself in my mother’s position. I suppose all women really do turn into their mothers.

Next week, I will dive into the male gaze as a tool of patriarchal control in my extended family, using Hindu-Indian culture as a case study.