This Week In the War On Women: Matters of Perception

The WOW links this week brought to mind a well-worn feminist trope I’d never been exposed to until my daughter went off to college and undertook to educate her old Ma with some of her assigned readings on “the Male Gaze.”

At the simplest level, this concept posits that half of us are raised and groomed to be constantly aware of ourselves as aesthetic product, as consumable goods. The other half are raised to be the consumers of that product. Still. Today.

Consider, for example, the high heel, now higher than ever. An hour standing in such shoes and the balls of your feet feel like they are raw meat. Twenty years of such shoes and you are heading for significant arthritic impairment. And yet women love their heels. The Carrie Bradshaws of the world (there are a lot of us) line the floors of our closets with multi-colored iterations — birds of paradise trapped to adorn our feet, lengthen our legs and allow us to float through life on our tiptoes: casual ballerinas.  

We have so intensely internalized the concept that being visually consumed is appropriate that gross physical discomfort becomes a small price to pay for the luxurious feeling of looking desirable. The ability to function, to move, to self-defend, to concentrate without pain — all tossed aside for that luxury.

Just a tad insane, n’est-ce pas?  

Now, on the other hand, consider the Santa Barbara mass killer from a few years back. That stupid, violent man-child was an extreme manifestation of the second half of the equation: the psychological destruction caused by teaching boys that they are the fit and proper consumers of girls. This mindset stunts our male children’s ability to relate fully, responsibly, maturely and emotionally with the female portion of the human race.

A corollary of the consumer mindset is that a boy never, ever, wants to be “like a girl” because the boy is the actor, not the acted-upon; the boy is the buyer, not the consumable good. (Said mindset, one might additionally note, is the foundation for yet another under-appreciated feminist trope: “Rape Culture.” Yes, Virginia, there really is a Rape Culture.)

So, as you peruse the offerings of this week’s War on Women, please contemplate to what degree the acculturated Male Gaze contributes to the dysfunction displayed on both sides.  Is this a mindset that needs to be continued as some necessary titillating constituent of our sexual interactions?

What would the world be like without it?

*   *   *   *   *