Belonging to Myself as a Former Agent of the Male Gaze
Words by Mariana Cid de Leon Ovalle | Art by Carmen Vidal
I started seeing dicks everywhere thanks to my film class, where I first learned of Laura Mulvey’s theory on the Male Gaze in cinema. It’s what they call it when a movie or character is written from the eyes of a heterosexual man. It’s also the most common perspective through which women in the media are portrayed. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about the media was different from that point forward.
Psycho’s Norman Bates was no longer merely slashing and killing Marion Crane with his knife. Halloween’s Michael Myers was not just attacking random unsuspecting women in the throes of sex. “Slashing and killing” became “penetrating and overpowering” a woman in her most vulnerable state. “Attacking women at random” became “penetrating and punishing women for being promiscuous.” Noticing a pattern here?
The women in James Bond movies became plot devices merely meant to please the protagonist and help him move forward. Even Princess Leia’s purpose in the Star Wars franchise changed in my eyes, especially after watching her comfort a man for losing his mentor as if she had not just lost her entire home planet. Then there’s the gold bikini her character wore in a scene where she was taken as a “slave” by a power-hungry mafioso. (Carrie Fisher herself famously hated that gold bikini.)
Basically, if there’s a woman involved in the story, the Male Gaze calls for her getting sexualized, if not outright penetrated, in one way or another.
I always tell people I had a latchkey kid type of childhood because the media was such a driving source of comfort and consistency when I was growing up. I was a deeply sensitive kid who felt incredibly inadequate, and so tv and movies were the safest places for me to learn about this new country I had moved to, where I was expected to learn the language, the phrases, the customs, and how to connect with others. It felt like I was being given a chance to explore this new world without the judgment of others. It became a tool to help me adapt and adjust.
It stung deep to realize that most –if not all– of the media I grew up consuming was never really aimed at me. I was always expected to experience these narratives secondarily, by identifying with the male. Ironically, it was also one of the most liberating and validating experiences I've ever had.
I spent weeks thinking about the relationships I never had the gall to end on my own because I wanted to whittle myself down, reshape my body, bend my bones, and squeeze myself into whatever mold was necessary. I needed to be more helpless, to have doe eyes, to be manic and quirky, to be soft and pliant. And yet I also needed to be the brand of kickass that sways her hips as she effortlessly fixes her car in daisy dukes and a tank top. I needed to be a whore in the bedroom but a virgin everywhere else. I needed to be tainted but youthful, experienced but naive.
The year was 2011 when I learned about the Male Gaze in my film class. Britney Spears was a national joke for her heavily publicized mental health issues. Lindsay Lohan was in and out of jail, rehab, and court. Paris Hilton was seen as an easy target for humiliation, they even did it to her face during interviews. I watched the media build these women up, high atop the tallest of skyscrapers. They were on magazines, billboards, commercials, interviews, and online. They were lauded as independent women but they didn’t even belong to themselves. Their journeys were turned into storylines, an easy way to drive up engagement and make money. They became fictional characters for the media to play with, to reshape into something that fit the mold of the Male Gaze. So naturally, when those same women started to rub up against the limits of this lens, the very qualities they were praised for became the weapons through which they were then torn down.
Let’s just stop for a second to sit in the fact that these are all white women. That isn’t to minimize their experience, but it does play a major role in how this idea is forced onto them. Because women of color are scrutinized through the Male Gaze in layers that do not normally exist for white women.
To name a few, in 2011, Janet Jackson was seven years into being blacklisted after a costume malfunction led to her bare breast being broadcast to millions of homes during Super Bowl 38. Venus and Serena Williams–with little to no scandals to their names– were megastar athletes who were constantly picked apart for their body types and strong-willed nature. Whitney Houston had become a target of criticism for her evolving voice (due to aging and alleged drug use), her ability to mother, and skepticism about her allegedly hiding her sexual fluidity…as if none of those things had been a direct result of the media’s obsession with analyzing and criticizing her in the first place.
Objectively, I knew that fame made things feel so much bigger, but the patterns I saw in their lives were not all that foreign. I had seen it reflected in many women’s experiences.
Beyond that, I began to realize that we all become agents of the Male Gaze when we ascribe to this perspective and perpetuate it ourselves. Even within our closest relationships. There are all these rules and limitations we place on what it is to be a woman that many, if not all of us women, are made to feel inadequate because we just can’t fit that mold.
The truth is that the Male Gaze is a lot like social media. It’s a snapchat filter designed to smooth out your skin, an editing app designed to soften your edges and narrow your sides. It’s a strategically angled photo meant to hide your double chin. It’s a virtual reality with very real consequences. It’s an idea of womanhood that has been thrust into all our faces, programmed into our codes, force-fed to our senses.
We have developed disorders, insecurities, and anxieties all because of an idea of what womanhood should be. As if our very bodies are not living sculptures. As if the way our roots grow is not something to be proud of. As if our resilience is not the very proof we seek. As if we are not the makers of our own relationship to self and others. As if that power was never in our hands, to begin with.
Deconstructing my relationship with the Male Gaze began in 2011, but it’s not over. Every day that I come closer to my true self, that I connect with her unabashedly, is another day that sits between my new self and my old self, the one who was an agent of the Male Gaze. And every day that I use the tools I’ve gained along the way to deprogram myself and to continue raising two powerful women (who can identify the Male Gaze for themselves and tell it to promptly fuck off) is another day of ensuring that it stays in the past.