All About The Male Gaze
For many women, their whole sense of self is completely shaped by how men are going to view them and their actions. The way they put on makeup, dress, work-out, eat is all shaped by creating the perfect character that will appeal to, and be palatable to a man.
Notice I used the word character? I’ve been thinking about women and characters a lot recently. And how women often become or are forced into the box of a one-dimensional character in a book or movie. Because women are desired to be archetypes, not people. I’ve seen myself and others be pushed into the box of the immovable, one-dimensional archetype. A man often takes a woman's most appealing traits and discards the rest.
The pretty girl, the smart girl, the popular girl, the quirky girl.
Women are made to become fake, plastic versions of themselves, in hopes to not even please a man, but just not to scare him.
Men, I think, in many ways are terrified of women being more powerful than them. And so when they strip away all the valuable parts of their personality, a woman's most potent anger and power disappears and she becomes a doll, with no visible feeling left behind her glossy, mascaraed eyes.
And women desire to appeal to men for a reason. So often I hear stories of girls who went off with who would be become their abuser, or kidnapper, or murder because they were afraid of hurting a mans feelings, but then also, when the girl doesn't go off with this man, he’ll still do those things her. She can’t win.
We’ve created such an interesting view of a man in our society, we’ve made it so men don’t have feelings and are steel walls and yet we all put forth so much effort to not hurt a man's feelings. Almost proving that we all know men do have feelings but we’re just so terrified to bring them out.
The hardest part is escaping your internal male gaze and understanding what you do for you, and what you do for men. Do I shave my legs cause I like how it looks, or because I’m afraid of coming off gross? Do I put on winged eyeliner every morning because I like the way it makes me look, or because I know it accentuates my eyes, which I know men like? It's naive to think that we are not doing these things to appeal to men. And it's not our fault, for lack of a better term it's like we all have Stockholm syndrome to our internalized sexism and the male gaze.
When you are raised, completely drowned in tiny waists, and pinky lipstick and perfectly waved hair, what else are women and young girls supposed to do, then feel like they have to be the girl the guy wants, cause often she is the only girl presented in the media.
Women's fear of men, desire to please them, and the ultimate goal of just not scaring them come together in the male gaze discourse. I think to fully understand how the male gaze affects our society, we first need to understand how it affects ourselves.
