A Gaze Returned

*Note Bene: This post will contain some, I hope a minimal amount of, theory-speak. Take the word "gaze" for example. In theory-speak, it means what it means (a sustained observation, a manner of looking), but it is understood at both a personal level (I gazed at ________ in wonder) and at a more cultural level (the male or masculine gaze). At this level, a gaze is also the interpretation that one (dominant, powerful) part of the world makes of another (subordinate, powerless) part of the world. So, the male gaze is shorthand for the historical collection of judgements that a male culture has made and does make about women. Similarly, the white gaze re: people of color; or the straight gaze re: LGBTQ people, and so on. A gaze is associated with agency, legitimacy, power, with a body of knowledge (or superstitious bullshit, depending on your education and political persuasion).

Now, the thing is that straight, white, male gazes are not the only gazes zooming around the world and interpreting stuff or people. The American gaze is not the only way of looking at the world, and hosts of other gazes regard and interpret America. See how the wor(l)d works? Good. There is a female or feminine gaze, for instance. In the case of this essay, that feminine gaze is also coded as white and straight for reasons that will be made clear in just a sec.

 Circulating among some feminist women on Facebook is a recent post a Jezebel critiquing an essay in Esquire (hence the white and straight--and well educated and privileged--context in which we are working here). It's a sharp and funny and ruthless critique of an essay that doesn't make a lot of rational sense but that expresses an unexamined and not terribly focused sense of dread or anxiety or anger on the part of (at least some) hip and upwardly ambitious white men. The worry is that women view them with contempt, that the feminine is gazing at them with an angry kind of disappointment. The essay coincides with some recent main-stream media discussions about the familial and cultural implications of women in many families earning more than their husbands, more women getting advanced degrees than men, etc.

This trend does indicate a change at the root, of the very pattern of our culture--eventually, maybe. It also means that women, as a general class, are achieving a gaze. Men and the masculine elements of our culture are not at all used to being gazed in this way, they're not used to sharing cultural or social power (one element of subjectivity) with feminine kinds of people. Not surprisingly, some women are not or are no longer impressed with what they see.

Now, partly this is because there is a real, and radical, shift going on and men and the masculine in our culture are slowly redefining themselves and being redefined by other forces. That passive voice there, being redefined, which indicates men/the masculine as an object in the way that women/the feminine have been for centuries, millennia, this is new to men and understandably uncomfortable.

In the theory-speak of radical feminism: the masculine is now in the unenviable position of having to critique and investigate its own subjectivity, and likely change it--a lot. The Masculine has to take itself as its own object and, with the inflection of the feminine gaze, do a lot of self-referential work. Sort of like going through a 12-step program for getting over the bad parts of the masculine subject position, rewiring one's gender reflexes. It. Is. Hard. To. Do.

I would like to take my response to Stephen Marche's essay in another direction, and respond not his particular writing performance (or the editorial standards at Esquire, WTF?), but to the creeping malaise he wants to diagnose, but actually cure.

The way that Marche worries about this contempt is a worry from the masculine side, of course. It thinks about the sources of feminine contempt as being those that men in our culture would expect, would have for each other. Not being well educated, not earning more than the next guy, not being good in bed or choosing a relationship other men find questionable or dissatisfying. That is, real stuff. Real stuff that really happens because, as West at Jezebel put its, people are complicated. People being complicated is not part of the world view, the gaze, of the masculine. People are surfaces and outward actions and pretty easy to know and judge (objectify) in the traditional masculine gestalt (superstitious bullshit).

Now, I think there probably is a good deal of feminine contempt panoramically surrounding the masculine. In the present circumstance, I would expect so. I just don't think it's about what Marche thinks it's about. Here's what it's about:

It's about policy, its about culture and daily life, it about the "stand up" men in our lives not getting our backs.

In the last year, we have seen state after state come after women's general health care and reproductive choice. That's what it means when clinics close, when states and feds want to defund Planned Parenthood. It means lots of women (and kids, and men) won't get even basic health care. It means that our lives and our families are at risk. We have seen hosts of women protesting these reversals of public policy.

More obviously, the attacks on contraception mandates in the Affordable Health Care act are a central nervous system twitch from the old guard of masculinity that cannot abide the idea of women, or men, having sex for fun or love, or any purpose other than procreation. This after we have been doing just that for two generations. This after spending billions of dollars to create Viagra so that Baby Boomer men can keep having sex for fun. And when we watch these defenders of tradition, we can see how seethingly angry they have been all this time. In the symbol of Sandra Fluke, we have all been called sluts (again) because we have and like to act on our sexual energies. And again, our own private sexuality has been the public subject of rather unkind male fantasies and a desire to consume our sexuality as fair exchange for contraceptive medication. Women know all too well this kind of sexual extortion. And we have seen women protesting and responding to these attacks on our sovereign personhood, and we have seen precious few men at our sides.

I will spare us a discussion of rape culture, the rape jokes that about on Facebook, the recent blow-up over Jason Tosh, and all of that, street harassment, and so forth. It will just take too damn long. But, I will say that all of that is a sign of just how badly the masculine and its gaze want to hang to their position as The Boss. Rape culture goes hand in glove with recent policy reversals made by cultural conservatives in state and federal legislatures. We do not see lots of men telling other men to cut this shit out and change their attitude. A few, but not a lot.

This all has a very real impact on women. We feel the male gaze too, and we feel its anger and its danger, the threat in it, the deep-seething desire to get us girls back under control. We also know that our culture and our economy have changed so much that this mean desire is totally impossible to satisfy, so we have to live within that threatening panoramic male gaze.We remember what has been done to us before, the stones, the fires, the beatings. We know that these stones and beatings and fires are, right now, raining down on and destroying the lives and bodies of our sisters around the globe. We really do know what you are capable of.

And we know that you (many, most of you) are not standing with us, are not holding up placards, are not raising a ruckus, are not getting arrested with us. You do not have our backs. (Now, some of you do--you're home with the kids while we're at the demonstration, or you are at the demonstration, gods bless you.) The men who feel the way Marche does are the men who are not with us, who don't quite love us, who are not at the demonstrations and have not done the hard work of critiquing their own relationships with masculinity and with women in this new world. And so, yeah, we hold you in contempt.

No shit.

The tension running underneath Marche's essay and responses to it is the same tension in the apocryphal story about a professor who asked the men and women in class what they most feared from each other. The men said they most feared women laughing at them. The women said they most feared men killing them.

I can live through a bit of chagrin.

And that, well that is why a particular cadre of men might be sensing some contempt in the female gaze right about now. But, I tell you, that gaze can also shower you with admiration and gratitude and love and desire. All depends on what you do next. On whether you have the courage to question your subject position and get our backs. Because just being a boy and breathing does not suffice anymore.