“Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
– Margaret Atwood
The first perceptions we make of ourselves exist in relation to how others perceive us. In early childhood, we notice the reactions of people in our lives and try to imagine how they are feeling about us. In job interviews, we anxiously scan the faces of our superiors, desperately seeking clues as to how we are doing. It is our human nature to gauge our self-perception around what others think of us.
For years, I tried to be what the men around me wanted me to be. I kept my hair long and blonde, conforming to any and all beauty standards that I could. I worked out to be skinny, not to be healthy. Frankly, it exhausted me. Then, I swung the pendulum far in the other direction, cutting my hair to a pixie cut, dying my blonde locks dark brown, piercing my nose and dressing less feminine – actions I considered to be in direct opposition to the male gaze. I wanted to feel like that, in my prime years of self-expression, I was dressing for myself and nobody else. Until I realized I wasn’t.
The first scholar to coin the term “the gaze” was Jacques Lacan, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Essentially, the gaze is defined as the anxiety upon realizing that one can be perceived. In 1975, Laura Mulvey was the first to define the subcategory of the “male gaze,” writing, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”
While Mulvey was discussing the male gaze in the context of film, art and literature, this concept is easily applicable to the real world: the conscious or subconscious inclination to view women through a heterosexual, male lens – reducing them to objects of lust – further establishing gender inequality within the social world.Â
For a long time, I thought I had “escaped” the male gaze. By making myself exempt from the cookie-cutter model of womanhood that I had long understood to catch men’s attention, I figured I could exist and practice femininity on my terms. However, the results perplexed me. While I figured fewer boys would find me alluring, I seemed to attract a new subsect of men. Men told me that I was beautiful because I “wasn’t like other girls.” That they “preferred girls who didn’t wear lots of makeup.”Â
While I was busy convincing myself that I had escaped the male fantasy, I realized I was simply appeasing it in a new way. By countering the stereotypical view of womanhood, I inadvertently welcomed a new perception of myself: the girl who’s “not like the other girls;” it felt like a slap in the face. Faced with a paradoxical conundrum, I panicked. But I never realized that the “solution” would be so simple.
My shoulders grew heavy from carrying the weight of what seemed to be an inescapable phenomenon. The weight was too heavy, so I put it down; there, the answer stood staring me right in the face. I let it go. I let go of what I cannot control, so it can no longer control me. While I realize I will never be free from how others perceive me—or more specifically the way a patriarchal society views me—I became unburdened by the acceptance of this inevitable truth.Â
While this sentiment in itself may sound depressing, make no mistake: there is liberation in letting it go. I know that the male gaze is inescapable. I know that changing the way I look will not stop me from being looked down upon or fetishized as a woman. But I no longer allow myself to become so deeply enthralled with how I am perceived by men. Rather, I focus on cultivating myself to be more like the women I admire and love. I find solidarity in my connections with fellow women because, after all, I think they’re worth impressing the most.