On a regular day of being a woman there are so many pressures put on us for merely existing: being liked, not too mean or crude, looking pleasant to the eye, being “ladylike” (whatever that means) and so on and so forth. But what’s all this presentation for? Or more specifically, for who? And why?
At some moment in time, society decided that women should be showcase-ready at all times. I cannot thoroughly tell you when this was, but that is what everyone can agree on as we have set so many unspoken conditions on women for how to look in certain places, if they want to be noticed, etc. Throughout all this, though, who is the spectator that women “aim” (not really, but apparently we live to please others) to lure in? Well, who’s left?
Related: Blind Your Internal Male Gaze
The internal male gaze has a great part in the mental suppression and societal degradation of women. Rooting from the male gaze theory conceptualized by a feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, the internal male gaze is the same from the original theory, only internalized by women to seem “attractive” or “impressionable” women. It’s important to mention that women don’t willingly choose to subscribe to this way of thought, rather they are conditioned to believe that that’s just the natural way we should think and live, to please men and give them pleasure. The male gaze depicts women to be sex objects that are on presentation for men and their pleasure; that anything and everything we do is always rooted in the hopes for a man to notice and approve of. This mental hierarchy not only degrades women, but hypersexualizes women in mundane acts including but not limited to: putting our hair up, reaching for something on a top shelf, or even bending down to pick something we accidentally dropped. Men have casually made our day-to-day actions about them because god forbid we are our own person with our wants, needs, and desires.
An additional issue that falls under this is the pressure women are put under to be feminine, dainty, and/or delicate under every circumstance. The internal male gaze ties into this as are women taught by default that our lives shall always warrant us being attractive to others interpretation. This sexualization of women by men is interesting, though, in that men will sexualize the most mundane, regular things a woman has to do to live her life but even if there’s a minor difference in how they do it, suddenly they are whores or sluts “asking to be taken advantage of.” Beauty standards being seeded in the possible wandering male eye have corrupted the way women live their lives because life isn’t meant nor is it built to hone their success or encourage it.
By putting men’s words so highly, we have dismissed a whole population. Women’s biggest concerns about being tiny in certain places and then bigger in other places, or being just the right amount of assertive, or even what we should wear on a hot summer’s day have influenced how we think of women in society, when a man will never have to worry about these things. Society has made life such a comfortable space for men to critique everything one does and if he warrants it, change things at the snap of a finger when the truth of the matter is that women literally couldn’t care less about half the things men feel so strongly women should be doing.
Related: Your Guide to the Male Gaze and the Female Gaze in Film
Despite all this, I am not writing all this to condemn men. If anything this is an open letter on how men are great, when they’re great. But the least we can do is hold them accountable when they are very obviously upholding and conserving old, sexist ideas. Just as with girls, this all starts young, and it should also start young with boys. A “man’s world” would be nothing without women and I cannot emphasize how much minding your business fixes things.