So @Alyssa_Neill made a post on Instagram about the male gaze and this was my response. The photo is a link, if you wanna read her comment!
I wrote this directly to address her caption, and have not proofread it or edited it… but it felt like something I ought to share. If you want to see the video we’re discussing here I linked it at the bottom.
1. I watched it. And personally my biggest issue was that is subversively sexist. It wasn’t about being Instagram famous, it was about stereotyping a pattern of behavior on Instagram. While the critique likely holds validity in the minds of some, it’s because they hold a similar perspective whether or not their understanding of the “symptom” actually gets to the root of the “cause”
It’s like western medicine trying to diagnose spontaneous tears and laughter as a psychotic break. Because they haven’t cultivated spaces for cultural experiences of samadhi, and they have only seen this under the influence of drugs or hysteria, it lies outside the realm of possibility that it could in fact be samadhi.
2. As a male person, reading the comments, I saw both male and female people who loved the video and it highlighted something for me:
While none of the comments I read said anything aggressively sexist(I only read a few, though) all of them are indoctrinated into thinking about the behavior of women through the phenomenon of male gaze, which is an aversive sexism. It informs policy and hurts the liberty of women to express themselves as they see fit. They think this is normal, and fail to see it as the norm they perpetuate. And this is female people as well, holding each other to different standards of behavior and beauty and policing what other women do.
3. As a NB person, this is bizarre to even think about. Plenty of men and women operate in this way mentally because of the historical paradigms of sex and sexuality in a post-agrarian society. Culturally we have tied a woman’s value to her sexuality, submissiveness, and role as mother/caretaker. Anything she does that makes her hard to control or potentially damages her ability to fulfill the prescribed roles, lowers her value to the patriarchy, which is the locus of power. As the systems of power became more complex and distributed, people’s overall power individually increased, but the gap in power between individuals and entities grew exponentially.
This is a part of queer theory, because the narratives of heteronormativity require a paradigm where males and females form a binary that creates complimentary roles... feminism liberates all people from a sort of transactional sexuality, because the male doesn’t trade being a provider for the opportunity to have a family, and a female can provide for herself if she decides to create a family on her own. This damages the narrative because it removes value from males and females who perceive themselves as lesser when a single female fulfills both roles alone in a world where the odds are stacked against her, especially when the single male parent counterpart is expected to fail or abdicate his responsibilities. Empowered women and queer people in a patriarchal society fundamentally undermine the accepted norms which removes heteronormative models, which include religious doctrines, economic models, and cultural norms from their place at the top of the hierarchy.
4. While there are many awakening people, who will likely question why this video was made or be frustrated by it being perceived as funny, the reality is that it describes a reality. In their reality, that is what people do. They laugh because to them, it holds some truth. In a heteronormative dynamic, this is the logical breakdown of that behavior, and they can agree upon it.
In another example of this, we have mainstream responses to female leadership. Culturally we still see the idea that a woman’s value is so inherently tied to her sexual contributions to society, that female CEO’s are undermined as leaders, but male CEO’s are never critiqued for being absent parents if anyone ever even bothers to asks if they even have kids.
You are right, there’s you and so many other people whose nudity is art and artful. Who want to bring sovereignty back to their experience of their own body. Who recognize themselves as beautiful, because that is what we are when we opt to see it. You’re not wrong. But it is a world we are sharing. So long as they have a heteronormative dynamic to point to as the ideal, people’s thinking will be trapped in these constructs, male and female.
Here’s the video we were reacting to, if you wanna see it.