Or: Why There Is No Such Thing As The Female Gaze

Scopophilia is, basically, a love of looking, though it might also encompass the desire of and within the act of looking itself. As predominantly visual creatures, humans tend to appraise a great deal of meaning primarily from what we see and, perhaps more importantly, how we see it. For the most part—and we’ll get to this in more detail shortly—”the gaze” should essentially be assumed to be male. It is through this lens that most significant cultural ephemera are constructed, especially those which revolve around status and power.

As an example, the advertising industry in particular has prowled, like a pack of sharks, for over a century, with a very finely honed sense of how that gaze operates, ready to scent various insecurities like blood in the water. Status anxiety, fear of senescence, self-disgust, entitlement—pick any insecurity you like, really—they all spill the same sweet sanguine smell, and billions of dollars are eagerly lapped up annually as men, mostly, look, mostly, at women—and women look, mostly, at themselves as they are seen by men.

It is important to note that it’s very challenging to speak about theories of the gaze without acknowledging the inherent heteronormativity of that very process. A great deal might be said in regard to the complicating aspects of queer gazes, for example, even whilst they are still embedded in the dominant norms and tropes of a homogenous global culture largely centred around Abrahamic religions and all their attendant masculine insecurities.

Discussions of the gaze should be further complicated in many ways by cultural context—especially in regard to gender norms and expressions. Many millennia of patriarchal dominance has, in my view, enshrined the male gaze with enough inherent power to ensure its relevance as a cultural force to be reckoned with, even in the face of even seismic shifts in (extremely) recent times. Entrenched male power has evidently existed for thousands of years (and conjecturally for tens or even hundreds of thousands). While it is persistently challenged and its terms of reference change over time, almost all global culture is built in some way upon that foundation, which is why—despite overwhelming evidence and insight which might legitimately threaten them—most mainstream norms (like heteronormativity itself) remain notoriously stubborn perspectives to shift.

Having said all that, it may seem superficially heedless to then immediately state that there is no such thing as the “female gaze”. While it might be a trending topic on social media from time to time, what most people refer to when they use the phrase is a simulation of the male gaze, not unlike woefully superficial reinterpretations of “matriarchy” as merely “patriarchy with a woman at the top”. In other words, not the same thing at all.

While it might be tempting to re-write a concept like the male gaze simply by flipping the gender, the process does little more than invert the concept itself. Any more than calling your nation a “democratic republic” or a “people’s republic” makes it actually democratic or egalitarian rather than despotic, creating a “female gaze” does nothing to invert the actual power dynamics at play. So it’s an interesting thought experiment but there’s no such thing in Western culture. Extant matriarchal societies are both invariably misunderstood, and vanishingly rare. Nor is their underlying cultural impact likely to legitimately challenge the colossal weight of the patriarchal societal imperialism which has dominated most human societies since the stone age.

So the reason these ideas (matriarchy, a misunderstood actual thing, and the female gaze, a merely hypothetical thing) are so easily misconstrued is quite simple: culturally, they have very little context or historicity to inform them as a concepts, and even now almost no cultural power whatsoever.

As regards the gaze, yes… obviously the majority of women can “see” in the physiological sense, women have eyes, and there are female “ways” of seeing which differ to those of men. Nevertheless, it’s important to think about why—in a patriarchy—not only is there no such thing as “the female gaze”, but there can be no such thing. Nor would we necessarily want there to be—switching the cultural hegemony of one gender for the other might feel like justice, but it remains problematic.

As a simple corollary, think of why there’s no such term as “masculinism”. If there’s “feminism”, there should be an opposite, right? Yet there isn’t, and there really can not be—despite the disingenuous bleating majority of men’s rights activists. I would suggest that anyone who can’t understand the difference has not yet grasped what patriarchal power actually involves. Nor, in a larger context, the insidiousness of its collusion with capitalism.

Instead, such arguments are merely co-opting capitalism’s vacant insistence on its ability to provide “equality” simply by creating ineffectual oppositional simulacra in an attempt to fill existential voids, just as it does with the cheap material objects it sells us as “necessities”. The mere possibility of a thing’s existence is not the same as it having meaning, heft, or actuality.

Incidentally, that’s also why such goods and services are so often ultimately so unsatisfying. Of course, it’s part of the show—product A fails to make you feel better, so the ad for product B steps in to sell you the same false hope in a different form. And guess what? When that fails, product C will offer you the exact same thing; this continues ad infinitum.

The point is that so much of the crap that we buy, or the things that we own, which are sold to us by the multi-billion-dollar marketing campaigns of multinational corporations are useless. That is, they provide little more than a fleeting dopamine hit, offer a degree of luxury, or exist to temporarily soothe some kind of insecurity. But just like doom-scrolling, shallow accoutrements cannot provide fulfilment because part of their function is to avoid addressing whatever anxiety or insecurity it makes such bold claims of conciliating. Otherwise, what would be left to sell next? Ironically, the actual purpose of many consumer items is not to ameliorate, but to propagate, anxieties and insecurities. That’s what keeps all the consumer dupes—us—coming back for more.

Whether it manifests as a physical item such as a handbag, a plastic toy, a sports shoe, a sugary treat, or panders to a cultural one like status anxiety or physiological dysmorphia—a manufactured need is still just that: manufactured, artificial, and these things will ultimately fail to provide anything close to fulfilment, much less address systemic inequality, no matter how temporarily good it makes people feel. Even the best-intended and well-crafted advertisement remains a mere simulacra of lived experience, and betrays its true nature with the inclusion of any form of brand or logo.

Fundamentally, capitalism only cares about enshrining power in the medium of money, and little else (which in a semiotic sense we recognise in a corporate brand like “Nike” the same way that a family name like “von Habsburg” would once have represented royal power in a very significant way). Patriarchy, in turn, enshrines power in the medium of “masculinity”. And that is very specifically not to say “men”. It’s not just any masculine form, but a particularly patriarchal one.

Patriarchy’s particular brand of masculinity

I would argue vehemently that patriarchy is not actually about being male in a biological sense—which is why it so very obviously harms a great many men along with almost all women—but the repetition of the performance of being a certain kind of male, a particular display intertwined within and among the reinforcement of expressions of power and status in particular.

That important distinction is why some feminist arguments around patriarchy fall so flat that they become practically indefensible. The problem is not apparent gender per se, but the performance of gender which patriarchal culture expects. That’s why, if a male person dares to show any expression of vulnerability—particularly pain or emotion, such as crying—he might be accused of such shameful emasculation as being labelled “a big girl”, or something similar. To some men, the mere suggestion of such an apparently horrific insult is offensive enough to their fragile pride that it might feel like a humiliating degradation.

In other words, it’s pointless being male if one does not behave like a “real man”. Patriarchal culture will punish both biological females as well as “feminine” men in a world where vulnerability is feminine-coded.

Which is also why the position of trans-exclusionary radical feminists—known as TERFs—follows a certain kind of logic, and yet remains pernicious and ultimately misguided. In being so wedded to centring “woman”, they’ve forgotten that woman is a performance just as man is, and gender is fundamentally a cultural construct and not some biologically deterministic fact. Men aren’t actually the enemy—patriarchal culture is, supported and enabled though it may be by a great many men.

Equally, when affronted blokes of a mildly progressive persuasion say things like “not all men”, it feels disingenuous. Because it is. The men who say such a thing may not actually engage in rape or murder or harassment or gaslighting or negging or sexual entitlement or objectification… or at least not very often, and it’s usually harmless isn’t it, just boys being boys and having some harmless fun. Or something like that. Yet if they continue to perform masculinity as it was taught to them, and benefits them in a culturally structural way, then they remain part of the problem.

So while patriarchy has little to do with any one given “man” at all, most men remain complicit within the maintenance of patriarchal power via a complex web of behaviours and signals—the performance of patriarchy, the “being a man”, rather than simply being male. It is not as simple as being some arch-categorisation of the nature of any given individual simply by the nature of some chromosome they happened to be born with, or weren’t—but nor is that fact an excuse for any single person, either. Even a “good” (if you can stomach the idea of such a trite binary) man can easily reinforce and enact most of patriarchy’s dominant discourse whilst being quite eloquent about its very obviously oppressive nature.

Some men may even perform a kind of pseudo-feminist rejection of various elements of the patriarchal dance, while at the very same time reinforcing others and merely masking that unyielded power beneath some shallow facade of alliance or sympathy.

It’s the equivalent of corporate awareness programs, training, badges, or allotted “wear X colour for Y Group Day” to celebrate whatever oppressed minority a company has no interest (both figuratively and literally) in actually empowering—unless, of course, it serves their profit margin. These sorts of things stink: conservatives loathe them because it makes them feel guilty and forces them to acknowledge uncomfortable inequalities they’d rather ignore; progressives hate them because they pay a paltry lip-service to something that requires real action every day. But, it’s capitalism… so a simulation of action is all we get.

To better understand the patriarchal aspect, though, we need to backtrack a little, and return to gazes. Because like most things, what is capitalist isn’t only about money, and what is patriarchal isn’t just about gender. Remember, having some money isn’t enough to be powerful under capitalism; and merely being male isn’t enough to be succeed within a patriarchy. You need real capital (that is, obscene wealth) and to perform a very particular kind of masculinity (consciously or unconsciously) to benefit from what these systems offer. Which is power: more specifically, power relations, which is more of a Foucauldian topic than a Baudrillardian one, but those two things are much more inherently intertwined than it might initially seem.

Kind regards

Decades before Jean Baudrillard, whose theories of simulation and simulacra are especially pertinent to the way in which advertising speak to us as consumers, there was another French philosopher who had something to say about the gaze, or le regard as it is in French. Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, suggests that the act of gazing itself inherently creates a power discrepancy between the onlooker and the subject of their looking, precisely because it necessitates the turning of the person beneath their gaze into an object. It’s the origin of our contemporary concept of objectification, only in my experience it’s often forgotten that this process begins with something as simple as a gaze. It wasn’t philosophy where I learned about Sartre, though; it was cinema studies.

In most visual mediums where money is concerned, the gaze is assumed to be male because the control of the vast majority of resources in most capitalist societies—which are also patriarchies—fall within male control. Therefore, in order to normalise exchanges based on aesthetics alone (as opposed to other potential forms of value), the gaze is assumed to be male because the target audience was, when these industries began, predominantly male. But perhaps even more importantly, the designers of the manufactured needs which drive advertising were, and still are, male. The vanishingly few who are not will still nevertheless use the industry-standard playbook; one whose pages are filled with things which appeal to the male gaze.

Why? Because our entire culture is enmeshed within it, our very understanding of the world informed by it, and every person who has wheedled their way into any kind of influence within that culture necessarily embodies the qualities determined by that same culture. I would suggest that exactly nobody is going to change patriarchal culture and its economic dominance from a fucking advertising company board room meeting—especially since such people still serve the whims of the corporate entities who, as clients, actually employ them.

And make no mistake: while female consumptive power and influence has undoubtedly grown, the expression of that power remains beholden to a highly adaptive and influential commercial discourse which remains predicated upon the dominant male way of seeing, adopting it within the manufactured needs which now simply also target women. That’s not empowerment.

Women might now be the ones who buy their own clothes, but the unconscious symbolism which clothing has held since they were consciously manufactured as fashion (as opposed to being a necessity) has been encoded by a long history of garments embodying various signifiers of feminine desirability. These signifiers work in the same way as performances of masculinity reinforce patriarchy, only they are passive rather than active.

Only very recently—in the last few decades and, as previously discussed, far too soon to have truly challenged cultural hegemony—has this been seriously transposed in the form of aspects like bulky and formless, or androgynous, attire. Or styles of an even more transgressive nature—those which seek to actively challenge these long-standing assumptions. And it is important to note that these things do occur. Patriarchy is not a monolith. Yet even so, in the broader social context around, say, fashion design, any student inspired by over many centuries’ worth of predecessors (which is what brings nascent designers into the field in the first place) cannot simultaneously reject the foundations of their artform—the work of those very same predecessors—without seriously compromising the process they’re undertaking.

Which is to say, rather than merely infer, that the fashion industry has long designed clothes for women in terms of how attractive (in some way) they make a woman appear to be when beheld by the gaze of a man.

Hot Damn

Obviously fashion is far more complex and nuanced than that in practice. Yet it is worth examining, for example, why waists are accentuated on many female-coded garments in ways which they almost never are in male-coded garments. Why is that? One’s first assumption might be to think that it’s because it flatters the body that wears it. And that’s true; it does, but why does it flatter? And why should it, or why does that actually matter? These are more slippery questions which point more directly to the history of clothing and what it represents.

A slender female waist denotes two things which suggests its underlying function vis à vis the gaze (pardon the pun, I couldn’t help myself). The first is that the wearer is not pregnant, which in a subconscious mate-selection sense is a critical factor for men seeking to invest in a potential partner. Mate-selection is precisely what places the female person—as object—firmly beneath a hypothetical male gaze in the first place. And it does so in a way which a female evaluation of male mate-value does not (given that a female is comparatively less interested in specific genetic signifiers and much more attuned to cultural ones). The second reason is that a woman with a small waist is more likely to be young (and therefore more fertile; markers of fertility are what we actually mean by “beauty”) because particularly small waists are quite difficult to maintain beyond a certain age, for either sex.

This may seem, at first, to be some horribly reductive or primitive means of reasoning, which flies in the face of any kind of sophisticated garment production in a postmodern era with access to concepts like, say, deconstruction. Returning to some biological referents absolutely demeans women-as-objects, as well as men-as-mere-consumers-of-objects, overlooking the multitude of circumstances in which people engage in ways which at least attempt to circumvent such representations.

It ignores the possibility that a man, for example, might choose to wear a female-coded garment despite its ostensible purpose or the social expectations placed upon his ascribed gender role. Or that a woman may make adjustments to her clothes or even create them herself, to her own designs, which negates the industrialised assumptions and practices which dominate the production of most consumer clothing. And these are just two examples.

All of these things are important considerations. Though ultimately none of them exculpate the original function of the cinched waist, which is to signify those two very simple things. Corsets were another means of artificially exaggerating such features, and the discomfort of their very design should illustrate the level of cognitive dissonance which is, and has always been, applied to fashion. Impracticality is likely why corsetry in particular eventually became antiquated, but remains fetishised by various sub-cultures and styles, occasionally resurrected mostly for nostalgia’s sake—but rarely without undertones of a certain kind of performative sexuality. It’s easily forgotten that the semiotic meaning of clothing is not deterministic; articles we choose to wear exist in the world as they are perceived by audiences, their meaning not defined solely by creators alone—and fashion, like it or not, is receptive as well as expressive. Think of how many times you, or a person you know, has said or thought something like “I just want to wear this thing without being judged, or objectified.” Because the garment is the aesthetic descendant of an original which actively invited that judgement, by design. This is a factor which only further complicates fashion’s entwined relationship with the past and significantly stymies the progressive and transgressive nature which the fashion industry itself—a cartel of commercial entities, don’t forget—often loves to talk up.

Similarly, I reckon another of history’s most uncomfortable and impractical articles of clothing—the high heel—could elicit its own digression in that respect. Nor does it take much imagination to guess why fashion items which expose flesh might also be markers designed to attract male attention, either. An exposed midriff works the same as a cinched waist in a garment; more obviously so because it reveals, rather than suggests. Not all aspects of fashion are designed purely for the gaze, of course—these examples are offered as some among many which indicate the underlying historicity behind many fundamental design principles.

The waist and the leg (heels are aesthetically about legs, not feet) are hardly the only examples. Lipstick and blush both simulate sexual excitement, which flush the lips and cheeks with blood and are naturally also visually appealing to men. That’s also why men don’t themselves typically wear lipstick or blush—heterosexual men have no interest in (and in fact may be confused or intimidated by) the allure of other men. Interestingly, it also explains how seemingly incongruous colours, like black lipstick, seem at odds with typical notions of “beauty”; because that is precisely the point. The goth aesthetic is a counter-cultural one, a resistance, a refutation, baroque and absurdist and in opposition to the insidious machinations of the status quo (especially where “beauty” is concerned). And yet, for example, even the gothic aesthetic frequently includes the anachronistic corset. There’s no escape, and it remains centred around that same process of being observed.

Even a defiant avant garde is still just that; first into the breach, ahead of its time, not capable of remaking all time. It reveals a (quite natural) conceptual blindness which persists to this day precisely because it is so ancient that it is likely impossible to undermine for long enough, or strongly enough, for our inherent—very likely at this point unconscious—understanding of it to change. And that speaks nothing of regressive political or economic interests in actively resisting such change, either. It is very obviously to certain people’s advantage (most of whom are men) for these cultural patterns to remain not just as they are, but as they have always been.

Finally, none of this is to say that fashion cannot be simultaneously enjoyed by women, or designed for women, or empowering in various respects—or, perhaps most importantly, outright subverted—because it absolutely can be. But it would be unfortunate to pretend the origins of what we think of as “fashion” were not largely designed for the benefit of attracting a male gaze, any more than we might overlook the nature of the vertical hierarchy underpinning patriarchy as having originated in the hands of those with the biggest sticks. What is less important is whether those sticks represented actual brutal violence or, as in the case of “civilised” authority like government or religion, merely coercive violence—the threat of it, rather than the enacting of it. Reminding, rather than needing to actively show, us from whence such authority originally obtained its power.

Nope

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the dominance of the male gaze will implode any time soon. While men, as a group, may be losing direct and absolute control of some kinds of power, particularly sexual power, that does not fundamentally change the way of seeing upon which the dominant commercial, social, or cultural discourses remain predicated. Women, as a group, remain submissive to that dominant way of thinking, and it would take truly cataclysmic shifts the likes of which we can likely barely comprehend in our present world, to alter that state.

Nor are these dichotomies are some proactive creation actively tailored to a specific tactical or strategic outcome; they don’t need to be. Such discourse is as innate to the systemic power imbalances inherent in capitalist patriarchy as the assumption of the existence of “god” is to, say, Christian nationalism. They are predicates, not absolutes, so thoroughly embedded in our way of living (and, often, being) as to have become second nature. In fact, they are inherent to all life. We do not watch predators cull their prey and wonder what structural iniquity might be overthrown between the two; it only comes into such stark contrast because we are capable of understanding our own inherited differences—which are by far, whether genetic, social, or financial, the primary reason why particular people wield more power than their peers.

As a result, our culture has subsumed assumptions about the gaze and its male orientation precisely because that’s how it has always been presented to us, and to those who came before us, and those before them. These gendered roles have been ascribed to us in ways we cannot easily see precisely because they feel innate. For millennia that’s just been “the way things are”.

Observing and understanding a thing does not inherently mitigate its extant power, any more than inventing a hypothetical antithesis might somehow birth a cultural force from its mere conceptualisation. Revelation can have a serious impact, certainly—it can be inspirational and even incite change—but it still needs to earn and maintain its place first. That’s the strength of tradition and the sluggish crawl of cultural change.

Yet, nothing abides absolutely. Perhaps the apparent immutability of patriarchal culture and its collusive capitalistic descendant will crumble. But my guess is that, when they do, they will drag more than just a dominant cultural discourse down with them.