That Old Male Gaze Again
Amanda over at Pandagon has a post on tit-gazing that gathered dozens and dozens of eager responses, most of which were so brain dead about gender that it was classic and disheartening at the same time.
Many of the male commentators trotted out the same things I used to say to well-meaning feminists before I had a chance to really look into what women think of sexism. Things like men are “genetically coded” to look at breasts sexually and that it was a “pleasure”, one that couldn’t be denied a man unless it was for “moralistic” reasons, like only a Puritan would not look at a tit and pop a boner.
Men who claim that they can’t help staring at tits are actually claiming that they have trained themselves to to look at tits as signals of sexual availability. The excitement they feel at looking at these select tits - they must not be old, or perhaps in some case must not be small or saggy, and they must not be related to you too closely, like mothers, daughters, sister - seems to be a completely esthetic pleasure, but is actually a response to the stimulus of sexual arousal that is created by the assumption of sexual availability.
Men walk around constantly seeking signs that they have learned to interpret as sexually arousing, and these same signs tend to categorize a subset of human beings that they deem fuckable as primarily arousing and only secondarily human, if at all. This is not some deeply-seated genetic coding or other evo-psych bullshit or else it would have caused the human race to auto-distruct through inbreeding thousands of years ago.
This is just something men do because they think they need to be constantly seeking arousal in order to be sufficiently masculine. When you train yourself to recognize tits as fair game for your personal arousal, and you spot a pair that conform to whatever criteria you have established as kosher - not my Mom’s! - then you tell yourself you can’t help it. Pathetic.
On the other hand, I still look at women and see beauty. I love the way they look, and I know for a fact that I can see sexless beauty in almost any woman of any age. Sometimes a young and beautiful woman will cross my field of vision and I’ll see her youth and beauty with the same appreciation I have for a flower in full bloom or a sunset. But my gaze is relaxed and devoid of sexual intent these days. I see nothing fuckable about beautiful women any more. The arousal is gone.
The desire to see beauty everywhere has led me to try to see the beauty in old people and even though old people have many things about them that signal the body falling apart and aching, I still see beauty there, like a dried flower or the last lingering touch of a sunset past. But I still have a hard time seeing the beauty in men, since I see chronic masturbators who live in smug denial of their assumptions of privilege, rather than what they might think others would see if they were looking at them. That’s my bias.