The One That Looks

I can remember it perfectly. I was in a class during undergrad at Central Connecticut State University. The professor was telling us about the male gaze, which like Foucault’s panopticon is one of the core theories you’ll very likely be taught in the humanities in the modern university. The concept of the male gaze defines the way that men looking at women reflects and intensifies certain patriarchal dynamics in society. When a man leers at a woman, he’s not just taking part in a little harmless pleasure, but casting women into a role of fundamental passivity and reducing her to her sexual value. It’s a concept that was originally most associated with film studies, but branched out to many corners of cultural studies and critical theory. From an explainer:

The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire.

A key idea of feminist film theory, the concept of the male gaze was introduced by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

We all murmured along to the lecture and admitted that the male gaze was real. (And I still do think there’s a lot of truth in the idea, now.) Some of us college-aged dudes did the customary apologetics for those classroom situations, and one guy raised his hand and pledged not to do it - not to use the gaze, to take care how he looked when he looked at women, never to leer. I very solemnly told myself the same thing. But aha! The professor told us, with just a little condescension, that we couldn’t just choose not to use the male gaze. The male gaze was not a choice we were making ourselves but the product of structural forces of society far beyond our control. When we went out into the world, we would reflexively check women out (those among us who were straight, anyway), and in doing so we would oppress them, even if they didn’t notice us looking at them. As was common to what we learned in those classes, the social problems described were intrinsic, mass phenomena, not subject to our individual moral choices.

And the thought that struck me was at that moment, well, then I guess I’m just happy to be the one that looks.

By which I meant, and mean, that if my efforts to not oppress women with my gaze were powerless in the face of entrenched sexism, I guess I would just enjoy my position as the one who benefitted from the structure of society I can’t change. It was out of my hands, right? It was a bummer, to be sure, and I would have liked to choose to act honorably rather than in a predatory way. But because of the structural obsessions of cultural studies, and their attendant lack of faith in personal solutions, I felt essentially freed from my responsibility to make the right choices in this domain. Because I was being taught that my choices didn’t matter - because if they did matter then the oppression couldn’t be universalized and sold as eternal, which is the paradigm of cultural studies when it comes to topics like sexism and patriarchy.

(I still don’t leer at women, for the record, and I don’t think you should either.)

My point here today is that you can generalize this out to the assumed political framework of the modern humanities and the larger social justice world. The dominant fashion these days is to argue that identity oppressions are universal and eternal. Nobody wants to permit individual exceptions and nobody wants to suggest that progress is happening. Try saying in a social justice-y space that you think we’re making major strides in fighting racism and you’ll see what I mean. (There’s been immense progress made in diversifying Hollywood in a few short years, but nobody wants to acknowledge that.) We are told to understand that white people perpetuate white supremacy no matter what choices we make; that men benefit from and perpetuate patriarchy simply by dint of being men; that individual straight allies can’t help but deepen heterosexism; that simply through blundering along unthinkingly in the physical world, able-bodied people oppress the disabled. This is the fatalism of today’s identity politics.

I suspect that this pushes people in the same way I was pushed in class 20 years ago: by denying that individual people from majority identities can make a difference based on their choices, contemporary left-leaning politics essentially subsidize nihilism on the part of the individuals in those majority groups. Because why bother, right? If I make my way through Brooklyn and, simply by dint of my white skin, contribute to the oppression of the people of color around me - remember Ibram Kendi’s nostrum that any and every action is either actively anti-racist or else racist - why should I particularly care about being a racially enlightened person? I’m cursed either way. And I think social justice rhetoric has quietly created a class of people who would do good if they felt they could choose to, but who are so burned out on the presumption of guilt that they don’t bother to “do the work.” Why should they? Who benefits?

All of this is distinct from but related to the consistent finding that framing race-neutral programs in terms of racial justice makes white people less likely to support those programs. (For example, when you tell people that Covid precautions are a racial justice issue, white people are less likely to support those precautions.) Which is lamentable, but if true, militates towards engaging in racial rhetoric strategically. And that dynamic combines with the utter fatalism of the “it’s all structural and unchangeable” stuff terribly. It makes selfishness seem logical. We should do the opposite, in my opinion: we should stop condemning vast groups of people as inherently oppressive, which minimizes the sense of personal responsibility, and emphasize that individual choices in the world matter when it comes to facilitating justice. We have agency. We can choose.