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
There are a whole hell of a lot of people who, while not denying that racism is real and pernicious, have simply stopped listening the instant the word is used. Why? Because the word has lost all value, has become so plastic that it can mean almost everything, just as a million different things can be used as a hammer...and people are tired of being the nail. As you say, if being constantly pounded on changes nothing and gains you not the slightest credit but only leads to another round of whacking, why bother to submit to it? After a while all it does is make you want to be the one doing the pounding.
The term "white supremacy" is also often invoked as an omnipresent, irresistible force that drives the behavior of white and "white-adjacent" people (the latter term often verging on absurd in its use) in nearly every realm of life. Even as a white person committed to building a more just society, I find myself tuning out and disengaging as soon as this sort of rhetoric pops up. It also denies the agency of non-white people as passive victims of "white supremacy". Even more confusing, this rhetoric became very popular at a time when actual white supremacists are flexing their influence in American society.
This is why I never understood Calvinism. Either you are one of the Elect and don't want to sin, or you are eternally scrowed and might as well just enjoy life while you can.
Insinuating that individuals have the ability to override societal structures with personal choice means everyone has to start looking in the mirror. The same talking points about why white men can't help but be racist and sexist serve as a convenient reasoning for why poor minorities end up in prison at higher rates, or why journalism majors with mountains of college debt living in NYC are financially screwed. For progressive politics, it's never the individuals fault-- Always the system. But as you have pointed out repeatedly, there's no RA for adults in the US and the rent is still due on the first.
Literary Theory was the most emotionally charged class I took in college 18 years ago, and I went to a religious university where I also took a class called “Faith and Reason.” So that should say something about how affecting critical theory can be.
Obviously not everything in Theory is wrong, per se. There is a lot to be mined, a lot of questions to ask that Theory has raised. That’s good. But it’s important to realize that the hopelessness underpinning critical theory is bad for our minds and, apparently, our real life interpersonal relationships. Theory offers a lens through which to view the world, true, but that particular lens flattens the many facets of experience, biology, preference, and personality that make us individuals. It’s a lens that lessens us.
What puzzles me most is why so many of the people who take the position that nothing we do can reverse the terrible tide of racism/sexism/whateverism that pervades the US call themselves socialists. You're not a socialist if you don't believe it's possible for humans to act creatively and with good intention to change society for the better. It's nothing if not an optimistic way of looking at the world! Historical examples abound. To name just one: Dolores Ibarruri who saw Franco and his fascist allies wreak death and destruction upon her beloved country held out faith until she died that good working-class people would eventually triumph over evil and make the world a better place. She saw that goodness firsthand in the faces of the volunteers with the International Brigades who came from all over the world to help defend the democratically elected Spanish Republic with nothing personal to gain and everything to lose. What the heck has happened? Does no one believe in goodness and fundamental decency anymore?
I get so frustrated by the claim that we are powerless to change our intrinsic badness and our worse impulses--that because they are “systemic” and “socially constructed,” they can’t possibly be undone. This claim is simply false. We change and improve as a society all the time.
Here’s just one of many stories I could cite: Many years ago I ran a half marathon to raise money for research into congenital muscular dystrophy. One of the team members, Alex, used an electric wheelchair and had contractures and very thin limbs. The wheelchair athletes went first, and Alex’s dad rode his bike alongside Alex to film the crowd cheering him on.
I saw the film afterwards and noticed something very interesting: Everyone in the crowd tended to flinch and look away when they first saw Alex, but then they all overcame that initial impulse of shock or disgust, turned back, and cheered for him. Everyone did this. They couldn’t control their reflexive gaze, but they could control what they did afterwards, and they all chose to be kind, warm-hearted, and encouraging--to do the right thing. In our culture we used to react to disabled people with disgust and horror. We used to hide them away. We don’t do that anymore--and this is only one of many examples where a supposedly systemic and inevitable evil gave way to a more moral and just way of treating each other.
I think we need more stories like this, to remind us that change is not only possible, but that it happens all of the time.
Wokeism is a totalitarian philosophy. Like Stalinism or Puritanism, it needs everyone to be presumed guilty, or at least everyone in an outgroup. You are entirely correct that as a plan for national social change it is hopeless. But it is very effective as a system of internal control of blue tribe world.
As a 66 year old woman,who also went to Central Connecticut State University,( when it was still a college) I would dearly love to attract “the male gaze” just once more and not from my 86 year old neighbor who isn’t sure who or what he is gazing upon. That be said, Thomas Parker wrote the best response and said it far better than I could.
I've always had a problem with Original Sin, and I could never figure out why being good didn't help you get into heaven.
And now, I am feeling the same way about all of these social justice issues. Apparently I was born evil, and no matter what I do, I will always be evil.
At least the church lets me get into heaven if I have faith; I'll never shake my evilness in the eyes of the socially just.
That doesn't mean I am going to stop trying - I'll continue to view people as individuals, and treat them with kindness and respect, perhaps even after they have stopped deserving to be treated that way.
I was thinking along these lines just a few minutes ago. I think embedded in the term "woke" is a problematic assumption and limitation: to be "woke" (at the moment) means to be awakened to the systemic injustices in the world, to the oppressive bedrock whose toxic fumes are released into our every societal activity. Awakening to these truths is essential, to be sure, but "wokeism" (at least as popularly understood/utilized) does not offer a sense of awakening beyond that point; it doesn't, for example, invoke a sense that such "waking up" is but an essential moment on the path of true awakening to grandeur. I think if these things (the gaze, theory, etc) were framed more as a waystation than a destination, there would be more room for a sense of growth, agency, and even desire/inspiration. Not just to not be bad, but towards the actual good.
I think many of these problems that people have with identification and belief in these unalterable conditions of your identity are resolved by having a more diverse friend group. I don't even necessarily mean racially diverse, but just people who do different things and engage with the internet differently.
I admittedly spend too much time online because I'm an idiot, but my wife has a much more normal relationship with the internet. Most of my friends are also quite normal and wouldn't know what I was talking about if I tried to explain the daily controversies on twitter.
If my social network was primarily made up of twitter scolds or people with literature MAs or political activists, I'd probably feel the weight of this kind of argument. But most people just never think about any of this even a little bit. If I told my brother that he can do nothing to escape his whiteness he'd probably just say, What the fuck are you talking about?
Thanks for this! I think the individual strategy is a practice to take the time that goes beyond 'looking at' someone to 'seeing' the person in a way that connects our shared humanity. The mutuality of seeing and being seen. Many years ago, I read John Berger's Ways of Seeing at the time I was learning about the male gaze. I wonder if you might revisit the futility of your opening paragraph to think concretely about how loving men reconcile the inevitable internal contradictions that come with growing up in a hypersexualized society structured by that powerful way of looking at women. How do you live with it without being absorbed by it?
The Frankfurt School and the critical theory that it spawned is more unique than a lot of people think it is. It was a way of thinking based on the premise "social change has failed in the 20th century, let's think about how that happens." A very specific niche in political thought.
But today, we encounter those ideas decontextualized from this premise (the premise that we are using everything we learn to analyze why everything we're used to has failed). Instead, I think we encounter them under the vague umbrella of "political thought." I think this is significant!!!
For one thing, it's extremely subjective. How is one supposed to know if another is, in fact, leering or not? And if so, how so?
Is leering always a bad thing? Do not women and men 'leer' at each other every weekend at the club?
Isn't leering a physical manifestation of a basic human function: attraction?
Don't women leer at men too?
I suppose it comes down to appropriateness and location - don't 'leer' at your boss while he/she's conducting the Monday morning presentation. But isn't that just common sense?? Do we need to conjugate the 'leering' down to its molecular parts because of it?
I've been leered at plenty of time by women in my life, who hasn't? Mostly I don't notice, sometimes it's annoying, and sometimes I like it. But I certainly don't expect someone else to know exactly when I do or don't want that...that would be silly.
While we both were watching another tired and nameless modern TV show, my girlfriend recently commented: "guys are such pussies these days..." To which I replied to her, "It's 2022, do you blame them?" I'm not a woman, so I certainly do not claim to understand that power dynamic from their perspective. But I think it gets to be a little ridiculous when all it takes for a woman to claim mental and emotional harm is a 2-second glance from some guy across the room.
There are a whole hell of a lot of people who, while not denying that racism is real and pernicious, have simply stopped listening the instant the word is used. Why? Because the word has lost all value, has become so plastic that it can mean almost everything, just as a million different things can be used as a hammer...and people are tired of being the nail. As you say, if being constantly pounded on changes nothing and gains you not the slightest credit but only leads to another round of whacking, why bother to submit to it? After a while all it does is make you want to be the one doing the pounding.
The term "white supremacy" is also often invoked as an omnipresent, irresistible force that drives the behavior of white and "white-adjacent" people (the latter term often verging on absurd in its use) in nearly every realm of life. Even as a white person committed to building a more just society, I find myself tuning out and disengaging as soon as this sort of rhetoric pops up. It also denies the agency of non-white people as passive victims of "white supremacy". Even more confusing, this rhetoric became very popular at a time when actual white supremacists are flexing their influence in American society.
This is why I never understood Calvinism. Either you are one of the Elect and don't want to sin, or you are eternally scrowed and might as well just enjoy life while you can.
Insinuating that individuals have the ability to override societal structures with personal choice means everyone has to start looking in the mirror. The same talking points about why white men can't help but be racist and sexist serve as a convenient reasoning for why poor minorities end up in prison at higher rates, or why journalism majors with mountains of college debt living in NYC are financially screwed. For progressive politics, it's never the individuals fault-- Always the system. But as you have pointed out repeatedly, there's no RA for adults in the US and the rent is still due on the first.
Literary Theory was the most emotionally charged class I took in college 18 years ago, and I went to a religious university where I also took a class called “Faith and Reason.” So that should say something about how affecting critical theory can be.
Obviously not everything in Theory is wrong, per se. There is a lot to be mined, a lot of questions to ask that Theory has raised. That’s good. But it’s important to realize that the hopelessness underpinning critical theory is bad for our minds and, apparently, our real life interpersonal relationships. Theory offers a lens through which to view the world, true, but that particular lens flattens the many facets of experience, biology, preference, and personality that make us individuals. It’s a lens that lessens us.
What puzzles me most is why so many of the people who take the position that nothing we do can reverse the terrible tide of racism/sexism/whateverism that pervades the US call themselves socialists. You're not a socialist if you don't believe it's possible for humans to act creatively and with good intention to change society for the better. It's nothing if not an optimistic way of looking at the world! Historical examples abound. To name just one: Dolores Ibarruri who saw Franco and his fascist allies wreak death and destruction upon her beloved country held out faith until she died that good working-class people would eventually triumph over evil and make the world a better place. She saw that goodness firsthand in the faces of the volunteers with the International Brigades who came from all over the world to help defend the democratically elected Spanish Republic with nothing personal to gain and everything to lose. What the heck has happened? Does no one believe in goodness and fundamental decency anymore?
I get so frustrated by the claim that we are powerless to change our intrinsic badness and our worse impulses--that because they are “systemic” and “socially constructed,” they can’t possibly be undone. This claim is simply false. We change and improve as a society all the time.
Here’s just one of many stories I could cite: Many years ago I ran a half marathon to raise money for research into congenital muscular dystrophy. One of the team members, Alex, used an electric wheelchair and had contractures and very thin limbs. The wheelchair athletes went first, and Alex’s dad rode his bike alongside Alex to film the crowd cheering him on.
I saw the film afterwards and noticed something very interesting: Everyone in the crowd tended to flinch and look away when they first saw Alex, but then they all overcame that initial impulse of shock or disgust, turned back, and cheered for him. Everyone did this. They couldn’t control their reflexive gaze, but they could control what they did afterwards, and they all chose to be kind, warm-hearted, and encouraging--to do the right thing. In our culture we used to react to disabled people with disgust and horror. We used to hide them away. We don’t do that anymore--and this is only one of many examples where a supposedly systemic and inevitable evil gave way to a more moral and just way of treating each other.
I think we need more stories like this, to remind us that change is not only possible, but that it happens all of the time.
Wokeism is a totalitarian philosophy. Like Stalinism or Puritanism, it needs everyone to be presumed guilty, or at least everyone in an outgroup. You are entirely correct that as a plan for national social change it is hopeless. But it is very effective as a system of internal control of blue tribe world.
As a 66 year old woman,who also went to Central Connecticut State University,( when it was still a college) I would dearly love to attract “the male gaze” just once more and not from my 86 year old neighbor who isn’t sure who or what he is gazing upon. That be said, Thomas Parker wrote the best response and said it far better than I could.
I've always had a problem with Original Sin, and I could never figure out why being good didn't help you get into heaven.
And now, I am feeling the same way about all of these social justice issues. Apparently I was born evil, and no matter what I do, I will always be evil.
At least the church lets me get into heaven if I have faith; I'll never shake my evilness in the eyes of the socially just.
That doesn't mean I am going to stop trying - I'll continue to view people as individuals, and treat them with kindness and respect, perhaps even after they have stopped deserving to be treated that way.
I was thinking along these lines just a few minutes ago. I think embedded in the term "woke" is a problematic assumption and limitation: to be "woke" (at the moment) means to be awakened to the systemic injustices in the world, to the oppressive bedrock whose toxic fumes are released into our every societal activity. Awakening to these truths is essential, to be sure, but "wokeism" (at least as popularly understood/utilized) does not offer a sense of awakening beyond that point; it doesn't, for example, invoke a sense that such "waking up" is but an essential moment on the path of true awakening to grandeur. I think if these things (the gaze, theory, etc) were framed more as a waystation than a destination, there would be more room for a sense of growth, agency, and even desire/inspiration. Not just to not be bad, but towards the actual good.
I think many of these problems that people have with identification and belief in these unalterable conditions of your identity are resolved by having a more diverse friend group. I don't even necessarily mean racially diverse, but just people who do different things and engage with the internet differently.
I admittedly spend too much time online because I'm an idiot, but my wife has a much more normal relationship with the internet. Most of my friends are also quite normal and wouldn't know what I was talking about if I tried to explain the daily controversies on twitter.
If my social network was primarily made up of twitter scolds or people with literature MAs or political activists, I'd probably feel the weight of this kind of argument. But most people just never think about any of this even a little bit. If I told my brother that he can do nothing to escape his whiteness he'd probably just say, What the fuck are you talking about?
Thanks for this! I think the individual strategy is a practice to take the time that goes beyond 'looking at' someone to 'seeing' the person in a way that connects our shared humanity. The mutuality of seeing and being seen. Many years ago, I read John Berger's Ways of Seeing at the time I was learning about the male gaze. I wonder if you might revisit the futility of your opening paragraph to think concretely about how loving men reconcile the inevitable internal contradictions that come with growing up in a hypersexualized society structured by that powerful way of looking at women. How do you live with it without being absorbed by it?
The Frankfurt School and the critical theory that it spawned is more unique than a lot of people think it is. It was a way of thinking based on the premise "social change has failed in the 20th century, let's think about how that happens." A very specific niche in political thought.
But today, we encounter those ideas decontextualized from this premise (the premise that we are using everything we learn to analyze why everything we're used to has failed). Instead, I think we encounter them under the vague umbrella of "political thought." I think this is significant!!!
"Leering" is such an odd thing to demonize.
For one thing, it's extremely subjective. How is one supposed to know if another is, in fact, leering or not? And if so, how so?
Is leering always a bad thing? Do not women and men 'leer' at each other every weekend at the club?
Isn't leering a physical manifestation of a basic human function: attraction?
Don't women leer at men too?
I suppose it comes down to appropriateness and location - don't 'leer' at your boss while he/she's conducting the Monday morning presentation. But isn't that just common sense?? Do we need to conjugate the 'leering' down to its molecular parts because of it?
I've been leered at plenty of time by women in my life, who hasn't? Mostly I don't notice, sometimes it's annoying, and sometimes I like it. But I certainly don't expect someone else to know exactly when I do or don't want that...that would be silly.
While we both were watching another tired and nameless modern TV show, my girlfriend recently commented: "guys are such pussies these days..." To which I replied to her, "It's 2022, do you blame them?" I'm not a woman, so I certainly do not claim to understand that power dynamic from their perspective. But I think it gets to be a little ridiculous when all it takes for a woman to claim mental and emotional harm is a 2-second glance from some guy across the room.