Interlude: The Male Gaze

LONG POV SHOT of BEAUTIFUL WOMAN in sexy dress, smiling. ZOOM in quickly on face. SLOW PAN downwards, taking in whole body, ending at feet (impossible heels), pausing slightly at ample cleavage. Saxophone music. POV PULLS BACK quickly, then moves in as BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, still smiling fixedly, holds out hand to greet HELPLACE-ZUCKER.

BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: Hello. Mr Helplace-Zucker? Nice to meet you.


OK, I think we can all see this for what it is, a trope, that is, a locution or idiom, visual shorthand, unoriginal but serviceable, intended to save time. As with most tropes, individual tastes will vary on just how irritating it is found to be. Me, I always found that tenor sax mildly exasperating, since I do not experience lust as a saxophone playing slow jazz, never have. More as a woodwind section, clarinets and oboes and cor anglais. (Make that corblimey anglais, if it's Joan Sims.)

The feminists are right about one thing: the eye behind the camera is likely assumed by the spectator to be male, at least by default. If it's a POV shot, as above, then, well, duh. Man looks at woman, is mesmerized by certain body parts. Such things do occasionally happen. (Whether they "should", or whether cats should be allowed to look at kings, is another question entirely. Cinema and community policing make uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.) If it's not a POV shot, then consensually, at least since the nineties or the noughties, the director has just screwed up, small time. Unless it's a comedy, in which case the cleavage shot is just one of those nudge-nudge things, and you'd have to look at the context before deciding whether the joke was laugh out loud, chuckle silently, groan or just cringe. There's still a steady stream of cringe movies coming out. I wouldn't get too worked up about it if I were you: no one takes them all that seriously.

Point is, say the feminists (OK, some), there is a male way to pan the camera over a female body, which is instantly recognizable, and canonical, and there isn't a female mutatis mutandis. Unfair! This is the bit I don't quite grok.

I mean, you could easily do a POV shot where female boss looks new male employee up and down, pausing on I dunno crotch area, or chest hairs sprouting from unbuttoned shirt, or bum, or whatever. It's probably been done, perhaps many times, but it's not a trope. In fact, if you added in the sax then it would almost certainly be taken as ironic or comedic reversal of the standard male gaze trope, and you'd be expected to smile. Otherwise, spectator would be left thinking: OK, right, got it, she's got the hots for him and will probably seduce him about three scenes later. Despite superficial appearances, this is not exactly what the male gaze trope says, and this is where, if I'm careful, I might just about be able to get to the point.

The point being that the male gaze, unlike the female one just postulated, is a remote-controlled gaze. It goes where it's told to go. It has little or no choice in the matter. It is trope material purely and simply because it's so boringly predictable. This is why I say I don't get why any reasonably intelligent feminist would covet it for herself, or for her sex. Just imagine it for a moment, girls. You meet someone nice, and suddenly you become aware that some unseen, grubby fingers are pushing a little joystick lever connected to your pupils, so that they move away from the nice person's face and travel blatantly across his or her body. Does this sound like something you would want to happen, or does it sound like a really bad dream?

Whose grubby fingers? Cui bono? Well, if I were one of the more exotic Canadian judges, I might say hers. She set the whole thing up, the minx, she made it happen by wearing that dress and those stockings and those shoes, and by rolling her hip around seven to ten degrees on the Z axis, and crooking her left knee slightly, and tilting her foot just so. But I'm not an exotic Canadian judge, and I think the better angle is sub specie aeternitatis. The fingers on the joystick are Nature's, as instantiated by a dense hank of brain wiring sluiced through with hormones, with testosterone as the prime suspect. Whether BEAUTIFUL WOMAN is using Nature for her own devious ends or not is down to the scriptwriter: at any rate, it's consensually not a police matter. (If you live in Saudi, your mileage may differ.)

I said a moment ago "little or no choice". That needs qualifying, obviously. "No choice" would be when it's a movie, and you're either the squirming spectator, or HELPLACE-ZUCKER in person. Let's leave that aside, since I don't want to talk about movies. In real life, it's "little choice". Do I need to spell it out? OK then. As fast as I can:

Yes of course there's such a thing as self-control, or self-discipline. If I was being interviewed for a job by BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, I would not make the utterly crass, suicidal error of noticing she has a body, still less gawping at it, tongue hanging out like a complete pillock. Of course I can stop myself doing that, any time I want. Everyone can. But this choice, or illusion of choice, only works on the micro scale, on emergency battery. Macro, you're defenceless. Nature imposes a quota of curves you have to get through every week, a necessarily regular rhythm of buildup of longing and escape of pressure. Think your 28 days, then compress or expand that time period to take account of all the individual variables. In other words, if Tuesday morning chooses to throw three BEAUTIFUL WOMEN in your path, and Tuesday afternoon five more, and in every single one of those eight cases it really matters that you don't look, not even furtively, then by Tuesday evening you are a suspicious-looking unclaimed package in an airport making ticking noises. You are a controlled detonation waiting to happen. (Less so when you get to my age, Allah be praised.)

This, by the way, is why Internet porn is a really good thing. It makes sure that the detonation occurs out of the range of anyone who might get - I was going to say hurt, let's just say offended. A bedroom is a safe place for small-scale explosions to take place in. The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, I know, I'm describing a sexually repressed society. The matter is debatable, but I think that's pretty much a tautology. You want a society, you need sexual repression, or at least suppression. Ask your average chimp. (Yeah, bonobos, I knobo. As far as I'm concerned, like Woody Allen's Sabine Women, they pretty much have it coming to them. Chimps across the river learn to swim, they're history.)

Hell, ask your dog.

Now I mention all of this (I could chuck "objectification" into the mix, but - nah. Don't get me started on that) because it's actually relevant in the context of me being me. It's another of those variables we have to set at the right value for you to get a preliminary feel for what all this is like. Or rather, it's several variables working in concert. On many, I score quite low, for different reasons (pathologically low on one or two: vide infra). Which is why it's always been mildly puzzling to me why this business of wanting, I mean the physical side of it, hurts so much in my case, while apparently not for others. Hurts, as in causes a permanent, gnawing, draining, saddening drizzle of nothing doing. A seedy, disfiguring despair and disrepair. A silent, unending misery.

A Hell-place.

This is not what we're told about. The dumber sort of feminists actually think that a bloke ogling a woman feels "powerful". He's appraising her, checking her out, making plans, flexing his muscles. He's the predator, and she's meat.

There may be blokes like that, but I'm not sure I've met any. Obviously, how many you think you've met will depend to some extent on your gullibility, on your willingness to accept face value. Pretending to feel confident and in control is something we all have to do from time to time. Falling for it isn't, to my mind, all that grown up.

You want to know what it's really like? It's like being homeless and penniless, and half dead with hunger, looking through the plate glass window of a cake shop at the wares on display, the eclairs and strawberry tarts and cream cupcakes on their plastic doilies, mocking you, permanently and existentially out of reach, forever.

And the male gaze is male insofar as it cannot look away. It wants to, but can't. That's what defines it as male: it's condemned to just stupidly go on looking, because O'Grady says.

As to why we don't hear this side of the story, well, the answer obviously isn't simple or unitary. One, there's the hegemonic discourse of the alphas, of the cake shop customers in their nice shoes, of the terminally smug. Two, there's dignity, the stiff upper lip and the quiet desperation of the eminently exportable English Way. Three, no one has yet come up with an adequate lexis for describing male sexuality (or female sexuality, perhaps, come to that). We need new words. We need at least 50 words for lust, for a kick-off, if we're going to make any progress understanding it. Four is something I will get onto later: briefly, the myth of the indivisible individual, of the two-dimensional citizen. It's a legalistic fiction, necessary to keep the prisons well stocked, but anthropologically illiterate: this idea that our minds and motivations occupy a single plane, that it is impossible for a person to be in conflict with himself, that from bar-pressings in a Skinner Box you can derive a complete circuit diagram of the soul.

But ultimately, I suppose it's just the sort of thing you have to deliberately and studiously ignore if you want to have a society. Which is why, so as to sidestep the Necessary Fiction, I prefer the society of individuals, of Milgram's Minority, of people who feel for themselves.

Like Trish, for example.

INT NIGHT. Inside a large, not very crowded dance-hall, CAKESNIFFE is standing a few feet from the bar, staring away into space in the direction of a group of female partygoers some twenty yards away. TRISH wanders up to him from the bar and hands him his drink. She pauses, follows his gaze, then smiles affectionately.

TRISH: Gorgeous, isn't she?

I find it necessary (given the ubiquity of the Hollywood trope) to insist that no, she was not being sarcastic, nor passive-aggressive, nor giving vent to any insecurity, when she said this. I was there, I should know. She was being understanding. I could almost say sympathetic. She knew that the girl whose rear view I may or may not have been eyeing up was completely out of my league and range, age-wise and everything-else-wise, and that all I could do was look, and I even think she knew (because we wrote about such things back then) that I was looking not because I wanted to but because I had to, and that I was in such a distressed state that a kind word would have floored me. And it did.

You may disagree, or feel that I am exaggerating, but for me, this moment was a miracle. It felt like I was watching the 1914 Christmas Truce. I may have even visualized the tabloid banner headline, full page: WOMAN UNDERSTANDS MAN! It's one of the very few times in my life someone has ever managed to surprise me profoundly.

You don't expect anyone, of either gender, to be that nice.

So add that to the test tube. I have seen goodness, and been amazed.

Oh, and that the two sexiest words in the language are "I understand".