You know those movies about those little nerd boys who get with really hot girls, and those girls eventually learn to settle for a little nerd boy because he’s kinda nice sometimes? Propaganda.
You know those movies and shows where the little nerd girl has to change absolutely every aspect that makes her, her, starting by her appearance, so she can get the really hot boy, while when it’s the other way around the girl just settles with the nerd boy? Propaganda.
natalie portman radiates such a terrifying energy i can’t describe it….. it’s not exactly evil but it’s not warm either…. i feel like she could unhinge her jaw and drag me into the ocean like a kraken but she wouldn’t bc it’s undignified
Wanna know why?
“Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman told the crowd at Saturday’s Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles that she experienced what she calls “sexual terrorism” as a 13-year-old after the release of the film The Professional.
Portman described her pride and excitement in releasing the film, only to encounter sexually explicit messages both directed toward her and made about her.
”I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” she recalled. “A countdown was started on my local radio show to my 18th birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with. Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in reviews.”
The experience, she said, changed the way she expressed herself publicly, in order to limit the ways she could be objectified by others.
”I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually, I would feel unsafe,” she said. “And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort. So I quickly adjusted my behavior. I rejected any role that even had a kissing scene and talked about that choice deliberately in interviews. I emphasized how bookish I was and how serious I was. And I cultivated an elegant way of dressing. I built a reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious, in an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”
“This is why girls are so much more employable than young men in all the shitty, less-than-subsistence-level service jobs they’re trying to cram young people into across Europe and America. Girls are better at pleasing other people and plastering on the pretty grin even when we’re screaming inside. That’s what being a girl is. Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called ‘emotional labour’, not because there’s anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we’re trained to it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.”
it always amazes me when a man says he doesn’t know how to iron, wash his clothes, or cook. Like, don’t you feel embarrassed saying that…smfh
All the people in the comments saying “they were never taught how” can somehow learn how to speak dorthraki and watch YouTube to learn how to make a furry suit but can’t use the internet’s infinite resources to learn to wash their underwear got me fucked up
I think there’s a perception that the male gaze is necessarily sexual and that’s imo out of line w its original theoretical basis and with reality. I think the presence of gay men as cultural and aesthetic curators who decide what is artistically beautiful and worthy of praise in womanhood is an expression of misogyny that comes from basically the same place as ‘she should have big tits because that makes me hard’; the same entitlement/ almost ‘authorship’ of women’s bodies is imo reflected in the accounts women share of sexual assault by gay men, basically being treated as a mannequin or toy, a dress up doll
I think gay men exempting ourselves from the male gaze reflects misunderstanding of what the male gaze is; to my understanding, a pervading cultural norm which says that women literally are as men see them, and which asserts that women 1) do not have independent perspective & 2) should be subject to the constant observation and judgement of men
I think gay men get so defensive about this bc we have gotten really used to thinking of ourselves as exempt from anything but vestigial misogyny bc we’re not on the heterosexual chessboard or because we’re ~soft men and the fact that this has reached the point of us downplaying our own capacity for sexual assault, or else throwing ~fetishising slash fic~ (as though they are remotely equivalent issues) in the face of women who overwhelmingly approach us not as enemies but as ppl whose expressed first instinct would be to want to see us as brothers, is completely inexcusable
i think that its an understandable endeavor to want to reframe the male gaze into a context that will make other gay men recognize that theyre capable of harnessing it (side note: i dont care whether or not you think its just for artistic consumption. dont come to me with those semantics), but i think that ultimately a large part of the defining qualities of the male gaze will be lost if you try to sterilize it of its overt sexual nature.
what i think would be handy here is to recognize that sexualization does not need to imply sexual attraction or even the possibility of sexual attraction to the woman. thats because the dynamic between men and women isnt even about sexuality, its about the material gender and power disparity that is inherent to the relationship itself. the only time sexuality is relevant is when the relationship is [sexually] intimate.
thats why a relationship between a straight man and a woman has the same power dynamic as a relationship between a bi man or a gay man and a woman (like with Nick Robinson’s treatment of the women he harassed). similarly, white women that don’t date women are also capable of sexualizing other women, such as black women, without being “attracted” to them. the idea of sexualization / sexual objectification has nothing to do with whatever humanized inner goings-on of “attraction” or “sexuality” you can infer, its exclusively in the realm of the external and material power.
(speaking of which, a lot of straight men also fall into the trap of feeling like their misogynistic interactions with women are an innate part of their sexuality just by virtue of it being with a gendered subject of their potential attractions. thats why its so hard for so many straight men to dissassociate the instrumental violence of their power relations from their intimate relationships with women. its the inverse situation from gay men.)
Imo “objectification” might be a the more useful term here, because it encompasses not only the treatment of women as sexual objects, but all the other myriad ways women are treated as if they exist for men’s consumption and use. I think a view of women filtered through the male gaze without sexual attention would be “something that I have no use for/don’t like”, while a more positive perspective views women as agents first before applying interest or lack thereof.
i would just like to point out that the recent conversation surrounding the male birth control trials isn’t just “lol weak men can’t deal with side effects” it’s the fact that when they were testing hormonal birth control for women in the 50s & 60s, the side effects were much worse, and the women who participated in them, mostly in puerto rico, were not told about the side effects or that the drug was experimental
and THEN when women dropped out, they started using incarcerated women as their guinea pigs, and then despite the fact that some scientists who participated in the original trials were like “uh i don’t think this is actually good, it’s making a lot of these women sick,” the pharmaceutical industry & fda were like ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and approved it for the general population anyways, without really warning women about the potential for all these negative side effects
and THEN researchers basically ceased to do any type of research on side effects like depression and decreased libido for 50 years, despite the fact that women were still complaining about them, and because there was no “hard evidence” of these side effects, a lot of doctors basically just assumed women were exaggerating or making it up. and that continued until the first major studyof depression in women who take hormonal contraceptives was released just. this. year.
oh, and fun fact: even after this new study was released, a lot of the scientific community is still being like “but can we PROVE these women aren’t just depressed because they’re LOVESICK?”
edit: for those of you confused about the purpose of this post, this is not a “women had it bad 70 years ago so men deserve to have it bad now” post. this is a “wow it’s great that scientists took these men’s (very serious) side effects seriously, and it would be great if they did the same for women’s, because despite the fact that hormonal bc for women came out 70 years ago, we still have very little research on the negative mental health problems that women experience while on hormonal bc, so that when they do experience these side effects, they are often dismissed by their doctors and have very few alternative forms of bc to turn to” post
shealwaysreads 