A question about male gaze

[msagara]

Last night, when I was falling asleep at my keyboard and did not want to sleep, I went off to the internet to read about books. (Not my books, though, because that frequently wakes me up in the Bad Way, because - author

Comments

male writers 'handling women well'

[anonymous]

Charles deLint is another writer who, in my own works, like women as people and it shows. I actually have you and Tanya Huff to thank for turning me onto Charles many, many, many years ago in Bakka.

[kateelliott]

[estara]

Not being male I don't feel qualified to answer directly, but Sartorias recently did a review on Goodreads of a self-published and quite popular m&m fantasy, which seems to have started in fanfiction - to her it seemed to be titillation for the female gaze - and I think a lot of m&m, whether in manga or in books is expressly written for the female gaze.

[reneekytokorpi]

That was my first thought, actually, to point out M/M fiction.

[estara]

Not that there aren't amazing books out there which are m&m, though. I point to Ann Somerville's Darshian Tales, especially Kei's Gift - or the heartbreaking (but in two instances late in the book very fanservicing) Sidecar m&m by Amy Lane (which is basically a look at the situation of gay Americans in the 80s) - oh and Whisper in the Dark by Tamara Allen, who does a very sweet love story in New York, but highlights a) the development of radio, b) the feelings of survivors of the Great War c) life in gay circles in New York of the 20s.

[reneekytokorpi]

I'll have to look them up. There are a few M/M authors I like and follow closely, but in general I don't enjoy reading it, mostly because of gaze issues I suspect.

[badgermirlacca]

I'm not sure what you mean by "male gaze." Could you clarify?

[msagara]

“Male gaze” for me is the constant sexualization of female characters and their roles in story. If you’re writing from an ostensibly female view and the first thing you notice is the shape of another woman’s breasts, lips, hips, you are viewing all women in text sexually first.

There are subtler things that for me are evocative of male gaze, but on the face of it, that’s enough to throw me out of a book.

ETA: It doesn’t always throw me out of a book. If the viewpoint is male, for instance. But if you’re writing from a female viewpoint, it often does, because it wrecks my ability to suspend disbelief.

[rowyn]

If the female viewpoint character is lesbian or bisexual, does it still seem dissonant for her to focus on sexual traits in other women?

One of my male friends who sometimes read romance often found the portrayal of the male characters in them unpleasant. I remember him specifically complaining about books where all the supernatural men were gorgeous and the one guy who isn't gorgeous and is an ordinary human is the jerk ex-boyfriend who 'gets what's coming to him'. So I'd say that, yes, women can write for the 'female gaze' in a way that men find off-putting.

[filkerdave]

Hmmm.

Most of the women I know generally don't describe other women in terms of physicality at all; it's all about "she's that nice one who always brings in brownies on Friday" rather than "she's the blonde with the long legs" -- I usually have to prod to get a physical description of someone if I don't already know them.

[mizkit]

kateelliott wrote about this a while ago, in particular mentioning a male reader who was absolutely convinced she had a homosexual agenda in her books. Eventually she realized that what he was reading as homosexual was her (deliberate) female gaze upon the male characters as sexually interesting (or not). The reader was so locked into the subconscious idea that only a male could look on someone with sexual attraction that he could only see what she was doing as having a homosexual agenda.

To his credit, Kate said, the *moment* she pointed this out to him, he understood what he'd been doing and restructed his mental stance.

So: yes, I think men can be made uncomfortable by the female gaze, but it doesn't happen all that often.

[msagara]

So, is male gaze just objectification, then? Or rather, is the inverse - female gaze - the same type of objectification, but of men? I’ve been thinking about whether or not there is a female gaze, or perspective, that elides or shuts men out in the same way; if there’s a way of handling male viewpoint that smacks them in the face and makes them throw the book across the room because it so violates the sense of reality.

[mtlawson]

I'm not so sure that we can simplify it that way.

I've read some people who believe that we have no way of knowing what a true female gaze is because our society is still predominantly male, so no matter what we think it is no from a predominantly female (or a truly equal) society. While I'm not prepared to go that far, I think that female gaze doesn't have quite the same impact on men as it might with women. For example, most of the guys I know don't mind being objectified, whereas I can't say that with my female friends.

[kateelliott]

[sartorias]

I have heard men disparage certain types of romance and fanfic, the way the female writers sexualize the men. Most of the time I ignore them, but I heard it from someone I respected, once, and in the discussion discovered he felt uncomfortable, as if females were unclothing him mentally and finding him wanting because he didn't have long eyelashes, beautiful hair, a lean, sexy body, and the other attributes he kept seeing. (He also comments about feeling uncomfortable with how much physical abuse they put these characters through, yet it seemed the writers were careful to never mar their males' beauty, even after floggings and male rape.)