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

[alleypat]

That's a shame in that it makes it difficult to grab all that stuffin one place. I find myself limiting the number of sites I read more and more each year. Have fun with it, I'll see about aggragating it somehow

[barbarienne]

The "female gaze" certainly happens in books, but the most common place for it is in "women's fiction" where the audience is not presumed to be male. The men who avoid women's things on the unquestioned cultural principle of "Why would I, a man, be interested in that?" probably never see it.

This avoidance helps reinforce those men's perception that women aren't actually interested in sex, but are merely willing to put out in exchange for financial security, or perhaps because he is just such a stud, he has overcome her natural female reluctance. You can always identify guys who have no female friends, because they say stupid shit like this.

Women, of course, know better, because we actually talk to other women about sex.

I have had the following conversation:

Guy: Women aren't as interested in sex as men.

Me: Did you miss the part where romance genre represents half of all fiction sales?

Guy: Well, yeah, chicks like romance and love and that crap.

Me: Have you read any of it? Holy shit, dude, a lot of it puts Penthouse Forum

[mtlawson]

I'll be honest in that I don't really notice female gaze very much in what I read. (Or in what I read when I actually get a chance to read fiction these days.) As for male gaze, it's less and less present in the fiction I read, but I suspect that's more due to having a lot of female authors in my TBR pile than anything else.

[mmegaera]

As the others have been saying, romance is full of what I think you're referring to as female gaze. The heroines of romance novels are extremely conscious of the heroes' bodies and (mostly) how sexually beautiful they are, and aren't afraid to think about it.

But then I've always thought of romance novels as having a more equal balance of power between the sexes than most fiction, although since it deals almost exclusively with romantic relationships (duh), it doesn't take that balance as far out into the wider world as it should. IMHO.

[pantryslut]

Useful link:

http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/08/26/faq-what-is-the-%E2%80%9Cmale-gaze%E2%80%9D/