#the male gaze is gazing

[cinnamon-coffees]

“It’s literally impossible to be a woman.

You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow, we're always doing it wrong?

You have to be thin, but not too thin, and you can never say you wanna be thin. You have to say you wanna be healthy, but also, you have to BE THIN.

You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.

You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.

You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.

You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.

You have to be a career woman, but also, always be looking out for other people.

You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is INSANE, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining!

You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood, but ALWAYS STAND OUT and ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL. But never forget that the system is rigged, so find a way to acknowledge that but ALSO, always be grateful!

You have to never get old. Never be rude. Never show off. Never be selfish. Never fall down. Never fail. Never show fear. Never get OUT OF LINE. It's too hard! It's too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says 'thank you!' And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also, everything is your fault.

I'm just so tired of watching myself, and every single other woman tie herself into knots, so that people will like us.

And if all of that, is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know." -Gloria the barbie movie

this is it. this is exactly it oh my god.

[animentality]

[coldbrewlvr]

need attention

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

Male gaze this. Female gaze that. What about my wide-eyed gaze, we're singing in the car, getting lost upstate?

[beidoukomskaicrux]

"why a jail cell?"

The world's literally ending, it's possible everyone will die, and Vi just realises how much she loves Cait in one exchange of looks. There's a huge tension and yearning in THAT moment. They're hungry for each other. I'm sorry but it feels unrealistic they'd go find a bed or smtg.

[diana-andraste]

Untitled (Evaluation), Kenneth Josephson, 1976

[spinaholi]

the way kristen 2 is just british male-gaze kristen

[medusa-fem]

Can we.. stop pretending mini skirts are peak fashion? None of us are comfortable in them. None of us. If I can't bend over in a bar without my ass popping out, then clearly this skirt was not made for my comfort, it was made for men to see my ass. Mini skirts were not made for "female empowerment" they were made for male fantasies. There's a reason autogynephillic males are obsessed with wearing them, mini skirts are fetish wear.

[somethinwrong]

[demontobee]

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

[frankensteinsfairy]

“However vast her narcissism, the Young-Girl doesn't love herself, what she loves is "her" image, that is, something that is not only foreign and exterior to her, but that possesses her, in the full sense of the word. The Young-Girl lives under the tyranny of this ungrateful master.” (Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun)

[stuffmywifelikes]

Stuff My Wife Likes

[thefugitivesaint]

Luis Royo, ''Heavy Metal'', Vol. 18, #6, March 1993

[scum-man-of-pesto]

This is SO REAL like first of all, the matriarchy they initially had was still this hyper-feminine mess where all the barbies still had to look perfect and attractive and have their hair and makeup done etc wereas the Kens simply, did not. Not to mention Alan even. And then still the only pressing harm of the Barbie-run society was that Barbie didn't give Ken much of her time in the way that he wanted her to, and as a result he subjugated every woman in the world?? He made all the Barbies ramp up the performance of the male gaze, spoke down to them, stole their literal houses and hard work, and enslaved them, and then the message was still like "uwu Barbie should've given more time to Ken so he didn't react this way" like no FUCK OFF are you kidding? The Barbies should've just systematically eliminated the Kens because at best they're useless and at worst they're clamoring to cause actual material harm. I WISH the movie lived up to "deeply bizarre and anti-man". It's actually really telling where we are in society that so many see this as an actually radical perspective filled with man-hate when it was literally so coddling to men. Don't get me wrong either, I did enjoy it for what it was like I know it wasn't going to go into an actual deep leftist analysis or anything but this reaction to it as though it had is making me nuts

[bluebugjay]

can't stop thinking about cheerleaders in mcr again

the way they've been in so many of their music videos - I'm not okay, teenagers, blood - and photo shoots and represented things like the American dream and the 'popular' crowd and blind conformity and youth and a certain (male gaze-y) kind of femininity

the way you can turn on kerrang and be very likely to see a band of similar genre also using cheerleaders in their music videos but it being 70% up-skirt shots or love interests whereas mcr have never done that

the way mcr never made the cheerleaders or any female characters in their mv's a 'safe' or 'attractive' kind of weird but instead straight up weird allowing them to dance strangely and wear gas masks and be covered in blood and be rejected by getting poked in the eye or even completely ignored actively tarnishing the cheerleader persona

the way gerard way has now dressed up as one, siding with the cheerleaders after being separate from them for so long

as if the cheerleader is no longer just that but also the girl within the uniform, done being used as a symbol of the American dream and the 'popular' crowd and blind conformity and sexualised femininity unwillingly

the 'and so he gets to die a Saint but she will always be a whore' of it all

[soleminisanction]

So a while back I ran the numbers to confirm a suspicion that fandom trends towards a trans Tim Drake, and there's a lot of bits and pieces around his canon material that I think contributes to that interest. But there's a particular, subtle one that's been poking at my mind a lot because I think it might actually be a pretty significant factor that nobody really notices:

His costumes.

The original Robin costume, the one Dick and Jason wore, is childish but exposing. It's innocent enough when they're being drawn as spunky children, but during the period when Dick's still wearing it into his late teens and early 20s, it's practically as revealing as a lot of the women's costumes (and, in retrospect, almost certainly laid some of the groundwork for him sometimes being sexualized by the art and writing the way female characters normally are -- George Pérez, at least, absolutely put him on display every bit as much as he did Starfire and Donna).

Damian's costumes, meanwhile, lean more into archaic/fantasy armor designs and are thus largely genderless outside some vague allusions to the codename's Robin Hood roots. And Steph's is, well, a minidress, and one designed to show off her figure, drawing explicit attention to her femininity.

But then you have Tim's most iconic costume, his original one, which is not only fully covering in a way the original look isn't, it also, by virtue of being designed in the 90s, sports a very specific feature: molded body armor shaped to look like pectoral and abdominal muscles. In other words -- an idealized male body.

Not every artist always included that detail, but it was an explicit part of the design that you don't see as much these days, at least not for teen heroes. Which means it's inadvertently the perfect costume for a trans masculine Boy Wonder. It's got built-in body shaping. The cape and tunic layers even help to make his shoulders look wider.

Tim's second costume, the OYL later suit, doesn't explicitly have this body shaping element, but some artists still hint at it in the same way that Dick's Nightwing suits do (ie, we assume they're not showing off their real muscles with skintight suits for safety reasons, but who knows). Plus it comes with the bonus gay longing of changing the colors to mourn the dead crush he's too deep in the closet to recognize.

And then you've got his modern Robin look which has the same kind of shaping going on in a sleaker, more subtle way, though it can vary from artist to artist how much the red part of his suit is drawn as a breast plate vs. a part of the bodysuit.

As a bonus, the design also has a tendency to make him look lean and lithe, in an interesting contrast to Damian who, despite being physically smaller than Tim, tends to have a presence that makes him come across as stockier and more solid, possibly because he's more heavily armored.

You even see this with some of Tim'snon-Robin looks. I've mentioned this elsewhere but, the original Red Robin look making him look older when the cowl was up honestly makes a lot of sense. That suit was originally designed for a Dick Grayson who was pushing 60 to conceal the extent of his age while still communicating his maturity and development. It makes sense that it'd work the other way, to make 17 year old Tim look like he's in his late 20s/early 30s.

It's tunic over a body suit design is also just aesthetically pleasing in terms of forming an elegant male body type, the same way a well-cut suit can be. Again, it does especially nice things for the shoulders, which is why I personally prefer it to the fully bodysuit redesign they give him in the latter part of the series. Although as we can see from the details in Marcus To's art, even that body suit has seams strategically placed to suggest muscles.

And then of course there's the 2016 Rebirth era Red Robin costume, which is just a more heavily-armored version of his classic Robin look that's trying really hard to make him look masculine and mature, which means... exaggerated muscles.

And the thing is, it's not that this doesn't happen with other characters' costumes. But for various reasons it specifically didn't happen with the other Robin costumes, like I described at the start.

Which is not something I think people consciously notice. But I do know that, when I was writing my transmasc Tim fanfic a few years before realizing that I myself was also transmasc, one of the images that solidified the story for me was how good it would've felt the first time a transmasc Tim put on his new Robin costume and saw the Boy Wonder looking back at him. And I remember specifically thinking about how nice the shaped armor would be for that sort of thing.

It's kinda funny how an obvious attempt to enforce gender norms wound up, for lack of a better term, backfiring, at least in my opinion. There's just something about exaggerating the masculinity of Robin, a role designed to contrast and foil the already exaggerated masculine ideal of Batman, that makes it feel like a performance.