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The Male Gaze and the Gut-Punch of Truth
Dec. 1st, 2013 09:43 pmOver and over again, the subject gets raised: why is there so much more m/m fanfic than there is f/f? And over and over again, the specter of women's own self-loathing is raised, as well as the theory that we have bought into male supremacy, that we find men's stories more compelling because society tells us that they are the important stories.
While I don't doubt that those are answers for some people, they always seemed to fall short as an explanation of why I personally wrote so much more m/m fic.
This weekend, at LosCon, (a Los Angeles area science fiction convention) I picked up a book called Queers Dig Time Lords, which is obviously relevant to my interests. One of the essays, Amal El-Mohtar's "Sub Texts: The Doctor and The Master's Firsts and Lasts" proved enlightening for reasons completely above and beyond any insights about my One True Whovian Pairing.
In comparing Davies and Moffat's tenures as showrunner, and their portrayals of male/male verses female/female sexuality, El-Mohtar writes:
"Post-Jack-Harkness, there is a remarkable reluctance to show men flirting or being intimate with other men, even while they are in an established, explicitly marked romantic relationship -- a reluctance that does not extend to women performing sexual desire for other women. much as i delight in seeing the latter, if makes me uncomfortable to see women repeatedly sexualized when men are not; my Male Gaze sense starts tingling, and I find myself facing the same kinds of proscription I felt as a teen."
That paragraph hit me with an almost-physical sensation. Sitting there in the restaurant down the street from the con, I read that paragraph over three or four times, absorbing it. Because it spoke to me on a deep level.
As a young queer woman, my first experiences of seeing myself in the media were through the straight male gaze. "Hot girl-on-girl action," specifically marketed to straight dudes. And though I sought out media by queer women for queer women as soon as I could, growing up in a culture that views female sexuality as primarily or even exclusively for the titillation of men has, perhaps inevitably, left its mark on my psyche.
It's harder to imagine a place further from the male gaze than the almost-exclusively-female world of fanfiction. But while I may intellectually know that, I still have a lifetime of experience with media, which has sunk its roots deep into my subconscious. It's hard to untangle my own female sexuality from the straight male gaze, even when I know that gaze is not present.
While I don't doubt that those are answers for some people, they always seemed to fall short as an explanation of why I personally wrote so much more m/m fic.
This weekend, at LosCon, (a Los Angeles area science fiction convention) I picked up a book called Queers Dig Time Lords, which is obviously relevant to my interests. One of the essays, Amal El-Mohtar's "Sub Texts: The Doctor and The Master's Firsts and Lasts" proved enlightening for reasons completely above and beyond any insights about my One True Whovian Pairing.
In comparing Davies and Moffat's tenures as showrunner, and their portrayals of male/male verses female/female sexuality, El-Mohtar writes:
"Post-Jack-Harkness, there is a remarkable reluctance to show men flirting or being intimate with other men, even while they are in an established, explicitly marked romantic relationship -- a reluctance that does not extend to women performing sexual desire for other women. much as i delight in seeing the latter, if makes me uncomfortable to see women repeatedly sexualized when men are not; my Male Gaze sense starts tingling, and I find myself facing the same kinds of proscription I felt as a teen."
That paragraph hit me with an almost-physical sensation. Sitting there in the restaurant down the street from the con, I read that paragraph over three or four times, absorbing it. Because it spoke to me on a deep level.
As a young queer woman, my first experiences of seeing myself in the media were through the straight male gaze. "Hot girl-on-girl action," specifically marketed to straight dudes. And though I sought out media by queer women for queer women as soon as I could, growing up in a culture that views female sexuality as primarily or even exclusively for the titillation of men has, perhaps inevitably, left its mark on my psyche.
It's harder to imagine a place further from the male gaze than the almost-exclusively-female world of fanfiction. But while I may intellectually know that, I still have a lifetime of experience with media, which has sunk its roots deep into my subconscious. It's hard to untangle my own female sexuality from the straight male gaze, even when I know that gaze is not present.
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