The "Male Gaze" as Female Shadow

Hi Martha, I agree this is a huge subject and there are definitley many complex factors that would have to be taken into account to get at what the “male gaze” really is. I've offered it somewhat simplistically here, just to begin to give a new feel for how we can think about this that also challenges us, as women, to own our own part in co-creating the “male gaze”.
 
It is true, as you've noted, that men can look at women as a mere objects of their desire to be “had” so to speak; what I would call the narcissistically oriented male self at earlier stages of development. But just as potently, women can embody themselves as the narcissitic object of beauty and male desire, to which affords them their own narcissistic benefits.

There is no doubt that the masculine gaze has set the stage for how women are seen within dominant culture, but it is also true that women at the early narcissistically oriented stages of development had good reason to play into the masculine gaze and solidify it culturally through the ways they chose to internalize and embody the “male gaze”, thus becoming an inherent part of creating it.

The problem with certain feminist assessments of the “male gaze”, is that it tends to paint women as mere victims of the evil patriarchy instead of acknowledging that at those earlier stages of development, women had a lot to gain by playing into the objectifying roles that they did, and still do.
 
Women have always carried an immense amount of power when it comes to how they embody their beauty and sexuality. My belief is that this isn't inherently wrong or bad (as some feminists would like to argue), I think women can choose to embody their beauty from the most narcissistic levels to the most divinely selfless and radiant levels, it is our choice, our development. And if we as women begin to break through into new ways of expressing our embodiment and beauty, I believe men's development will also flourish into deeper and higher ways of viewing the female body. But as long as we deny that beauty is ours to claim, and instead attribute it to the construction of patriarchy (see Naomi Wolf's “The Beauty Myth”) we actually stay stuck at square one: never allowed to embody higher levels of our own radiance, and thus developmentally stunted as a culture at the most superficial and narcissistic levels when it comes to female beauty and the male “gaze” (i.e., our post-feminist world today consists of plastic surgery rising at an astronomical rate and Britney Spears as the icon of femininity for my generation).   

Thanks for your thoughts on this Rich and Martha, very rich dialogue indeed.

I like your idea Rich of noting a spectrum of power/disempowerment for both men and women in this area. I definitely resonate with the fact that men who need to gaze and objectifiy women are disemowered from their own deeper development, just as women who feel the need to use their own objectification are also alienated from their own deepest self and radiance.
The biggest issue I see is that these patterns are so deeply ingrained in us for all four-quadrant reasons, and it takes a lot of awareness, practice and commitment to see the many ways in which these dynamics run through our culture, biology, and psyches. I feel like my work is really trying to convince women (and men) that it is worth the agonizing work :-) That there is something truly more magnificent awaiting us if we let go of our often uncounscious addiction to holding what we believe gives us power in this world (for women, that is primarily beauty/sexuality, but of course not exclusively).

Martha, I agree that we can never fully “reject” cutural conditioning around beauty, partly because that cultural conditioning is at least in small part build on biological “truths.”
What I mean by that is that cultural notions, although massively inflated and commodified, are still based on some very real biological realities about what our species finds attractive for reproductive purposes. This is what post-modern feminism often fails to look at, although I give post-modern feminsm due props for their understanding of the social-cultural component of beauty's unfolding.  But what is interesting is that our relationship to both biology and culture can and do shift as we develop.

I don't feel that this new image of beauty for women is about creating a completely individual and independent image that can somehow exist outside of the realities of the socio-cultural world. My belief is more that as women begin to emerge into these very real higher and deeper levels of their own consciousness that they will inherently begin to change the very nature of the collective fabric that makes up our culture.
It takes brave individuals to begin to break through these new levels of awareness and embodiment so as to start to articulate and create a new platform for cultural awareness.

 So you are right, at this point, our culture doesn't offer us a space in which to make meaning of this new level of development, so we can definitely feel “insane” at times as we attempt to speak about it.  But I do believe that as more women step into these higher waves of consciousness we will inherently begin to create words and signifiers/signifieds of a new  collective cultural meaning making system. It is sitting on that creative evolutionary edge that begins to make this kind of radical change possible, even when it looks truly bleak out there from a certain vantage point.