Rituals for De-Internalizing the Male Gaze

Margaret Atwood once said, "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman." And today, I want to help you evict that man. Rituals for de-internalizing the male gaze, let's talk about it. Welcome back to Solgum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological, and literary flair. I'm your host Victoria Hutchins, my goal is to give your soul something to chew on. And today, we are talking about the male gaze. Let me ask you a question, have you ever caught yourself performing when there is absolutely no one around, like your home alone, but you're sucking in your stomach, or you are reading a book in your room and you're kind of reading, but you're kind of performing girl who is reading a book in her room. Or there's the classic, you're crying, then you catch a reflection, you look kind of good, your lips are red, your eyelashes are wet. So then you switch to taking photos of yourself crying. If you relate to that, I made this episode for you. Maybe you clicked this episode because when you look at how you show up in the world, what you wear, what you post, your grooming habits, how you talk. You get this weird spooky, icky feeling that it isn't all your idea. Or maybe you are navigating getting trapped under the male gaze in the context of dating, and you are tired of having your life forced, be drained by a never ending cycle of situations. Maybe you are tired of spending your one wild precious life, back stalking, your latest tinge match, who you do not know, so hard that you have read his mom's small business as Yelp reviews. Maybe you just want to be able to go to the grocery store without covering up your acne without feeling like a monster. If any of that sounds like you, you are in exactly the right place. And even if you think this conversation doesn't apply to you, I bet that it does. Maybe you're like, girl, I'm gay. You sin or men, I don't even like men, or maybe you're happily married or maybe you are a man, but I'm here to tell you the male gaze comes for all of us. Regardless of your sexuality or your gender or your relationship status, we are all taught to orient ourselves around the approval and preferences of men. And it runs so deep. It is so much deeper than chasing men in the context of dating and how we dress. What is at stake here is our ability to be present in our own lives. In today's episode, I am going to talk about seven rituals that have helped me de-internalize the male gaze and help me come back to myself when I get trapped under it. And can I just say before we even get into it, you are not alone if you are struggling with this. And it is not your fault. I have struggled with contorting myself into shapes that I think will please the male gaze in different ways for my whole life. I can think of entire months of my life that were lost to consuming obsession with people I didn't even really know. One of the big ways I've navigated this and unpacked this in my own life is my voice. I have an extremely low voice like I cannot hit the high notes in most songs sung by men. I cannot hit Zac Efron's notes in Breaking Free and High School Musical. I have tried at karaoke bars many times, but I have an extremely low voice and it took me like 25 years to realize that I was using a speaking voice that was not my voice. I used to speak in a speaking voice that was like truly an octave higher than how I speak now. I think I was consciously like hmm, I'm going to manipulate men to like me by raising the picture my speaking. It wasn't that. But we are taught to be a good girl and be a sweet girl and the benefits of being an attractive girl so early and so persistently that very quickly it becomes subconscious. And I've come a long way, but let me be clear. I am not the final boss of Decentering Men, okay? You see this armpit? It's shaved. If you're listening. As always, I am speaking to you from in the trenches with you, not from the other side of the war. And that's why this is a philosophy, psychology and literature focus podcast, not of the world according to Victoria podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about with Jean Paul Sartre and Smote Beauvoir and Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag and Mary Oliver think about this. But if there's one thing I do know, shame does not give us back our agency. And I think conversations about Decentering Men often very quickly turn into vilifying women for the most natural, normal human thing in the world, which is wanting love. Let me be so clear from the jump, you are not that bad or stupid or broken or silly for wanting to be loved. My goal for this conversation is not that it inspires you to call off the search for love. It is that it leaves you with some tools to help you stop twisting yourself into inauthentic shapes, to get validation, to feel the void of love. Also, hi, hi, if we haven't met, I'm Victoria. I am the host of this podcast, obviously I am a writer. My debut poetry collection make believe is out now. I'm a social media content creator at the Daily Victorian on Instagram and TikTok. And I'm so happy you're here. If you're not new here, hi, hey, what up? It's good to see you. This season of SoulGum is ad free, all season long as a gift from me to you. And I paid for it. I have received offers to sell this podcast out and I have declined to them. I don't want to be talking about meal delivery plans on here anymore than you want to be listening to that. A few really quick things if you want to help me keep the podcast ad free. Live and win and God willing, I have future new physical creative work, wink, wink. Hear me out when I talk about it, okay? If you like the podcast, consider subscribing to it wherever you're listening. That way, I'll come up on your homepage, you'll never miss an episode. If you like this episode, share it. You could send it to your best friend and be like, we need to hold each other accountable. We need to have a decentering min summer. You could post it, you could put it on your Instagram story or take a screenshot and put it in your next dump if you want to like cultivate a cat strap for a man repellent feminist aura this summer. I love that. If you do tag me at the daily Victorian on TikTok or Instagram because I love to try to thank you. You could rate the podcast five stars wherever you're listening to it. It takes just a few seconds and it is so helpful to me. You have been here before you know my ass loves the comment. I make this podcast for you. I want it to be what you want and comments are one of the best ways for me to get a sense of what is interesting to you and what you're thinking about and what you like. I'm also just nosy and I want to know about you in your life. So talk to me. Even just say hi and like where you're listening from. I want to know. Okay. Let's get into it. Seven rituals for de internalizing the male gaze. Number one, do a gaze audit. You cannot evict the man in your head if you do not know where he lives. So naturally the first ritual to de internalize the male gaze is taking stock of where it's influencing you. In his 1943 work being a nothingness 20th century French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre uses his famous keyhole hypothetical to explain his concept of the gaze which is how he thinks being perceived fundamentally changes our experience of ourselves. He says let us imagine I have come to look through a keyhole. I am alone and non-conscious of myself. In this door, there's a spectacle to be seen. So you are alone peeking through a keyhole. You are completely unsolved conscious. There's no like am I going to get caught? No, you are completely absorbed in watching whatever is going on in this room. But then he says I hear footsteps in the corridor. Someone is watching me. What does this mean? All of a sudden I am this self that is known by another within a world that the other has alienated from me. So all of a sudden you are not just the watcher you are being watched. Think about the experience of watching a movie alone in your room. When you are watching a movie alone, if it's a good movie and you haven't seen it before, often you get so sucked in that you are completely in what Sartre would call the subject self. You are not even aware of the room around you. You are not aware of how you're sitting or your physical body. You are completely absorbed in the experience of watching the movie. How compare that to the experience of going on a first date to the movies? You are kind of having an experience but you are also very aware that you are being experienced. You are very aware of your body. You are very aware of how you're sitting. You are aware of every little noise your stomach makes. Am I breathing loud? Can they hear these little spitty noises in my mouth? I need to cough. I don't want to cough. Why is my hand resting so awkwardly on my leg? Am I laughing at the right parts? Am I laughing too much? It's a completely different experience than watching a movie alone. Because now, instead of being fully in your subject self, fully absorbed in the experience of watching the movie, you are extremely aware of the duality of being subject and object at once. So when we do a gaze on it, we want to think about that. We want to think about how other people's presence is affecting how we act. Unfortunately, it goes. so much deeper than that. Because the gaze is chokehold on us does not end when we leave the movie theater. Why? Because we enforce it against ourselves. Panopticon style. If you have not heard of the Panopticon, it is a theoretical circular prison written about by 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book "Discipline and Punish" to explain how systems of power make us police ourselves. Imagine prison cells in a ring with one central watchtower at the center with a guard. The guard might be watching any prisoner at any moment, but the prisoners can't see him so they can never tell when he's watching. Eventually, it does not matter if the guard is even there. The prisoners police themselves around the clock just in case they become their own guard. So when we audit how the gaze is influencing us, we do want to think about how other people being around us affects our choices, the footsteps in the corridor of it all. But we also want to think about the moments where we have become our own guard, where we enforce the male gaze against ourselves within the confines of our own mind. I'm going to give you some questions to reflect on to audit how the gaze is showing up in your life. Number one, over the course of the coming week, see if you can notice a footsteps in the corridor moment. That is a moment where you suddenly become aware of someone else's presence and switch up. This could be like you're singing along to a song in your car and you're going full out and then you pull up to the stoplight and you're like, wait, let me relax. Like the people that are also at this stoplight can see me. It could be you hear your partner coming home and you jump off the couch, you have this sudden need to make it look like you are cleaning or doing something productive. It could be you're talking and just stimulating and then you see someone glance at your armpit and you realize you have a pit stand and you switch up how you're talking, put your arms down. See if you can notice a moment where someone else's presence makes you change how you act. Second question in our gaze at it. Think about how you change yourself around people you want to want you. Dating, crushes, situationships. Do you change your laugh? Do you order the small thing on the menu instead of the big thing that you actually want or the healthy thing instead of the unhealthy thing or do you not finish your food even though you want to finish it to try to seem dainty and petite? What do you not tell them about yourself that you would tell someone that you just met that you're not romantically interested in? Do you shrink yourself in some way to try to be less intimidating? So second one, notice how you change your behavior when you like someone romantically. Last question in the gaze at it. See if you can catch yourself witnessing your life instead of living it. There's a clinical term spectatoring that was coined by the sex therapist Virginia Masters in William Johnson. And it's referring to how usually women in the context of sex, instead of being present in their body float up out of our bodies and watch ourselves. We watch our performance. And of course in the context of sex, I think that's often a trauma response or a response from negative sexual experiences. But it's also something we do outside of the context of sex too. Like I'm thinking of this song "Thirst Trapped" by Audrey Hobert, my queen. Is she an epowavy? Yes. Is she Kierkegaard for weird girls with iPhone phase? Also, yes. And it's a weird girl with iPhone phase. I adore her. But I'm thinking about the line where she says, I look at what I posted and pretend I'm you. Listen to my playlist and pretend I'm you. Which is so real. We've all done that. Like have you ever gotten an exciting new follow on Instagram and then you go to your page and imagine them looking at every post? It's like kind of innocuous. So I'm kicking my feet, imagining this man looking my Instagram, sue me. But also exactly what I'm talking about here. Research on self-objectification shows that women do this way more than men. We are trained to see ourselves from the outside looking in. So see if you can catch or think of some moments like that, where you are imagining someone else perceiving you and performing instead of just being. Which brings me to ritual number two. I like to call this a week of no photos and few mirrors. In her 1977 book on photography, Susan Sontag has a line that I think about so often to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. So often could be at a concert or seeing a beautiful landscape or I happen on a cute animal. My instinct is to pull out my phone and open the camera app before I've even really seen it with my eyes. And there's something really sinister about that. The impulse to capture something instead of just be with it. And don't get me wrong, I love taking pictures. But I do think the extent to which we are documenting others and ourselves is creating a voyeuristic relationship with the experience of being alive. Think about what that does when you are the thing being photographed. I love a selfie, but every time we take a selfie, we are kind of turning ourselves into an object to be appraised. Like even the action of swiping through photos you took, I like this, I hate that, I like this, I hate that. There's something very unnatural about that. So the idea with this ritual is for one week or even just one day, avoid taking pictures of yourself and even avoid mirrors. You might even cover up a mirror in your house so that you have to make the conscious choice to look instead of just reflexively checking appraising yourself when you walk by it. So ritual number two, one week or even one day, no photos, few mirrors, which brings me to number three. Push back on, I do it for myself. Something I often hear and say in conversations about grooming, makeup, body choices is I do this for myself, like shaving, for example. I used to get so defensive at suggestion that shaving is something that inherently we do not do for ourselves. I would say things like it makes me feel clean. I just prefer the way it looks. That's my natural preference. But deep down, I always knew that wasn't the truth because, okay, Victoria, why is that your preference? In her 1949 work, the second sex, Simone de Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." In his 1762 work, the social contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said, "Man is born free and everywhere else he is in chains." RuPaul once said, "We're all born naked and the rest is drag." They're all kind of saying the same thing. We become who we are, not through independent choices only, but through our cultural conditioning, through societal expectations, and through learned behavior. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were lovers. They had a lifelong complicated sorted situation trip and they kind of argued through their work. In the second sex, Simone de Beauvoir was pushing back on Jean-Paul Sartre's idea that existence precedes essence or building on it. Sartre was saying, "Life has no fixed set meaning. We become who we are through our own choices." Simone de Beauvoir's like, "Yeah!" But there's also the conditioning of it all. There's also the programming. Leave it to a woman to get it. And I think many of us know this. Like we know that if we lived in a vacuum and formed outside of the container of society, we would not be shaving our armpit hair off. But I think we insist that we do things purely for ourselves, even when we know we kind of do kind of don't because sitting with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that a choice is part of our programming and continuing to make that choice is really uncomfortable. But good news, Simone de Beauvoir in her 1947 work, the ethics of ambiguity argues that we don't have to give up everything that we know is a product of our conditioning to make progress. She says, "Man makes himself a lack." But he can deny this lack as lack and affirm himself as positive. He then owns the failure, which, huh? She's saying, "Even just acknowledging the influence of the outside world on who you are and the choices you make is in itself progress." So here's the ritual. Take one grooming or beauty habit that you swear is just for you and trace its origins. What made you feel like it was something you should be doing? For me, I remember being in fifth grade, sitting on the school bus next to my little boyfriend at the time, Trey, wearing shorts with my hairy little legs and him looking over at them and saying, my best friend's name was Brittany. Brittany started shaving her legs. When are you gonna be allowed to shave your legs? Once you trace what made you feel like you should be doing it, can you trace it back further? For shaving, it started being marketed to women in the 1910s when women's fashion shifted towards sleeveless gowns and sheer fabrics that exposed their underarms and their arms in public for the first time in centuries. And of course, there were companies ready to seize that moment. Razor companies, which previously only sold Razor's marketed for men, published articles and ads in beauty magazines arguing that women could not wear these new sleeveless styles with their armpit hair. They framed underarm hair as an embarrassing personal problem to which, of course, they had the solution. Gillette released Malady Decolite, the first safety Razor designed specifically for women. And I know all that. And yet, I'm still shaving my armpits. But thinking about it does make me more tempted to not. Even if we're not ready to stop shaving or whatever it may be, understanding the moments that we learned that it was important for our desirability to conform to them and the broader context of how these natural things were sold to women as problems starts to open our eyes. So number four, push back on, I do it for myself. And try it. try to trace the origin of one of your grooming habits. Which brings me to number five, which I'm gonna call Bechtel mode. In 1985, the cartoonist Allison Bechtel made a comic strip called The Rule, highlighting a weird thing she noticed at the movies. Most movies she watched had alarmingly few female characters and the female characters who were in the movie she watched almost always had storylines that revolved around men. The rule she joked about in her comic had three criteria which became known as the Bechtel test. A piece of media passes the Bechtel test. If it has number one, at least two female characters, number two, who talked to each other. Number three, about something other than a man. You've probably heard of the Bechtel test. It's mentioned in pop culture all the time. People joke about failing or passing the Bechtel test. And it's just a comic. It's not some foolproof test for what is and is not feminist media or feminist conversation. For example, baby got back by certain mix a lot, passes the Bechtel test. Oh my God, Becky, we'll get her butt to women talking to each other about something other than a man. But I do find that one thing that keeps the male gaze at the center of our relationships with other women is how much we talk about men. And listen, I love to talk about men, relationships, who you're hooking up with, what they texted you. Let me listen to the voice note. Take a photo of the Snapchat. They sent you with your computer and texted to me. I want to know every detail. But it's also important for our friendships to transcend that. So when I talk about the ritual of Bechtel mode, when you hang out with the women in your life, make sure there is at least some time in the conversation if you're on the phone with your long distance best friend or you're out to dinner with your friend, where the conversation isn't focused on men. And I don't think we should be doing this all the time. Like sometimes your best friend goes on a first date and they call you while they're driving home. And the whole conversation is gonna be about that date as it should be. But I've noticed that when one of my friends starts dating someone really new and exciting who seems great and interested in them and dynamic and respectful, I get really excited for them. And I do ask about how it's going with that person. Often before I ask about other facets of what's going on with them. So Bechtel mode, trying to keep a check on how much you and your friends are talking about men. Which brings me to ritual number six. Take a pleasure inventory. Or what I like to call a what the soft animal of my body loves list. If you know me, I know you know wild geese by Mary Oliver. All rise for our national anthem, okay? You do not have to be good. You do not have to crawl our knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Something I've realized lately is that the antidote to self surveillance is sensation. I think this is something that many of us can feel in our bodies and research supports that. Research shows that self objectification viewing yourself from the outside perspective, looking in disproportionately actually decreases your ability to notice your senses like hunger or being cold or hot or fatigued. And the door swings both ways. The more we are able to really get in our bodies, the less we want to monitor and police them. The soft animal of your body does not surveil itself. It is not wondering what it looks like when it cries. It is not googling what are the name for the little dots on your legs. It just knows what it loves. Warm leaves stretching. So when I say a pleasure inventory, I have a list in my phone called things the soft animal of my body loves. And it could be anything. Crunch wraps a cream, petting my dog, the sound of waves, the feeling of sun on my skin, caterpillars, being barefoot, black coffee, slices of cheese, Noah Kant songs. So the idea here is to keep a list of positive sensory experiences, things that you like that don't have to do with appearance. Focus on the ears and the nose and the hands, not the sight, taking a pleasure inventory, keeping a list like this. Number one helps you remember that you are a creature and that creature pleasures are what's real. It also gives you a toolkit for when you do self surveil of ways to get back in your body. You're at the beach thinking about how you look in your bathing suit. Okay, let me close my eyes and listen to the sound of the waves, let me feel the sand under my feet. You see a photo of yourself that makes you want to dissolve into thin air, turn on a song you love. You're feeling an urge to look in the mirror and pick up your skin for an hour, go outside and feel the sun on your skin. So ritual number six, pleasure inventory, which brings me to our last ritual. I'm going to call this pre-situationship prep. The moment you happen upon someone where you're like, oh no, I could get obsessed with you. I could lose my entire identity inside of you. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to pull out your journal and make a list of your non-negotiables. No matter where this thing goes, these are the things I'm going to keep for me. On that list, you're going to put the things in your life that you want to protect that are important to you that you do not want to sacrifice on the altar of the potential relationship. Could be, I am going to go to my Monday night yoga class, even if this person asked me to do something because I love that class and I always feel amazing after. I am going to make a plan to see my friends three times this month. I'm going to keep my space clean. I'm not going to use this as a dumping ground where I drop my bags because I'm staying at their place. I'm going to continue to take pride in my own space. Write a list of your non-negotiables. The other part of your pre-situationship prep, write a list of your standards. Write out what real love feels like to you. What type of compliments do you like to receive in the context of dating? What type of things feel invalidating and objectifying? What type of behavior makes you feel supported and safe? What type of behavior makes you anxious? Get it on paper before you're in the middle of it with them because when you really like someone, it's very tempting to wave away the red flags. So get it all down so that you can't be in denial about it later and so that you're clear on what you're looking for. As women and feminine people, we are taught so early and so persistently that our value lies in our ability to be picked that I think often in the context of dating, we forget that we are also picking. We get so wrapped up in the do they like me that we forget to assess whether we like them. So getting really clear on what you are looking for can really help you remember that you are not seeking to be chosen, you are choosing. I want to leave you with a poem. This is Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance by the former US Poet Laureate Adolimon. Sometimes I think you get the worst of me. The much loved loose forest green sweat pants, the long browless days, hair nodded and uncivilized, a shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoved dance on my brain. I'd like to say this means I love you. The stained white cotton t-shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk, but it's different than that. I move in this house with you the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty's cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal me than much else. I'm wrong. It is that I love you. But it's more that when you say it back, lights out a cold wind through curtains. For maybe the first time in my life, I believe it. Real love, the type of love where we are really seen and really known outside of beauty's cage, counter-intuitively teaches us the most of all of what love is not. But in order to be really loved, we have to let ourselves be really seen. We have to show up not as who we think they will love, but as who we are. If you hear nothing else from this episode, just hear me on this. It makes sense that you care. It makes sense that you want love. It makes sense that you want it so bad that you are willing to put yourself in a box. You are not bad for putting yourself in a box that you have been snapped at and pointed and told to get in for your whole life. The fact that you listened to this whole episode shows me that you are someone who is trying to break out of the panopticon that we are all in. And that's really brave and really cool. And I'm proud of you for that. And I hope you're proud of yourself. Okay, lightning round recap. What did we talk about today? Today, we talked through seven rituals for de-internalizing the male gaze. We talked about number one, doing a gaze at it. We talked about Jean Paul Searcher's keyhole example and trying to catch those I hear footsteps in the corridor moments. We talked about Michelle Foucault's panopticon and looking for the guard in her own head the moments where we are surveilling ourselves. Ritual number two, a week of no photos and few mirrors. We talked about Susan Sontag's on photography and the voyeuristic nature of constantly documenting and looking at ourselves. Number three, pushing back on the idea that you do it for yourself when it comes to all of your grooming and beauty choices. The ritual here is to trace one habit back to where you learned it and maybe even back to where it all began. Number five, vector mode, leaving room in every conversation for non-relationship non-man talk. Number six, taking a pleasure inventory, making a what the soft animal of my body loves list. And number seven, pre-situationship prep. I walked you through some things to consider commit. yourself before you get obsessed with someone new your challenge for this week is to pick one of those rituals and actually do it like decide which one resonates with you and commit to yourself right now you're gonna actually do it that's all i've got for you if you enjoyed this episode remember help me keep it out for you consider subscribing to the podcast rating it five stars sharing it with a friend pop it on your instagram story put it in your next dump and talk to me i love a comment be nice to yourself this week stay focused move with intention and an open heart and you can do anything you start your mind to i love you so much it was so good to talk to you i'll see you next Sunday