EPISODE 8: Whose eyes are you looking through? The Male vs. the Female gaze

When you look in the mirror, whose voice is in your head? Yours — or someone else's you've been carrying around for years without realizing it?

This episode is about the male gaze, the female gaze, and everything in between. We're talking about where these concepts come from, how they quietly run in the background of the way you see yourself every single day, and — most importantly — how to start shifting out of one and into the other.

We also pick up the thread from episode 7 and properly unpack compulsory heterosexuality (comp het), because it turns out comp het and the male gaze are the same system. One tells you who to want. The other tells you how to be seen. And together they've been running in the background of most of our lives like software we never agreed to download.

In this episode:
— What comp het actually is and how it connects to the gaze
— John Berger's "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" — and why that line explains so much
— What I see behind the camera in boudoir sessions — and the moment clients stop seeing themselves through the male gaze
— Three ways to actually start shifting into your own gaze

Transcript

Whose voice is in your head?

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Can you do something for me real quick? I want you to, if you would, please, think about the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror. And I mean like really looked at yourself in the mirror, not just like a quick glance to make sure that you look presentable enough for school drop-off this morning. I'm talking like when was the last time today, maybe yesterday, maybe this week, that you looked at yourself in the mirror and had thoughts about yourself. And then I want you to reflect for a second on what those thoughts sounded like. Maybe they were nice. I would love that for you if they were nice thoughts. But if they were not so nice thoughts, if they were about your hair or your skin or your body shape not being good enough, I'm wondering if you can tune in and listen to whose voice it was that was saying those things to you about your body not being good enough. Was it really your voice? Or was it someone else's voice? Was it the voice of an ex? Was it the voice of your current partner? Was it the voice of a friggin' commentator on e News who was talking about some celebrity on the news last night that had a body that looked a lot like your body? Most of us have been looking at ourselves through someone else's eyes for so long that we forget what it's even like to look at ourselves through our own lens with our own voice. And to do that, we're gonna break down in episode eight today the difference between the female and the male gaze. And by gaze, I mean G-A-Z-E, because I know it is Pride Month, and we have been talking about the gaze all month, as in G-A-Y-S, but we today are talking about G-A-Z-E, gaze, as in the lens in which we look through something at something else. So today we are dissecting where does the female and male gaze come from? How did it get here? And what happens when you start to dissect them and recognize their existence and choose which one you're going to look at yourself through. Welcome back, my friends, to the Renaissance Room Podcast. If we haven't met, I'm Katie, your host, a boudoir photographer here in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I like to think I am your professional mythbuster, and today I am your reminder that your view of your body was never neutral. And we're gonna dig right into that today, okay? So buckle up. Today is all about the female versus the male gaze. Okay, my friends, if you listened

Breaking down Comp Het

SPEAKER_00 3:00

to last week's episode, I am very grateful. I heard from so many of you. It feels really nice to have told that very personal part of my story and my life and my feelings, especially because it's like ongoing and I still haven't figured it all out yet. It was really beautiful and wonderful to be met with so much love and support. So thank you so much for that. And if you missed that episode, it is episode seven. It is all about my coming out story and some other things that we are gonna talk a little bit about today. So if you missed that episode, go ahead and pop back to episode seven and take a listen and see what you might have missed. You can absolutely still listen to this episode standalone if you want to, but um, we do talk about a few concepts that we brought up in the episode about queerness. The main thing from the last episode that I want to touch on today while we're talking about the female versus the male gaze is the idea of compet, which we did slightly break down in the last episode, but compet is it stands for compulsory heterosexuality, which is the idea that when we are born, we aren't really given an option for anything other than heterosexuality. It is assumed by society that when you are born, you will be attracted to the person of the opposite gender. And I wanted to come back to it today because I think, as it turns out, compet and the male gaze are intertwined. And it's not going to come as a shocker to you to find out that it is also intertwined with the patriarchy. Let's explore a little bit how compet and the male gaze are kind of like the same words in a different font or the same system in a different outfit. Okay. Let's start there. So compet when we get to call it such a cute little tiny itty-bitty acronym nickname, is such a simple set of letters and short little phrase, but such a big concept. And it was most famously sort of articulated by Adrienne Rich in the 80s. So it hasn't really even been around that long of a phrase to like explain societally why we have this expectation. She came up with this concept, or at least is the most known for talking about it, of compulsory heterosexuality. She was saying that women being heterosexual isn't necessarily natural. It's a societal expectation. It's a script we're meant to read. We're given the script before we even can read, really. And that script or that structure that is compet is applied to little girls from a very young age. Quietly, constantly, and quite powerfully, to be honest. It starts as young as every single story that ever started with the term once upon a time, when a Prince Charming comes and chooses a woman, and it teaches us that a man choosing us is safety and happiness and success and desirability. And goddamn do all those things feel safe and good and great. Who doesn't want that? Who wouldn't want to feel that way as an adult if you're a little girl seeing these stories and being told that being chosen by a man will bring you everything you've ever wanted in your life? But what Adrienne was saying with Compet is that that Prince Charming feeling, that desire for desirability, that was never neutral. Those were instructions handed down to us. So all of that ties in together because heterosexuality and compulsory heterosexuality doesn't just determine who we desire, it also determines how we want to be desired. And

Male Gaze Intro

SPEAKER_00 7:00

that is why this is all tied together with the male gaze. It trains us to be a very specific object of desire in order to obtain that safety, that success feeling. So compet, male gaze, like I said, same title, different fucking font. They're part of the same system. Compet tells you who to want, male gaze tells you how to be wanted. And together, they're kind of like the software that's been running in the backgrounds of our brains that we never fucking ask to download. They've just been there. We inherited them. But the male gaze, man, it is like a better monitoring system than your fucking ring camera. Okay? I will get into how the male gaze even has women monitoring each other, let alone just the way that men are monitoring women's bodies, but this shit is a good security system for men. So the male gaze sort of like keeps us presentable for an audience. And sometimes the audience isn't just men, it's one another, it's women. And I think anyone who's ever felt like your desirability is a survival skill knows exactly how serious the male gaze can be. So let's dig in to the male gaze just a wee bit more. Where does the male gaze come from? Or the term anyway, because obviously the male gaze comes from Le Patriarch. But where did we get the language for it? Before we got the exact word for it, there are a few famous quotes, maybe not famous quotes, but quotes that I have heard that have previously stopped me in my tracks that explained what the male gaze was. There is a quote from John Berger. I know I'm bringing a man into the conversation, but I think you're gonna appreciate the realization that he had, okay? So he was describing the mechanics, if you will, of the male gaze in his work called The Ways of Seeing. And he wrote, Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relationship of women to themselves. Men look at women, and women essentially experience themselves being perceived. But do you feel that way? Because I read it like four times and I was like, wow. Yeah, that tracks for me. And the thing that I think is the most staggering

Self Surveillance

SPEAKER_00 9:45

about that, A, is that a man noticed it. So good job, buddy. And B is that it's not just explaining the objectification of women from the outside, which is the male gaze, but it's also touching on like self-surveillance, which is really what comes up in Boudoir all the time, is there is no man in here in the studio when we're taking pictures. There is a need to be a man in here. Because you, as the woman who's getting her very vulnerable photos taken, is already very aware of those perceived flaws. And you are already surveilling yourself and how you are going to be perceived by anyone who sees these photos before they're even seen. There is no man in here telling you this stuff. It isn't there's no male gaze physically in the studio when we're taking photos, but it follows women around. They take it with them everywhere that they go. Because the male gaze teaches us how to survey ourselves. Another quote that's very similar is by Margaret Atwood, who is the queen who wrote, you know, The Handmaid's Tales, The Powerball of the Sower. She has been quoted, and I can't remember what piece of work it's in, but I've heard it multiple times in the last couple months. Um, but she has written, You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. So wild and so true. You are a man inside of a woman watching a woman. What are we? We're our own movie that we're watching through the eyes of a male director. Like, how powerful and true and creepy and crazy is that. And that's why the male gaze is insidious as fuck. It's not just men policing women's bodies. Now we're also policing ourselves. Speaking of movies, uh, the woman who came up with the

History of the term Male Gaze

SPEAKER_00 12:00

term male gaze, or is at least again accredited with it, Laura Mulvey, was a movie writer critic. She was looking at observations about the way women were filmed. And at the time, and spoiler alert, also pretty much today, movies were written by, directed by, filmed by, and starred in by men. And for a very long time, it was assumed to be consumed by a male audience. So movies made by men for men. I think we still today see the oversexualization of women in movies. And when that happens, what what's really happening is it's turning women into objects as a thing in the movie instead of a subject in the movie. And while this writer who coined this term was talking about movies specifically, what she was really talking about was this big projection of what the female experiences in our world, in the patriarchy, in the workplace, in your home, in every system that we have, really, not just movies. And this next part about the male gaze feels hard even for me to admit after all these years. And I'm still unlearning it and still catching myself on it, but you don't actually have to be a man to look at the world through the male gaze. Women are trained to do it too. And I've already briefly mentioned this, but I thought maybe I could talk a little bit about my own experiences with it and my own realizations of it. I don't know about you, but I've certainly been guilty of getting dressed in the morning and wondering which people I'm gonna see that day and whether or not those people will like the outfit that I'm wearing. I'm not asking, do I like this outfit? Do I like this outfit with cool pink cheetahs on it? With puffy sleeves? Yeah, I fucking do. But am I asking myself, will the boomer aged man that I have to see today because of my work schedule like it? Will the girls at the cycle studio like it when I walk in to get change for my spin class? I'm not asking, do I like it? I'm asking, will all these people I don't even know if I'm gonna encounter today like it? And that question can range from, will this outfit make me safe today? Is this outfit considered by the male gays too promiscuous? I've asked myself, will this outfit make me desirable? If I'm going somewhere where I care about being desired by the people there, I might be wondering, is this cleavage enough? Does this show off my back muscles enough? Is my short skirt enough to be desirable to this person that I'm wishing to be desired by? It can even just be about acceptance, you know. If you're going to a party that you know everyone there has a, I don't know, coach bag. For me, that was in high school, the little coach bags, so popular. If I didn't have a coach bag, I wondered, would I be accepted by these other girls? The question of how am I presenting to others is very often on women's minds. And even though that all sounds quite vain, it's it's not vanity. It's like a coping tool. It's conditioning, right? The male gaze is not about how do I feel or how do I want to feel, it's about how will I be perceived

The Male Gaze in Boudoir

SPEAKER_00 15:40

by others. And I see this male gaze in boudoir all the time. I see it melting off of my clients when they're in front of my camera. I love the part of the process in boudoir when the client who was so infiltrated by the male gaze, which by the way is all of us, every client, but I love watching people see their revealed photos and falling in love with the way the light falls on their back rolls, or the way their legs that they spent years hating look strong and they look alive in the image. Or when a client says, You know what, Katie, actually, can you not retouch my face? I really love seeing my smile lines around around my eyes and my lips because that means, God, I've laughed a lot in this life, and how beautiful is that. That shit, that's the female gaze. That's when we break the male gaze from this like trap we've been in, and we start to look at ourselves through our own gaze. And maybe those things are happening for a client during their reveal, not because anything again changed about them, but what it is is their first opportunity to look at themselves outside of their self-surveillance. Their first opportunity to look at themselves in a totally different light through someone else's lens. They get to look at themselves outside of the self-punishment that they've put themselves through for not looking a certain way in order to be desirable and wanted. And I have to be honest, this is still a struggle for me, too, because hello, I live on this planet, I live inside this patriarchy, I live in this world, okay? I too often have to catch myself looking at myself through the male gaze. I catch myself looking in the mirror. In my partner, she catches me looking in the mirror sometimes, picking myself apart in a way that makes me stop and have to look in the mirror and ask myself, whose gaze am I looking at my body through? Is it mine? Is it a man's gaze? Is it society's gaze? Who actually hates my lower belly pouch? Is it really me? Do I really give a fuck about that extra fat, my lower belly? Do I really care if I have a little bit of cellulate on my butt after 36 years of life? Or is that somebody else who gives a fuck? And for me, as I'm unlearning how to perform compet and perform for the male gaze, because before I unlearned those things, before I came out, before I was a boudoir photographer, I could walk into a room full of women and feel competitive or threatened, or like I was constantly comparing myself to everybody else in the room, and that everyone else in the room was just a reminder of all of my failures or the benchmarks that I couldn't meet. And when I started to unlearn some of that, partially from coming out, partially from learning about the patriarchy, partially from becoming a boudoir photographer, all of those things helped me start to unlearn this like performative compet for the male gaze. But the thing that helped me the most was starting to ask myself, what do I find beautiful? What do I find sexy? What do I find desirable and attractive? Not what have I been told is desirable and attractive, but what do I actually think? What is my intuition when I drown out this compet male gaze noise? What do I think is stunning? And I try to bring that into my boudoir photography now. I actually sit and do like a five-minute meditation before every client comes in because I want to like actively ask my male gaze to put itself on the back burner before a session because every client that comes into my studio deserves a session from the female gaze. Like that I want them to have that. I want them to be able to look at themselves through a different lens than what society looks at them through. And because a boudoir session, at least with me, is more than just sexy pictures. It's kind of a rehearsal for a new way of seeing things, like a sandbox or a play area, for allowing you as the person in front of the camera to attempt being seen differently and then practice looking at yourself through that lens so that you can look at yourself through the female gaze moving forward after that photo shoot day into the future, far past the two hours we spend together in front of a camera. It's about getting to be witnessed and objectified in a way that doesn't reduce you. It's a photo shoot where you get to feel desired and desirable without being flattened to this like one-dimensional character in a movie made by a man for a man. I think all genders are capable of experiencing a gaze that's rooted in curiosity and respect and desire and tenderness instead of dominance. I think we can all use the female gaze as a way to look upon those who we want to be with, mate with, have sex with, be attracted to. All of those things can belong in desire without objectifying anyone. So if I had to sort of put all those definitions together, I think what the female gaze is, is all of those things with interiority, like giving a fuck about what's happening inside that person and their experiences. It's not just about their beautiful body and their abs or their boobs or their chiseled jawline or their booty. It's about what is happening inside that body, inside that human's experience. And that you know.

The Female Gaze

SPEAKER_00 22:00

My opinion makes for so much more compelling storytelling, imagery, relationships. But doesn't it feel hotter knowing that the person you're attracted to is experiencing desire, pleasure, safety? Like if I look at a picture of a woman from the female gaze versus the male gaze, I will look at this sexy picture of a woman from the male gaze and I wonder and worry, is she feeling safe? Did she consent to this? Does this make her feel powerful? Does this make her feel small? What is she feeling? And I already know that the fact that I'm asking those questions means that I could take the same picture of whatever body part is being sexualized in the sexy picture of a woman from a male's perspective, and I could take a same picture of that body part and still make a sexy as hell picture. But because I give a fuck about what's happening for that person in the image, the image will automatically have a female gaze, a female perspective. But when I'm in my studio, I am bringing the female gaze to the art that we're making. I'm asking you, how are you feeling? How do you want to feel? Do you want to feel dominant? Do you want to feel submissive? Do you want to feel playful? Do you want to feel confident? All of those things have places in our sensuality, in our sexuality. And to me, anyway, that is the difference between the male and the female gaze. What's happening inside for the person in the image? It can even be of a man. I still think I can look at a man from the female gaze because I will be caring about his inner world, what is happening for him, what is happening in his mind, what is his experience, and that's gonna come out in the art. And I think that shows up if you watch certain movies by female directors. I think you can feel that compared to a male director. There's so much more built upon the characters, especially the female characters in her world, like little women, or like fucking anything Greta Gerwig does, even the Barbie movie. The Barbie movie is like basically this. The whole movie is Barbie realizing that she was made in the male image, the male gaze, and that she is a thing before she's a person. Like, I mean, I guess maybe I just have a thing for Greta Gerwig and the way she portrays women, but there are so many movies and examples to bring it all back to the movie analogies that the female gaze can still be beautiful and powerful and hot and sexy and fun and flirty and all the things that maybe men think that they're making their female characters seem in movies. But the difference is does anyone give a shit about what's happening inside that person for their experience? Do we care about their feelings? Do we care about their fears? Do we care about their comfort? Do we care about their wants or their needs or their desires? Right? I think men can practice the female gaze easily. They definitely can. They can care about the person in the body, in the story they're telling, when they're writing books, when they're writing TV shows, when they're writing movies, when they're caring about the women in their lives, they can do it. And we can too. And we get to choose every day. Isn't that cool? We get to wake up and say, Am I gonna look at my body through the male gaze or the female

How to change your own gaze

SPEAKER_00 25:30

gaze? And really the first step to changing how you look at yourself is noticing, is listening to a podcast like this, or catching a TikTok clip, or watching a YouTube video about what is the male versus the female gaze, and internalizing it and catching it and noticing when you look in the mirror. Is this my voice or is this the voice of the patriarchy? Is this my voice or is this Don Draper from Mad Men? Who's talking to me right now about this part of my body? Am I really witnessing myself as I am right now, or am I auditing myself, checking all the check mark boxes of what I do and don't have? And noticing it, even just asking yourself that question to start with. If you still can't answer it, the tiny itty bitty pause in between looking at yourself in the mirror and starting to do that picking apart checklist, just that millisecond moment of asking yourself this question is making a difference, even if you can't answer it yet. And even if you can't say, Oh, I know whose voice this is, I'm gonna quiet it down. Just the act of stopping and saying, Huh, I wonder whose voice this is that's saying this gnarly thing about me in the mirror, that is a great start. And if you can do that, and the next step is getting curious, literally looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, Do I really hate my stomach? Or does somebody else hate my stomach? Who hates my stomach? Where did I get this hate for my stomach from? Does it even belong to me? Because if you start pulling on that thread, that thread of a question, you almost always find that at the end of that thread is the patriarchy. And not just the patriarchy, but all of the isms you're gonna find at the end of that thread. You're gonna find racism and ableism and fatphobia and transphobia and classism. You're gonna probably find at the end of that little tiny thread all of the systems that are deciding which bodies are desirable, worthy, attractive, safe, and visible in the first place. And all of that to say is that I am aware that the way I personally have experienced the male gaze is still from a place of extreme privilege and protection that other groups do not get. And this conversation gets even heavier and more complicated for the bodies who are less protected than mine in this world. And I am very happy to do another episode on some of those other isms in the ways that many, many, many, many marginalized bodies get an even shorter end of the stick. So the last thing that we can do to shift our gaze from this sort of like inner male gaze critic to a more female gaze is to continue putting ourselves and our bodies in spaces that feel safe to explore this idea. Places that allow you to be in your body fully, places that allow you to explore what it's like to be in your body fully, because some of us have never even done that before. Places that are going to remind you that you are a subject, not an object. You're the main character, not a woman written by a man into a movie just to drive the plot line of the man character. And for some people, that's movement classes. Sometimes that's pole dancing. I love going to pole. Maybe it's spin classes, maybe it's yoga, maybe it's Pilates. Anything that helps you feel confident and strong and beautiful in your body is a great step to do. For some people, it's boudoir. Maybe it's not an every year or every decade, even thing, that you can do. But if you've been thinking about it, I can tell you it is one seriously awesome place to experience embodiment and then walk away with a pretty dope souvenir of a reminder of how awesome you felt in your body on the day that you were brave enough to get in front of a big old camera in your underwear. And boudoir is a powerful experience, not because anything about your body changes. The only thing that changes, and I've said this before, is your perspective on your body. And maybe this whole male versus female gaze thing is the best way I can explain what I'm trying to do in the Ren Room. And it's not that I'm trying to create the absolute most flattering image that helps you pass some invisible external test about what your body's supposed to look like. What I'm trying to do is capture an image that's so you you've never even seen it before. Because maybe you've been looking at you through your own male gaze, right? Finding an image in the pile of many images that we take in a day that makes you look at it and say, Oh my god, that is me. That is multi-dimensional me, sensual me, desirable me, playful me, strong me, confident me. All of those things can exist in one singular boudoir photo. And when I see that sparkle in a client's eye, when they

Final Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 30:45

grasp all of that, about one picture of them, that is what I'm trying to do at every single session. That's the shift, that's the whole thing, that's the whole kit and caboodle. If I can do that, my mission is complete. And I will leave you with this final thought. And I do believe this episode has gone over 30 minutes already, so I'm sorry. But I will leave you with this final thought, which is that we were never meant to spend our lives performing for an audience we didn't choose. We didn't fucking ask for this, okay? We did not ask to be performing for the male gaze. So guess what? That means that you get to choose what is beautiful. You get to choose the gaze that you see yourself through. You're allowed to choose images and clothes and lovers and hobbies and passions that feel good for you and no one else. So if I give you nothing else in this episode other than a lot of yapping, I give you permission to do just that. You don't have to keep performing for this audience. Perform for an audience of one and let that be you. And I'm really proud of all of us for having these conversations and digging in because they're uncomfy and they're not fun. I mean, they're fun, but they're, you know, they're hard to, they're hard to hear, they're hard to digest. Um, but you're here and you're listening and you're digesting, and I'm really proud of you. And if we can all just continue to look in the mirror and question who is the inner critic that is saying those gnarly things to us in the mirror. And if you are doing that work with me right now, awkwardly, imperfectly, one mirror glance at a time, then you are making progress. We are all making little baby steps towards being our most empowered, unique, and truest selves every single day. We're doing great, guys. Okay, it's the end of Pride Month. I have more Pride parties to go to. I gotta go, but I'll see you guys in July. Thank you so much for listening. La la love you.