(I've been away for awhile, going through a drug trial that proved way successful, but sadly I had to back off the drug once the trial was over and resume a standard anti-depressant, so just now I've gotten back to the point where I've got things to write, ironically since Nancy and I leave on May 20th to backpack for two months, so I doubt I'll be able to blog from the trail: my iPhone requires laborious typing. Anyway, this post has nothing to do with my depression . . . or does it?)
Our culture creates a gaze, a giant Eye, primarily through media but also through the way our media selects what stories or episodes of "human interest" to reflect, and our Eye has always been - though in the era of assertive feminism was slightly, significantly less - proudly consumerist. Now, when we read "our media" we are tempted to see "elite, rich, Liberal-North-East-educated," based on the success of right-leaning rhetoric, but that reflects the owners of our media rather than the consumers of our media. Instead, our media reflects what sells, and what sells equals what sells the most, and the most consumers are all the regular folks, the non-elites, the heartland-educated, the me's and you's of ordinary, everyday folk. And one primary consumerist strain - and since the primary consumer tends to be a man, the patriarchal strain - through the regular folk is this: men's bodies are private property, to be covered and respected and left alone, while women's bodies are public property, to be exposed for evaluation, respected only if they pass some standard of reproductive value = "hotness," and even then used as a commodity for whatever purpose men acquire them for. Don't believe me, look how universal standards of clothing - males in baggy shirts and pants and hats, females in tight, short skirts baring legs and arms and hair flowing free and heavily made up - appear not just among media-types - celebrities, athletes, video stars - but among college students, high school students, even - and here's the "get 'em while they're young" terror - among elementary students and kindergartners. The Eye consumes females - women and young women and girls - reflecting an unashamed Male gaze, and men in turn are encouraged to commodify women's and young women's and girls' bodies and, thus, women and young women and girls themselves.
I have had feminist tendencies as long as I can remember, primarily (I think) because for the first ten years of my life (before my Mom married my Dad) I was raised by frightfully independent and capable regular-folk women - my Mom and my Grandmother. This does not mean I'm innocent of joining rapturously with that Eye: I'm not, by a long shot. I remember when I was five and learning to draw, one of the things I drew was a naked girl chained face-down on a conveyor belt (I am not making this up, though I may be sharing too much information) because I got some kind of thrill (certainly not fully sexual at so young an age, but surely pre-sexual) looking at the Coppertone add (reputed to be Jodie Foster) where we see the cute little dog pull down the cute little girl's bikini bottoms (she wears no top, being pre-pubescent) at the moment when we get to see her shock and surprise and helplessness while getting to appreciate the marked tan lines that emphasize her bare bottom, and to this day I don't know where the conveyer belt came from except that in some way I realized even then, even at a young age, that I was drawing a product not a person. Now, you may say, "Jeff, from a young age you were creeping on women," and you'd be right. But I make a claim to feminism or at least the feminist impulse because of how ashamed I was of that drawing: I had a naggingly clear sense that what I drew was wrong, I just didn't know why. You see, feminism - or, if you want to be more universal, humanism - or, if you want to be almost as universal as you can get, beingism (gee, if I add non-beingism I'll reach the Tao) - speaks to that deep place where we know we shouldn't be made into a consumable so we shouldn't make anyone else into a consumable, and the place where all that starts is in how much we get to see of another person - whether their skin, or erogenous zones, or genitals, or even - and horror is never far from commodification - their blood and viscera. And all these little viewpoints - as feminism so rightly told us making us even more conflicted by strutting braless and proud and holy - add up to one big giant all-seeing Eye.
Years ago, before I had studied feminism academically and found my place there (ask me sometime about being the only male in a class on "Feminist Christian Ethics" and I leave it to you to speculate why I was the only male in the class even though it was while I was at Candler which some called a rather "liberal" school of Theology), I saw a perfect presentiment of today's Post-Feminist Eye that in the depths of feminist vigor I never thought I'd see return. Again, this is probably telling too much but if I've learned one thing being a feminist, it's that feminism needs male feminists to speak honestly about male conflictedness, so I'm willing to speak openly about maleness even if it's shameful. Around 1985, a good friend was getting married, and believe it or not none of the five of us had ever been to a strip club. So, after tucking into massive steaks and potatoes and drinks, we hopped down to a locally infamous joint to ogle the women, and we all - my four friends and I and everyone in the place - so vigorously ogled, but - here's an example of conflicted - surreptitiously, if you can believe it, glancing here and there, pretending not to see, or looking determinedly into a stripper's eyes instead of where we wanted to look. Except for this one guy, seated at the dance stage, an ordinary Joe telling by his dress - oops, clothes - but one willing to hold out a $20.00 bill to a woman dancing on the stage, holding out the bill until she had danced to his satisfaction, naked except for a g-string (sound familiar), and only after she had turned her back and done the splits two feet in front of his face did he nod without a smile on his face, signaling his hard-won approval, and slip that twenty into her string. I am so heartbroken today, because the Eye I experience - the pervasive, media-centric, consuming Eye - is the same Eye he wore in his hard, hungry face.
The Eye is Post-Feminist, not because women have gained a commodification-free autonomy so that the Eye has morphed into my Mom's tearful eyes as she gazed on my childish, "it's wicked and it's wrong" sketch of female bondage as commodity, but because though I can't believe I'm typing this twenty years after my feminist education the male objectifying gaze has snapped back with such fury not over the protest of women and young women and even girls, but because the Eye depicts women and young women and girls as happily complicit, willfully submissive, and it's all in good fun and body-forward and healthy (provided you're "hot"), though I know that can't be the truth, that no one really wants to be an object, a commodity, though our culture's assertion that we must "brand ourselves" and the fierceness with which so many of us (even me, I confess) uncritically adopt such language certainly questions my supposed knowing, and I find it's not just women, but it's men, too, men like me who seek attention and notice, and who want to parlay that into income, and fame, and brand-loyalty, Post-Feminist because I and us learned nothing from the Feminist movement (though it still lives, quietly), particularly Feminism's most humanizing lesson: we are in our essence free and beautiful persons, all of us, I and Thou, until one of us looks at another as a thing to be consumed, possessed, owned, then we both become objects of critique, and scorn, and assessment, and price, advertised in selfies and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and the seemingly infinite ways we can take pictures of ourselves for another's appraisal, unwitting but still-for-some-reason-slightly ashamed parts-per-billion that make up that sleepless, unblinking, derisive, degrading, all-consuming Eye.
