The Internalized Male Gaze and Self-Objectification

The Internalized Male Gaze and Self-Objectification

[00:00:00] Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy:

pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are [00:01:00] your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood- The Robber Bride. 

Ramshackle Glory: Dahlia never showed me nothing but kindness. She would say, "I know how sad you get". And some days I still get that way, but it gets better. It gets better. It gets better. Sweetie, it gets better, I promise you. And she'd tell me. She'd tell me. Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. Keep on loving, keep on fighting. And hold on. And hold on. Hold on for your [00:02:00] life. 

Hi there. Thank you so much for joining me.

I'm Hecate, and this is Finding OK, a healing podcast for survivors of sexual assault and any and all abuse. When survivors share, we share strength. You are not alone.

Today I'm going to be talking about the internalized male gaze, objectification, and how it can intersect with the sexual healing so many of us are doing post-trauma. This episode is mostly for the listeners who are women, femmes, or assigned female at birth, and who have been objectified and sexualized most under patriarchy. These are some thoughts I've been mulling over for a while in my own healing, and they may or may not be things that you're ready to tackle if your trauma is very fresh.

But as always, take what resonates and leave the rest. Let's get into it. 

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Trigger and content warnings for this episode include the following, patriarchy, sexuality, sex, the subject of abuse, but no specifics, eating disorders, weight, body image, and strong language. Please check in with yourself and make sure you're all right to continue.

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Thank you.

I first heard that Margaret Atwood poem a few years ago and it blew me away because it verbalized something that I had never been able to put into words before. I've been chewing on it ever since, and in this episode I'm going to talk about some of the internal healing and deconstruction work I've been doing in my own head.

It's very much a process for me, but it's my hope that it might resonate or prove useful to others.

First, I want to quickly make sure we're all familiar with the term, "the male gaze". I promise you it's a massive part of your life, whether you realize it or not. It's a feminist term coined by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 [00:05:00] essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. I first came across the term in art college.

Whenever an artist creates anything, they have to consider their audience or their viewer. And whenever you view art or media, you should definitely consider who created it and whether or not you are the target audience. What the term "male gaze" articulates is that most art, literature, and media is depicting women from a predominantly cis, heterosexual, masculine perspective.

Women are sexualized and objectified and it's so built into everything that we don't always notice or question it. The male gaze is the filter that is always upon women and AFAB people, and it is also within nearly

all the [00:06:00] media and art that surrounds us and bombards us constantly.

An excellent documentary about this is Miss Representation, which deals with the representation of women in film, tv, and advertisements. It is eye-opening and kind of soul crushing. The intro montage to that movie lives in my head rent free, and I cry every time I see it. I sobbed the first time I saw it because it drove home what I had been subjected to my entire life without comprehending it.

I consider it a must watch, and you can find a link in episode notes.

Something you see looking back through Western Art History is that women are often portrayed from a voyeuristic male perspective.

So many paintings of naked women reclining, [00:07:00] or dressing, or bathing, as if viewed through a keyhole. The specter of the male artist and the presumably male viewer watching her without her knowledge, her ignorance and lack of agency a part of what makes her beautiful and unchallenging.

A flesh vase in a human still life. It's that voyeurism aspect that I want to talk about, especially because I didn't fully understand how deeply it affected me until I heard that Atwood poem, and it crystallized something kind of nebulous for me. When I think about the male gaze, I don't just think about media and artistic representation.

For me, it's not just about male authors writing, "She breasted boobily down the stairs" and sexualizing every mundane moment of our existence, I also tend to think of [00:08:00] the everyday weight of men looking at me and watching me. It starts so early you don't even realize it's happening, and then once you realize it, you're supposed to pretend it's not happening, even though their eyes are constantly on you.

We're raised under that immense weight of the male gaze. I don't remember the exact moment I realized men were always watching me. It was something gradual, but it was a part of growing up and understanding what it meant to exist in the world. It wasn't just that I was being perceived, but that I was being perceived by men, and that they would constantly make it my problem. And if they didn't, I was expected to make it my own problem.

I owed them and their unsolicited opinions consideration. Pretty was the [00:09:00] rent I owed for existing in public; actually, for existing at all.

I wasn't able to turn that feeling of being watched on and off. It had started too early and without my understanding. It was made clear to me that I should always appear to my best advantage, a walking work of art, a seemingly unconscious snapshot for some random man's experience.

I never knew when they were looking, so it was best to assume they were always looking.

Be aware of the way I stand and sit, cross my legs, bend at the knees, not at the waist. Be aware of how my hair falls across my face, or of the curve of my neck, and my thoughtful expression. When I exist like a walking painting, men come up to tell me I'm beautiful. I don't want that necessarily, but when I [00:10:00] don't exist like this,

then men come up to tell me to smile or cheer up.

They tell me to fix my face.

One is less disruptive than the other, and they were going to interrupt me and demand my time anyway. They believe they're entitled to your time and the world will tell you they're right. This is how I existed since I can remember, a model, always at work and being judged, but never paid.

And sweetheart, you never know when your future husband is watching, so you better look gorgeous, but unaware of it constantly. What a fucking drain on a person's energy. The patriarchy is the program opened in the background, constantly draining a person's battery while they try to actually accomplish things in the world.

Hard to exist authentically while programmed to be unconsciously attractive without being self-conscious, or [00:11:00] God forbid, vain or even just aware of your own beauty. Be fuckable, but oblivious to your own objectification. Fucking hell, what a nightmare. I imagine this experience is even more intense for people who are raised in a religion with an ever watchful masculine deity or sky daddy.

But that's a whole other kettle of fish. My version of America Ferrera's monologue from Barbie would be filled with way more rage and profanity.

But I think you get it, and I hope you're on the same page as I continue.

What I wanna talk about is that internalized male gaze, the way we become our own voyeur without realizing it. As Atwood put it, "peering through the keyhole in your own head. If nowhere else, you are a woman with a man inside watching a woman". It's similar to the way we as abuse [00:12:00] survivors begin self-monitoring.

We learned to anticipate the needs, desires, moods, and triggers of our abusers as a survival skill. A part of healing for so many of us is actually being conscious of the way that we internalized those things and how they became patterns that were difficult to break even after escaping the abuse.

We often internalize our abusers in a way that that anticipation of their needs involves us taking over for our abusers and doing their job for them, even after they're gone. We can continue negative thought patterns and self-abuse in our own heads that we learned from them. Their abusive voice becomes the cruel voice in our own heads.

It's really similar with the internalized male gaze. We learn to [00:13:00] anticipate the wishes of the watcher, and the watcher is always a man. So many of us confess to a sort of Truman show experience, feeling an invisible audience, even when we're alone.

I honestly wonder if some of that could be linked to this internalized voyeur, the man in our mind that patriarchy installed without our knowledge or consent.

Now, I do wanna take a minute to address something. If any part of you is asking, " Hecate, I know you're non-binary and identify as both man, woman, neither, and all. Are you actually just a confused cis woman, and this invalidates your non-binary experience?" Thank you for asking. Uh, no, that's completely different.

Moving on. What I'd like to talk about next is how this intersects with sexuality, or at least how it intersects with my [00:14:00] sexuality.

About eight years ago, I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder and my doctors took me off all my psych meds. Coming off the meds I was on was very intense, and as my body changed,

I realized I had never actually recovered from my eating disorder. As a kid I had just shifted to a new goal weight that doctors and people around me found more acceptable, and everyone pretended the problem was solved. Being taken off multiple psych meds, so suddenly meant my body changed.

I gained 50 pounds, and that's a big deal for someone with an unresolved eating disorder. It's a big deal for anyone. The way I see it is that part of getting healthier for me has meant getting bigger and taking up more space.

Both figuratively and literally. It's been [00:15:00] extremely challenging and has stirred up a lot of unresolved issues over the past several years. Something I noticed was how dramatically my weight gain affected my comfort being intimate with my partner.

Yes, we are going to talk about sex now. It took a while to dissect what I was experiencing. It wasn't just that I became self-conscious in bed because my body was different.

I absolutely was, and I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful partner who talked with me about it and assured me that I was loved and that not only was he into me because of who I am, but that he also found the changes pretty sexy too. He wanted me to be healthy and happy, and he also, blessedly, loves big butts.

That helped to hear, it really did. But it didn't solve the issues I was experiencing. It wasn't just that I was afraid my [00:16:00] partner didn't find me sexy. It was that I didn't find myself sexy. I no longer felt sexy, or felt aroused, or felt worthy of pleasure or sex. I felt like I had lost worth by no longer conforming to society's deeply problematic beauty standards.

It was a disturbing realization because I have no respect for those standards. But now that I was existing in a bigger body, I was suddenly realizing how much of my identity was wrapped up in them, against my will.

It was pretty fucked up. It still is. When I realized I didn't feel worthy of sex or pleasure, and that my body image was actually disrupting my ability to feel any arousal at all, I realized this was something that ran really deep and was going to take a lot of inner work and patience to [00:17:00] dismantle. It's weird to talk about out loud, so bear with me.

Referring back to the male gaze, our ideas about sex, pleasure, and intimacy are deeply influenced by film, TV, and pornography. Most of us are exposed to dramatized performances of women's pleasure before we ever really experience much of it ourselves. Most of us have probably seen an actress basically fake an orgasm over a cheeseburger in a commercial before we've ever had an orgasm ourselves.

If we've had an orgasm ourselves.

But all the non-male pleasure we're shown in mainstream media and in most pornography is usually for men's benefit and consumption. It's a performance. The focus is on women and non men performing pleasure for the [00:18:00] benefit of men.

The focus isn't on authentic pleasure. That's generally demonized by society. And plus-sized women's pleasure and sexuality is more often a subject of mockery or jest in mainstream media.

Most of the sex scenes I can think of with plus-sized actresses in movies or shows that weren't for laughs, aired very recently. It matters that almost all the women I saw on screen, or even in the books I read that got to fall in love and have sex were slender or malnourished.

Pair that with the message I received from society and the people in my life, that no one would love me if I got bigger,

or that a cis male partner would fall out of love, leave me, or lose interest if I got bigger as I aged or if I had [00:19:00] children. That's serious baggage. I realized that for me, it wasn't just that I was self-conscious, it was deeper and multifaceted.

Once I started investigating what was getting in the way for me during sex, I realized that what I was labeling as self-consciousness, insecurity, and body image issues was also tied to a performance. I mean, that I realized there was a performative element to my having sex even after 17 years of being in a loving, healthy, and stable relationship.

This is no fault of my current partner. It's stuff that's been deeply ingrained by growing up AFAB in this society, being subjected to the male gaze, and also trauma from past partners. I'm not going to get into it in this episode, but I think a lot of survivors who experienced sexual abuse within [00:20:00] relationships tend to have trauma and patterns tied to performing sexual enjoyment for their partners.

For many of us, it was a matter of survival.

As I started thinking about all of this, I realized that during sex, I had always subconsciously been thinking about what I looked like to my partners, the sounds I was making. Of course, I was trying to make sure it was enjoyable, but it was the way I was doing that; I was trying to curate a sexual experience for them.

I'm specifically talking about my cis male partners right now. It was always impressed upon me that men are visual creatures, and so being beautiful or ethereal in bed was in my mind. Any second of our time together could be a snapshot that lasted a lifetime for him. I was [00:21:00] curating memories and experience.

A big part of having sex was being sexy. This meant that inner voyeur, that man that patriarchy installed in my head was always sitting behind my eyes and essentially a part of every encounter. A part of me was always mindful of being pleasing to the male gaze, and that meant objectifying myself to a certain degree, again, without even realizing I was doing it, and in the most intimate moments of being together physically with someone I loved.

When my body changed and my libido evaporated, I realized that my sexuality was linked to self-objectification, to perceiving myself as a sex object. When my body no longer fit the mold of skinny, fragile little fuck toy, [00:22:00] my connection to my own sexuality was interrupted.

When I believed my body ceased to be an object of desire, I ceased experiencing desire. My partner certainly didn't stop desiring me, but the man in my head did. I think this is because all of my formative years, I was taught to see myself as a sex object.

And when that object ceased to conform to beauty standards, I had no clear direction to my healthy body experiencing desire, arousal pleasure, or sexual gratification. I didn't even feel worthy of being seen. That's actually tragic. That's really fucking sad and fucked up.

I'm still finding and forging those new and healthy pathways. This is an ongoing journey for me, and these [00:23:00] realizations were honestly sparked by hearing that Margaret Atwood poem for the first time a couple years ago.

I wanted to articulate this because it's some deep inner work that might be helpful and relatable to other survivors struggling with similar issues.

A lot of the time we think about healing the sexual aspect of our trauma in very simple terms; of being able to have sex without being triggered, or having flashbacks, or feeling safe with a partner. Those are so real and so important, and those are things that I've had to tackle as well. But there are these really weird, deep aspects to healing that intersect with both our trauma and with patriarchy and all the programming it secretly installed in our brains and bodies without our permission.

Identifying, dismantling, and uninstalling those thoughts, [00:24:00] patterns, and programs is both insanely intellectual and also very embodied and somatic for me. Since I started existing in a bigger body, I have felt cut off from my own sexuality,

but I've also felt more free, and empowered, and more rooted in myself than I ever have in my entire life. I'm not sure if I'm actually looked at less or if it's that that man in my head is telling me I'm being looked at less. But I love it. The energy I used to subconsciously devote to being perceived as attractive can now be devoted to other things, and there are so many more interesting things to be than "pretty".

Pretty is not the rent you owe for existing. I've [00:25:00] been falling in love with becoming more myself and embracing this next part of my life now that I'm not young and skinny.

It's wonderful. It's natural for bodies to change as they age, and I'm doing my best to connect with that. I am trying to be extremely conscious in paving a new path to experiencing sex and desire in a more authentic way for myself in a healthy and fuller body, discovering both by myself and with my partner, what more authentic and less performative pleasure looks like. I haven't read it yet, but one of the next books on my reading list is The Body is Not An Apology. The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor. I hear really wonderful things and it is right on topic. Probably should have read it before creating this episode, but this felt really [00:26:00] urgent to talk about for me, and there's always more research that can be done.

If I wait till I'm an expert on every thought and subject, I'll never talk about anything and this is a process. So here I am in that process.

A another huge part of my process has been spicy literature, and I do actually plan to do a whole episode about the important role that can play in healing. That'll be a fun episode.

So yeah. In closing, I just want to note that this is a part of why I call Finding OK an intersectional healing podcast. We can't comprehend or heal from the violence we faced without reckoning with the systems and institutions of oppression that have facilitated and enabled that violence.

As a person existing in a body that was assigned female at birth.

I have been subjected to not just physical violence as a part of that, but also [00:27:00] systemic violence. It's important to remember that violence is not just physical; it can be mental, emotional, financial, spiritual. Survivors know this. We experience many forms of abuse, all devastating and traumatic, only to be told that physical abuse is the only kind that's valid. And then that's often excused as well. An overarching aspect of systemic violence is dehumanization.

Power structures dehumanize many groups of people in order to justify systemic violence against them. You have to face the dehumanization you've been subjected to in order to grapple with the dehumanization you've internalized unintentionally.

I want to more fully and authentically have human experiences like physical intimacy that have been disrupted [00:28:00] by my own systemic dehumanization. I want to stop seeing myself as a sex object and start experiencing sex more fully as a human. I want to radically humanize myself. I want to feel safe and at home in my own body, and I want to fully feel desire and pleasure, and I want to believe that I'm worthy of that, that my body is inherently deserving of those good and beautiful things.

I know it is, but I want to believe it and feel that truth. I'm still figuring out how, but acknowledging these issues is a part of what will bring me closer.

I think creating this episode and talking about it will help me towards my goal, which is turning around inside my own [00:29:00] mind to look that inner voyeur in the eyes and punching him in the fucking throat.

I hope these thoughts have been helpful in your own healing journey, and I wish you success in your own internal throat punching process.

Again, take what resonates and leave the rest.

Thank you so much for listening. Please check episode notes. It's where you can find all my links so you can check out my website, follow me on social media, subscribe on YouTube, and catch me live on Twitch. I want to remind everyone that with the disruption and changes we've been seeing with social media platforms, this is a good time

to make sure you're following creators, organizations, educators, artists, and activists on other platforms in case they're forced to move elsewhere and so you can have access to anything they might be producing that's being censored by social [00:30:00] media. We need to stick together and stay connected.

I especially encourage you to support your favorite creators on platforms like Patreon and Substack. If you didn't know, it's free to follow someone on Patreon if you can't afford a subscription. A massive shout out to all the Patrons that made today's episode possible. Thank you Emerald, Meadow, Urja, Kathleen, Sedonka, Bryony, The Gob,

Hannah, Erica, Grim Glutton, 

Felix,

 And welcome Maha the mighty Meehee. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's so good to have you with us.

I also want to give an extra special shout out

to two incredible people who swooped in with large game changing donations since the last episode.

Thank you Inner. I am so grateful and so glad that episode was helpful for you. That was such a [00:31:00] beautiful surprise when I saw your gift pop up with your lovely message.

Thank you. So much love to you on your healing journey. Huge thank you also to Tiny Haggis. You are an angel and a gem, and you have funded a full month of the podcast. Your generosity and kind words have made me tear up more times than I can count this last month.

Moran taing.

Many thanks. I appreciate all of you more than I can ever say, and I couldn't do this without you. Thank you for your support and for helping Keep Finding OK available to survivors around the world.

Today's episode was edited and produced by me, Hecate. The music is, Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist used with the permission of Ramshackle Glory. Thank you again for listening. This has been Finding OK.

Destroy the [00:32:00] Kyriarchy and keep working towards collective liberation. Take care of yourself, and take care of each other.

Ramshackle Glory: Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. Keep on loving. Keep on fighting. And hold on and hold on. Hold on for your life. For your life. Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. Keep on loving. Keep on fighting. And hold on, and hold on. Hold on for your life.

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