'Chicks'

As Women’s Month ended a week ago, so I am writing this week on Male Gaze, Sexual
Objectification and Self Actualization. Let me begin with an excerpt from Carol Shields' Unless,
pp. 135-137:
Insofar As
October 8, 2000

Dear Sirs:
I was feeling more than usually depressed last night over personal matters and I happened to
be sitting in a big armchair skimming through the latest issue of your magazine, which my
spouse thoughtfully picked up for me at the local Mags & Fags...

I couldn't help noticing that you have sold one of your very expensive advertising pages to what
appears to be a faux institution of some kind. The density of the typography and its brown
uncurling script are attempting to avoid the usual four-colour commercial blast, but without
success. There's actually a lot of hustle on this page.

The product, in any case, is Great Minds of the Western Intellectual World: Galileo, Kant, Hegel,
Bacon, Newton, Plato, Locke, and Descartes. Small but very authentic-looking engravings of
these gentlemen's heads form a tight (let us say impregnable) band across the top of the page,
and what is suggested is a continuum of learning, a ceaseless conveyor belt of noble thoughts,
extracts of which are recorded, as you explain further down on the page, in eighty-four (84) half-
hour lecture tapes, which one may listen to as he [assumed pronoun] walks or jogs or
commutes or does the CHORES [my emphasis].

That's a great number of half-hours given over to learning, you will agree, but at least a
subscriber will be saved, according to the advertising copy, "years of intense reading and study"
and, even worse, "complete withdrawal from active life."

You can awaken your mind "without having to quit your job or become a hermit." A hermit! That
scholar will be guided in his study by the Faculty; that's Darren (skipping last names), Alan,
Dennis, Phillip, Jeremy, Robert, another Robert, Kathleen (Kathleen?), Louis, Mark, and
Douglas. My question is: How did Kathleen make it to this race?

I might as well admit that I am troubled these days (and nights) by such questions. I have a
nineteen-year-old daughter who is going through a sort of soak of depression — actually her
condition has not yet been diagnosed — which a friend of mine suspects is brought by about by
such offerings as your Great Minds of the WIW, not just your particular October ad, of course,
but a long accumulation of shaded brown print and noble brows, reproduced year after year, all
of it pressing down insidiously and expressing a callous lack of curiosity about great women's
minds, a complete unawareness, in fact.

You will respond to my comments with a long list of rights women have won and you will insist
that the playing field is level, but you must see that it is not. I can't be the only one who sees
this.
I realize I cannot influence your advertising policy. My only hope is that my daughter, her name
is Norah, will not pick up a copy of this magazine, read this page, and understand, as I have for
the first time now, how casually and completely she is shut out of the universe. I have two other
daughters too — Christine, Natalie — and I worry about them both. All the time.

Yours,
Reta Winters
The Hermitage
Orangetown, Canada
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74462.Unless

***
And this is why I am so offended by the ‘Male Gaze.’ This is why I am offended when men I
know treat women as ‘chicks.’

Patriarchy has oppressed women for centuries, and as British sociologist Sylvia Walby points
out, culture is one of the six pillars of Patriarchy.

The culture of Western societies has consistently distinguished between men and women and
expected different behaviors from them, but the expected patterns of behavior have changed.
The key sign of femininity today is sexual attractiveness to men.
https://revisesociology.com/2017/01/10/patriarchy-structure-walby-sylvia/

***
Don’t get me wrong. I am not being sour grapes here. I am not unattractive, and I can be a
stunner (well, at least for my age!) if I spend time, energy, and resources on making myself
more attractive, like on beauty products, as a good friend of mine suggested.

But why should I? Why should my value be measured by how I look? How will that -- how I look
-- contribute to humanity, to creating a better world?

If I spent 20 minutes in the morning every day fixing my face, that could have been 20 minutes
spent writing a poem, preparing food for a loved one, saying a prayer for world peace, or
learning how to code.

And did you know that the amount of money all women worldwide spend on cosmetics is likely
enough to solve world hunger?

You do the math; you extrapolate:

https://uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/British-women-spend-10-billion-annually-on-cosmetics-and-
hair-products,833971.html
https://www.sphericalinsights.com/reports/cosmetics-market#

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/ending-world-hunger-by-2030-
would-cost-330bn-study-finds

***
As Naomi Wolf argues in her book The Beauty Myth (1991), beauty is the “last, best belief
system that keeps male dominance intact.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1205027-
beauty-is-a-currency-system-like-the-gold-standard-like

“Or in short, somehow, we've been flogged by the idea that to be beautiful (which we must, or
else no one will love us), we have to look a certain way: thin, youthful, smooth-skinned, small-
nosed, silky-haired, etc. Hey presto: your average woman feels ugly her entire life and old, too,
for most of it. What better way of keeping her in her place?” (Emily Wilson, The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/18/classics.shopping
***
And then, when young girls internalize this objectification, it can be so dangerous -- leading to
body dysphoria, depression and eating disorders:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1740144514000357

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
229638479_A_Test_Of_Objectification_Theory_The_Effect_Of_The_Male_Gaze_On_Appeara
nce_Concerns_In_College_Women

Most of all, when women and girls are encouraged to spend so much time on their appearance,
they are less likely to develop their talents and skills and to self-actualize.

And when that happens, society and humanity, as a whole, loses out. We all lose out. ###