I Get Too Hungry for Dinner at 8

“The threat of the male gaze has been making many women and gay men ill for years, but men’s magazines show that the threat has now become general enough to be counted a cultural worry. All men now experience other men’s looks, and that is one of the anxieties these magazines sometimes exploit and sometimes suppress.” –Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books

I spent a good part of my life being influenced by “the male gaze.” My dad had no idea how to contend with my mother, let alone how to relate to a daughter, so it became important to me at an early age to be fairly “boyish.” I wouldn’t wear dresses or skirts. I asked for and received toy guns, learned to use a grease gun and helped to reload shotgun shells. I had by own compound bow and .22 rifle. I played ball, climbed trees, insisted on a red boy’s bike with a thing on the handle that made noises like a revving motorcycle, I picked up and/or touched all manner of gross things, and I never, ever cried in front of anyone. Why?

Sometimes I honestly liked the butch things I did, had, and wore, but mostly I just wanted to be with my dad. I wanted him to like me and to approve of me, and it just seemed like the more boyish I was, the better he’d like it.

Don’t get me wrong—he never, ever gave off any kind of “I Must Have a SON” vibe, (which is a good thing, as his only children are my sister and me), but I knew he wouldn’t be comfortable playing with dolls or having tea parties, so . . . I learned to do what I knew he’d be comfortable with. I knew my mom loved me and would want to spend time with me no matter what, so I guess I didn’t make much of an effort on her behalf. The Catholic school girl deep inside of me actually feels guilty for that, but I suppose that’s another post.

So, despite the fact that I spent a lot of time hiding out in my room reading library books, encyclopedia volumes, Erma Bombeck, Richard Simmons diet books, and whatever trashy paperbacks I could get my hands on (also fodder for another blog post), I spent most of one summer filthy, playing with the neighborhood boys and wearing a blue tank top with the number 44 on it almost daily. Despite the fact that I spent an entire winter creating a set of standardized tests (the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) on graph paper, complete with answer key, to administer to my sister and the neighbor girl when I forced them to play School with me the following summer, I asked my dad to take me to The Club with him, where I sat on a bar stool drinking Cokes, listening to my dad and his friends talk about cars and guns while they drank beer, smoked, and spit tobacco into empty bottles. Despite the fact that I used my sister’s Barbies and Strawberry Shortcake dolls to dramatize many a girly (and often Valley of the Dolls-type) storyline, I begged my parents to let me get a hunting license on my 12th birthday.

Sometimes I was Who I Was, but often I was the kid I thought my dad would want to spend time with. In truth, I learned a lot of good stuff. I know how to use guns and hunt and fish. I know how to change the oil in my car (although I pay someone to do that for me), and I know how to change a tire. I can drive a tractor hauling a wagon, IN REVERSE. I know how to use tools, how to read a map, and I can deal with cleaning up dead birds or other creatures who end up meeting their doom in my house or yard without outward signs of revulsion. My sister, however, who didn’t play The Perfect Little Son, can’t do ANY of those things.

So there’s that.

But I guess my point is that I’ve been aware that men are/might be looking at me from a very early age, and that I let it be important to me from a very early age. It evolved, as you can imagine, into wanting to be physically attractive to men, which involved any number of corrective garments, weight-loss programs, skin-care regimens, hair goo, and hours in front of a mirror. Plucking, poking, brushing, curling . . . all to (frankly) little avail.

Happily, I’m getting to a point where . . . Eff that. You know? I’m slowly becoming happy and confident enough in myself that I don’t care who is or isn’t looking at me, or what they might see. I only like wearing make-up for special occasions. So there. I don’t like fussing with my hair, so it’s cut to look nice without fussing. Take that. I’m clean and comfortable, and beyond that, all anyone should care about is how well I behave. So HA, ha, beauty industry. Bite me, anyone who thinks I should look like a model! Bite me hard.

I used to be so very grateful that I didn’t have a daughter to raise, because I couldn’t imagine getting her through it. I can see more and more evidence, though, that the quote from above is true, and that I’m going to have to be aware that getting The Boy through the fear of the gaze is going to be an issue.

I don’t want it to be that way! I want things to be more equal between men and women, of course I do, but . . . not this way! I don’t want men to have the kind of comeuppance wherein their looks have to be scrutinized and pressured and threatened! I want it to be the OTHER way! I want women to be able to have the same, “I’m so awesome that it doesn’t matter if I’m fat and have crazy hairs growing out of my ears—how can you not want me,” attitude that men do. Or used to. You know?