The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott

  Another way could be a character deliberately measuring the female character for her sexual attractiveness because of a specific defined plot point. “JJ checked out the three women, trying to figure out which one had been down at the swimming pool when the painting was stolen. Etc.”

  If there is no specific reason to describe her sexual attractiveness for a defined plot or character reason, then the writer is deferring to the male gaze and objectifying the character even if the writer didn’t intend to do that. The writer is dropping out of third into omniscient to package the character for a male reader who enjoys the titillation in large part because our culture so heavily exposes the female body to sexual objectification in our visual imagery, advertising, film, tv, games, and fiction.

  If a female point-of-view character is constantly describing herself in sexual ways, ogling her breasts as if she is part of a GQ photo-shoot, or being placed in sexual situations that cater to heterosexual male “fantasies”—all too often defined by lubricious physical description and/or the use of “titillating” sexualized violence—she is probably being written with a heterosexual male gaze.

  Female characters in science fiction and fantasy who are sex toys or sex workers are almost always being written from the male gaze regardless if they are the ones speaking, because the view of sex as being that of the male objectifying the female as his object of pleasure is so pervasive in our culture.

  Is the character a lesbian or bisexual? Chances are good that her lesbianism or bisexuality is still being written through the veil of a male gaze if the way sexual attributes are being described leaps from the personal attraction to the omniscient breasts. [Note: I would guess that transgendered individuals are least commonly depicted in positive sexual ways via a male gaze. I’m hard pressed to come up with examples.]

  Most problematically, descriptions of rape can be deeply offensive when they are purportedly being told from the point of the view of a woman being raped but when in fact everything about the description and situation is being seen through a male gaze.

  Furthermore, the expectations of who a woman is, what she wants, how she reacts, much less how she is physically described differ wildly dependent on the assumptions wielded by the writer.

  A problem arises when people write and/or read without knowing or realizing they are writing and reading exclusively from the perspective of a male gaze. When this perspective has been internalized as the most authentic or real perspective, it can subsume and devour all other perspectives because it is treated as the truest or only one.

  Let me tell a story.

  Many years ago, I was accused by a reader/reviewer of having a “homosexual agenda,” a comment which puzzled me. I certainly do have such an agenda if by that one means I support QUILTBAG rights (as well as marriage equality). However, the reader meant a deliberate hidden agenda inserted into the books to warp young minds, perhaps as a form of semantic contagion. I usually don’t argue with reviewers (except sometimes in my thoughts), but the way the statement was phrased really did make me wonder what in my work could possibly have triggered this particular interpretation.

  In fact, I wondered so much that I did the thing I know better than to do: I emailed him.

  He wrote back, and was polite but insistent that I had this agenda. We argued back and forth for a while until a lightbulb went on in my head.

  The reader was reacting without understanding why to the fact that I often write men from a heterosexual female gaze. When I write female characters, I describe them sexually only if they’re being observed from the point of view of a character who is sexually interested in them. Those of my female characters who are heterosexual, however, will see and describe male characters through a sexual gaze directed onto the men.

  As an astute reader, this person was picking up on this (not particularly graphic) sexual description of men. Because virtually all the fiction he had read had been written from the heterosexual male gaze, to him a sexual gaze was by default a male gaze. I the writer was causing this reader to “see” male characters through a sexual gaze. Therefore, he interpreted my narrative gaze as a homosexual male gaze since“thegaze”and “the sexual gaze” by definition had to be male; thus he identified this as a homosexual agenda.

  It’s been my observation that in our culture women can read comfortably about men’s sexual interest in women because it is considered normal and expected and acceptable, but men cannot always read comfortably about women’s sexual interest in men. In the US in particular, I perceive that we have a cultural comfort in looking at women sexually and (although this is changing) a discomfort in looking at men sexually.

  This reader hadn’t thought to consider there might be another “gaze” possible in this story. The concept of a female sexual gaze as something that could be present in fiction had never occurred to him. To give him credit, when I pointed this out, he immediately got it.

  Here’s my theory:

  We will never get past the supposed disjunction between male and female gazes and viewpoints until men think nothing of reading and writing through the female gaze because it seems ordinary, plausible, and interesting to them. Writers will stop writing about omniscient breasts once they pause to ask themselves whose gaze they are really writing from when they are ostensibly writing from a female point of view.

  However, this is not the only way the male gaze permeates everything. In the examples I use above, I describe male writers writing a male heterosexual point of view through a female character’s eyes as well as a male reader’s reaction to a female gaze.

  Women also have to struggle against this pervasive idea that the male gaze is the most real and most authentic view of the “world.” Women can view their own stories through the lens of a male gaze, or can feel most comfortable in stories that reinforce these norms.

  Women can read comfortably about men’s sexual interest in women. Women can watch and observe visual representations of sexually objectified women seen through a male gaze and think it is not only normal but the way things always have been, are, and will be. Women can enjoy shows and books in which the female characters are unclothed and sexualized and the men are clothed and sexual or just active doers, and not necessarily think about the disjunction in how women are portrayed compared to men because it is so common that it is seen as right. To see in some other way, through a different lens, then seems not right but rather false and wrong.

  So here it is: Stories told through a female gaze are just as valid, just as true, just as authentic and universal. And they are just as necessary, not just for women but for men, too.

  ALL OF THE STORIES ARE NECESSARY.

  This essay has focused specifically on gender, and on a binary view of gender at that, but I want to suggest what most of you already know, that the issue of “gaze” expands exponentially and intersectionally outward from here through gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion, age, nationality, class, and multiple other vectors.

  Listen, there’s nothing wrong in writing through a male gaze if that’s the story you have to tell.

  The problem lies in not being aware that the male gaze is a gaze. When readers don’t realize how the male gaze pervades so much of our storytelling, they can’t assess with what root assumptions the story is being told and how the default defines our expectations and our responses to how stories are told and how we read them. When writers don’t even realize they are writing through the male gaze, then they can’t possibly assess how that default male gaze influences the stories they tell and how they tell them.

  THE NARRATIVE OF WOMEN

  IN FEAR AND PAIN

  MY SPOUSE AND I started watching the television series Fringe to see if we would like it. The first episode was cool except for the clichéd and unnecessary “put the female lead in her underwear” scene. Undressed scenes are what killed my interest in watching the US remake of Nikita with Maggie Q because I could not get past the gratuitous bikini and lingerie scenes in the pilot, which w
ere evidently needed to undercut the fact that she is meant to be a dangerous and out-of-control assassin and perhaps to attract a male viewership evidently deemed (by the producers and writers) too sexist to be willing to watch a show with a woman lead unless she is undressed for them. I don’t know, maybe some other reason. What I do know is that the plot did not need the undressing for the scenes to work.

  But then in the second episode of Fringe they went right for a “serial killer of young attractive women” plot for no reason other than there is evidently something in Hollywood or maybe our culture that gets off on these scenes of young women in poses of sexual passivity being terrified and mutilated and screaming screaming screaming. I had to walk out of the room because not only am I sick of it but it creeps me out.

  I’m not creeped out by the knowledge that terrible things happen to young women (and old women, and children and men and all manner of people, especially those who are vulnerable and unprotected). I’m outraged and saddened by that knowledge, and I honestly think there is an important and even vital place in our literature (books, film, etc.) for strong, fearless depictions of suffering and injustice, so we don’t lose sight of what we must strive to change. The people who suffer must not be silenced because of the discomfort of others who don’t want to be forced to acknowledge, to see, that suffering and injustice exists.

  But I am creeped out that images and portrayals of young women in positions of sexualized passivity who are in fear and in pain are used over and over again AS ENTERTAINMENT, to give us a thrill, to make our hearts pound.

  I remember the time a couple of years ago I went with my daughter, then twenty, to a video store (remember those?) to get a movie to watch for the night.

  After about five minutes she said, “Mom, I can’t stand to look at all these DVD covers because so many of them show women in poses of fear or pain and it really disturbs me, like it is telling me that this is the story I have to internalize about becoming a woman.”

  I realized I had gotten so used to it—had gotten myself used to it— that when I browsed through a video store looking at film posters and DVD covers filled with shocking images of objectified and sexualized women in fear and pain, I just skipped my gaze right over it like it was ordinary and nothing to remark on. I had learned to stop seeing it as much as possible. It had become ordinary and nothing to remark on.

  That brought me up short. I had hardened myself to it, and I had just assumed that my daughter would grow up learning to harden herself to it. But she couldn’t, or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she thought she shouldn’t have to.

  It made me think about how when I write I have to struggle against the idea, sunk down deep inside me, that when I write about women they have to be afraid or they have to be in pain.

  Too often when the stories of women in fear and pain are told, we are seeing them in pain, we are being pushed into the perspective not of the woman who is suffering pain but into the perspective of the person inflicting the pain.

  We are constantly being asked to identify with inflicting pain on others.

  Of course we are. You don’t just take over the other person’s life and body; you also take their voice, their dreams, their perspective. You take their right to speak and leave them with only the power to suffer, a suffering that can be lifted from them by death or by rescue but always by an agency outside themselves. You take their eyes and turn them into your eyes, your gaze, your way of looking at the world. When such stories are told in this way, they reinforce the perspective of the person who is watching the voiceless have no voice.

  But while it is important to say “let’s stop telling those stories then because they exploit women and furthermore perpetuate the view of women as victims whose only role is to suffer fear and pain,” I would go on to suggest that it is not quite that simple. It isn’t binary; it’s not either/or. All stories of women’s fear and pain are not the same because it does make a difference from what perspective we see.

  In her memoir Mighty Be Our Powers (written with Carol Mithers), Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee of Liberia talks about discovering the need to find spaces in which women could share their stories. Some of the stories she heard were stories that came out of the civil wars that wracked Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone; others were stories that had to do with untold experiences within families, the kind of thing no one wants to talk about no matter where it happens. She writes:

  Each speaker wept with relief when she finished; each spoke the same words: “This is the first time I have ever told this story . . .”

  Does it sound like a small thing that the women I met were able to talk openly? It was not small; it was groundbreaking. . . . Everyone was alone with her pain.

  Everyone was alone with her pain.

  That line stabs me in the heart. I do not want me, or you, or anyone to be alone with the pain.

  Yes, I get angry and creeped out when I see and read stories about women in fear and pain, seen from the outside, looking down on them, inflicting pain on them through the gaze of the story.

  I get especially angry when I’m told that these are the only or the most realistic stories, that they trump any other way of looking at the lives of women. Because they don’t. This perspective looks in only one direction; that makes it an incomplete, biased, subjective, and even warped perspective.

  You see, I worry that it is another form of silencing when women’s stories of fear and pain are not given voice when the voice is theirs or when an incident of violence or fear is told from the perspective of the person who undergoes that experience, who must live with it, be changed by it, internalize it, fight against the injury it has done to her, build or continue her life, live defined by herself and not by her injury.

  I worry that it is another form of silencing when all such stories are seen as the same without considering from whose perspective they’re being told. It is not a small thing to speak up. It is not a small thing to hear stories and voices that have long been silenced.

  There are indeed too many stories that fixate on women’s fear and pain, and more than that, in my opinion, too often it is the wrong stories that get the attention, the wrong stories that are held up as the right ones, the only ones, the most authentic ones. The truth is usually difficult and complex and often so painful that it is easier to look away. All too often, silence is the ally of the powerful.

  So, yes, I will rage against the exploitative portrayals of sexualized violence, of women in fear and pain. But I will also remember the women who never told their story because there was no one to listen.

  AND PHAROAH'S HEART HARDENED

  I HAVE NEVER TOLD this story to anyone except my father. I may have told my spouse at the time it happened, but I don’t recall. My children were there, they were the reason it happened, but I doubt they remember.

  In the mid ’90s my spouse was attending graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University, in State College, Pennsylvania. He and I and our three then-small children lived in graduate student housing, on campus, in an old World War II era duplex of 625 square feet. It got a bit close at times, to say the least, and in addition I worked at home writing, so I made every effort to get the kids out to do something, anything, when I had the chance and when the activity was age appropriate for small children.

  A traveling photo exhibit came to the student union. I noted the photographer’s name first because early in his career he had worked at the local newspaper in the area where I grew up. Brian Lanker had since expanded his journalistic photography; this exhibit contained a series of portraits of African-American women, specifically women who had contributed to the nation as artists, writers, activists, community organizers, business women, singers, what have you, that were collected into the book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

  That looked promising!

  One afternoon I walked the children over. I suspect that my daughter was seven and the twins
were five.

  The photos were all I could have hoped for, beautifully shot, large and imposing, opening a tiny window onto these magnificent women of strength and purpose. Many of the women were, at the time the photographs were taken, elders; maybe most were. They were a testament to the power and importance of age as a weight that anchors and balances a society when storm winds batter it, yet you could also see in their faces the hard work they had done when they were younger.

  Some I had heard of; some were names I’d seen although I knew little enough of them; some I had never heard of. The children were as patient as children can be at that age and I knew better than to drag out our little expedition beyond their ability to enjoy the outing and the novelty. We didn’t linger over any of the portraits until we came to Rosa Parks.

  Like so many, I have a soft spot for Rosa Parks.

  I thought it worthwhile to give my children an early lesson in citizenship.

  I had to choose my words to work for the level at which they could understand, overly simplified and yet truthful. I said something like this (reconstructed from faulty memory):

  “This is Rosa Parks. She is a great American hero. When she was younger, there was a law in some parts of the country that people who have black skin, as you can see she does, had to sit in the backs of public buses. People who had white skin, as you can see we do, could sit in the front. Isn’t that a strange law? Just because people’s skins are different colors? Of course, it was wrong to have a law like that. And she knew that, so she with the help of some other people decided to protest the law. She got on the bus one day after work and refused to sit in the back of the bus, and then she was arrested, but then many more people began to say that that law was wrong, and then the government got rid of that law. So she is a hero. She is hero for the people who could now sit wherever they wanted on the bus. But she is also a hero for all America, because a law like that hurts all Americans because a bad law like that hurts the spirit and heart of America.”