by Nancy Friday
Most men do not pay prostitutes for sadistic pleasures but far more frequently play the masochist, the bad boy/man who gets his orgasm at the feet of the dominatrix. The statistics on men’s abuse of women have risen along with women’s entry into the workplace; men’s brutality should not be overlooked or excused, but alongside should be the figures on men’s mortality, their inability to live alone given their early training in suppression of emotion. We are all in this together. As premature aging and heart attacks increase among working women, maybe we will learn some compassion for “man the beast.”
“The Copulatory Gaze”
No one took women’s complaints at being ogled seriously in the old days; if men didn’t look, there would be no selection/date/marriage/security. Women dressed to be seen so that we might be picked; men often took advantage of their role as voyeurs, “staring holes in us,” but still no one taught boys how to look, the etiquette, how women felt being watched, or rejected. Our fear of rejection should be factored in, the heart-in-mouth quandary as we were graded, hating the examination but also praying that we wouldn’t fail. To fail was to live unchosen, without husband or children. We hated men’s eyes even as we dressed to the sound of romantic music and the fantasy of filling his eyes.
Let me quote anthropologist Helen Fisher at greater length, for her calm, intelligent voice is so full of reason and compassion for us poor confused human animals:
The gaze is probably the most striking human courting ploy. Eye language. In Western cultures, where eye contact between the sexes is permitted, men and women often stare intently at a potential mate for about two to three seconds during which their pupils may dilate—a sign of extreme interest. Then the starer drops his or her eyelids and looks away.
No wonder the custom of the veil has been adopted in so many cultures. Eye contact seems to have an immediate effect. The gaze triggers a primitive part of the human brain, calling forth one of two basic emotions—approach or retreat. You cannot ignore the eyes of another fixed on you; you must respond. You may smile and start conversation. You may look away and edge toward the door. But first you will probably tug at an earlobe, adjust your sweater, yawn, fidget with your eyeglasses, or perform some other meaningless movement—a “displacement gesture”—to alleviate anxiety while you make up your mind how to acknowledge this invitation, whether to flee the premises or stay and play the courting game.
This look, known to ethologists as the copulatory gaze, may well be embedded in our evolutionary psyche…. Perhaps it is the eye—not the heart, the genitals, or the brain—that is the initial organ of romance, for the gaze (or stare) often triggers the human smile.
Men stare in a way that women do not. Fisher suggests that men’s habit of looking comes from their ancestors, who squatted for hours behind the brush on the African veldt, watching for an animal on its way to the watering hole. The male brain addresses spatial action in a different way than does the female’s. We women are just beginning to look in earnest, perhaps in answer to men’s new interest in fashion, perhaps as reward for our own new economics.
Writer/editor Susie Bright argues that lesbians have the fine art of looking at women down pat and offers this advice to men: “Look at her. All over. Linger anywhere you like. When she notices (and she will if you’re really looking), hold her eyes with yours. Hold them close. Every second will feel like a minute. You’ll be tempted to avert your gaze but don’t…. You’ll know then and there whether she wants you or not…. If she does want you, she’ll be thrilled by your look, because it says to her that she has your full attention…. The beginning of love is the promise of all that’s to come—for boys and girls. And it all begins with a Look, which is nothing more than a Hope. If I can seduce a straight girl with the strength of my curious green eyes, then you shouldn’t have any problem at all.”
Oh? But he very much has a problem, beginning with the fact that a woman’s gaze at another woman is felt quite differently than a man’s look is. Women’s eyes have always been the judges of our beauty; it is for women that we dress and for a woman’s gaze that our tiny eyes searched when we were infants.
Men look from woman to woman, never satisfied, always seeking young, lovelier women when they feel bereft of beauty within. It is the wise woman who sees her man as her beauty subject, who awakens him to his belief in himself as physically lovable. He dare not lose her vision of him. Only she has the eye, the good mirror. Without her he would once again be relegated to the invisible drabness of men’s world. Money is prodigious power, but it will not warm you. “Feed me! Feed me!” men’s eyes bulge on the street, hungry that no one has seen them.
We would all stare less at women and more at men if we had seen ourselves in father’s eyes from the beginning. When he is totally absent, the dependence on women is obviously exaggerated. In his fiction as in his life, D. H. Lawrence was ambivalent about women, an almost madness that originated in his intense relationship with his mother and the total absence of a father. It has been suggested by one of his many biographers that the women whom Lawrence treats with misogynistic contempt in his work represent a version of himself, that part of himself too tied to his all-consuming, adoring mother, perhaps too identified with her in the absence of a father. Lawrence could not abide any rival, and in his marriage with Frieda his unhealthy jealousy of her sons by a prior marriage often drove him to violence. Students of literature agonize over the “real” Lawrence as portrayed by the characters in his novels.
In strictly Patriarchal days a man grew up learning through observation the rituals of looking at women. No one suggested that there was an etiquette in voyeurism or that there should be. He observed his father and other men looking and commenting as women passed by, and since the men didn’t mention how the women felt, being scrutinized, it didn’t occur to the young man to master anything but the courage to fix his gaze. It was from us that boys/men discovered the chink in our formidable armor.
Consider the dawning awareness when a male, grown up under the monopolistic power of a woman’s gaze, comes to the realization that his own eyes have the ability to dress and undress, excite or unhinge a person of his mother’s sex. A man comes to this discovery about the same time he realizes his role as economic provider, meaning he has reassessed his father’s influence, up till then understood to be less than that of the all-powerful mother. When a young man learns these various male powers, they help oil his way into the hitherto frightening world ruled by women.
Today women have traditional woman power along with economic power, and now we have become voyeuristic. If men have put a sharper edge on their voyeurism, there are reasons for it. Forever balancing power, men move like an army into the beauty arena, elbowing women aside in the mirror. It has nothing to do with fashion designers; it is a genetic move and countermove in the evolving balance of power between the sexes. I do not mean to diminish fashion; clothes are very powerful window dressing, for they often say what the person inside is feeling. Today our clothes are way ahead of us.
In the olden days, a young woman might use the power of her naked body, “pretending” not to be aware of his hungry eyes; she used it to feel the thrill of power in his loss of control. There is in Carol De Chellis Hill’s novel Henry James’ Midnight Song a rapturous description of a young man outside the window of a young woman whose life he has saved while she was sleepwalking in the park. He is now watching her, naked in front of a mirror, playing with her breasts:
He was dizzy with the spectacle… with the glowing wonder of that gold and rose and white white breast… and then her hand, three fingertips, reached up, brushed against it and scissoring went closed, then open…. Then she lifted her head and stared into the mirror, straight at him…. The girl stepped away from the glass, her face an unread smile. Had she seen him seeing her?… Had she known?… He knew somewhere that she knew he was watching her out there that night, pinned in the dark behind the glass. His breath had stopped when he saw her nipple there, and her smile and
her leaning into the mirror, her back to him, her reflected face to him, and he had been so stung with beauty and desire.
Today we provide for ourselves, which frees us to enjoy the power of the bad, sexual exhibitionist; but the other girls, mother, The Rules, drain any real joy in our erotic omnipotence and we hate men, despise them for not solving our dilemma. We get back at men, punish them when we wear our exhibitionistic clothing in offices where we can get them fired, jailed, for not solving the good girl/bad girl split, a task that only we ourselves can perform.
There is no derogatory name for women who flash; in North Carolina and Mississippi, it is against the law for men to peep through windows at women but not for women to peep at men. We walk, near naked, on the street, stand in windows and undress, or we fantasize about the thrill of masturbating in the sight of the man next door: the thrill of the forbidden, as we spread our legs, feel his eyes on our genitals, with us safe behind our closed lids, brings on a shattering orgasm.
As women get more into looking at men, and we will, it would behoove us to learn from their mistakes, which we’ve complained about long and bitterly. When men try with their eyes to bring us down a peg or two, are they knocking us off our high heels because they think we are inferior? Could it be that, instead, they feel our dominance over them? When we complain that men’s eyes “objectify” us, we make beauty ugly, when indeed “You are a sight for sore eyes,” speaks of balm, the medicinal power of a restorative drug.
Part of women’s surge of rage at the sidewalk gawker is that he hasn’t gotten us past our own self-loathing. Weren’t we told as small children that some day The Prince would come and recognize our beauty? Damn him, his eyes have failed us again, failed our efforts in front of the mirror before leaving the house, and left us publicly disgraced, fulfilling all of women’s/mother’s warnings: “I told you not to show off!”
Why does every positive choice regarding clothes, hair, makeup have its opposite, a warning that if we do wear that bustier, color our hair, we will be in danger? The Brothers Grimm wrote many cautionary tales: The beauty is haughty and earns a comeuppance; her stepmother and sister envy her and treat her cruelly; she is used to lure men to their deaths; and her own father is incestuously attracted to her. The elf/imp/animal in the fairy tale who warns the maiden not to wear the beautiful dress, the red shoes, is, in fact, mother/the other girls warning us that too much beauty will arouse resentment and exclusion.
Now, when the man’s eyes undress us on the street, the cautionary tale cries, “You asked for it!” In truth, the man has said nothing. We have no idea what he thinks of us. He is only looking. The fear that we have gone too far, shown too much, is in us. When we arrive at our destination, we tell the other women of our experience on the street. “That is how men are,” the women say in sympathy. However, maybe one will mention to another the unbuttoned blouse, the nipples discernible through the sheer fabric, the obvious curve of the ass. “She had it coming,” they will murmur, a shared judgment that electrically tightens their friendship, leaving out the sacrificial lamb.
Perhaps what we hate in men’s stare is that they have seen our worst self-assessment, or picked up on our fantasy of how we long to look, which is in great part sexual, precisely what we’re not allowed to be. In that picture he just took, the click of the shutter of his blinking eyes, is our dress too tight, the bra too pointy? We were uncertain of our image in the mirror before we left home, but something in us loved how the outfit accentuated our curves, all the more prominent because we also abandoned the jacket, which we wish now in our discomfort that we had worn.
To be honest, when a man stares it isn’t his opinion, but what his eyes have activated. We can’t even see his eyes, don’t dare to look, but we fear he sees the wench, the Bad Girl we have been warned to conceal and now have brazenly exposed, thinking we could handle it. We cannot, and we blame him for our failure. We hate him for seeing our bodies, which cry out for visibility, a caress, precisely what mother forbade. But it is our projection, taking our own bad, forbidden desires out of ourselves and placing them in the man, then accusing him for owning them.
The Fantasy Fuck
Only in fantasy do we allow ourselves to break mother/women’s rules and soar into orgasm on the image of our bodies, our breasts, our cunts driving men mad, and ourselves too, for there is nothing like conquering the forbidden, stealing sex—“Yes, I’m breaking The Rules, fucking this man, these men, their bodies on fire at the sight of my beauty, faces buried deep in my cunt, which in their hunger they devour!” In my own life, nothing was more thrilling than oral sex in my date’s car, just outside the dormitory door, the headmistress signaling only two minutes to curfew. To this day I love the memory of it.
The fantasy fucker—no “lover” he—accomplishes with his penis and mouth what no mortal man can: His tongue works against the image of our cunt—not a pretty sight—until he makes us come, our wrenching cry of orgasm partly out of gratitude for a few moments of self-love. A woman’s fantasy of stripping in front of men driven to masturbation at the sight of her beautiful nude body frees her momentarily from the earliest learned lessons that her genitals were ugly. To reach these heights, women make men into brutes, for no ordinary Nice Man could overpower mother.
Men’s erotic dreams are nowhere near as demeaning to women; in the privacy of their minds, where they might be and do anything, they are not the evil, mean, abusive louts that feminists would like to imagine. What the great majority of men dream is that a woman would adore their body, meet them halfway in sex, or take over the entire seduction, the job of it, thus removing all fears of rejection and giving the man the unequivocal approval he has always wanted from a woman. The woman of his dreams is hungry for sex, not a romantic dinner; she loves his penis, the sight and smell of it, and the taste of his semen is sweet nectar, swallowed to the last drop. She is everything that most real women are not, and she thinks of her own womanly body as he always has, a temple, every creamy cranny of which is to be explored by his mouth.
The fantasy of two women together, a perennial favorite, is something he dreams of fulfilling in reality, so exciting is the idea of women—two of them!—deeply enjoying each other’s body, a living testimony that they are part animal, like he, and not the antisex people he has always had to work so hard to seduce into spreading their legs so that he might worship. Sometimes these fantasy women let him join them, and if he had the very good fortune and/or the money, he would make this erotic dream come true.
The last thing heterosexual Patriarchal man needed was the thought of sex with another man. It’s fine for women to play with their own homosexual ideas, but the look of a straight man, from his physiognomy to what went on in his mind, had to conform to The Deal. To be a Real Man, one had to have a woman for whom to provide. Women’s entry into the workplace has broadened the mirror for men; by taking on the role of the provider, women have freed men from their narrow vision of themselves.
Most men wouldn’t attribute their return to the mirror to feminism. There are other contributing factors to the changes in men’s lives, but to paraphrase Karl Marx, economics determines history. In this century, feminism is the New Economics. As men relax and proceed deeper into the mirror, I would imagine that their gender roles will also come to have more of women’s fluidity.
My research shows that young heterosexual men’s erotic fantasies of other men are just beginning to swim up to consciousness; unlike men before them, there is no guilt; however, the other man is usually anonymous, thus keeping the fantasy on safer ground. With so many men getting into beauty, how can the mind not wander into this once forbidden territory?
Beauty in the Workplace: Courtship or Sexual Harassment?
Were women aware of what we brought into the workplace twenty-five years ago, that in pulling men’s eyes to us we were, in Helen Fisher’s language, “trigger[ing] a primitive part of the human brain, calling forth one of two basic emotions—approach or retreat”? Putting s
exual beauty into the workplace was dynamite. The Dress for Success Suit was a form of armor that solved many problems, but when sexy fashions and high heels returned to the fashion scene, the people who were left to deal with this unprecedented event were men.
Women, according to feminist law, were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and men were forbidden to react. What background did men have in working alongside beautiful women who aroused them, confused them, and many times made them very angry by rejecting them?
Instead of educating women regarding the reactions we provoke when dressing in an eye-catching way, we give them outrage, the legal weapon of sexual harassment to use against any man who responds in a manner that makes the woman uncomfortable. We might have educated women regarding the language of clothes; instead, feminism declines even to consider that women, consciously or not, may be involved in their own harassment, that there are ways of dressing, walking, talking that signal to a man something that women may not have intended.
As women press deeper into the workplace, we compete with both men and women for jobs. Now we have returned to beauty competition, this time with both sexes, though most women would be reluctant to call it that. Instead, women call men’s looks and speech that make us feel uncomfortable “sexual harassment.”
Real sexual harassment occurs, and exactly what it is and how it should be punished are questions that will take time to resolve. After all, 80 percent of single women who get married while working full-time marry someone they meet through the workplace. It is one thing to ridicule men for looking and speaking to women on the street or in bars or at parties in a manner felt to be insulting and rude. Whether or not he was guilty, we could always walk away. But an office is confined, situation and feelings intensified by the compression of space, the chance that the look/words/touch could happen again, tomorrow, the next week.