The Male Gaze

In the Street and On the Trail

The Male Gaze

My wife’s misogyny contains the bitterness of knowledge. Whenever it flashes out, I know not to be too inquisitive or ask for clarification. I can, however, enjoy its transgression, which I do, smiling as I descend the stairs to the living room. As she scrolls past that clip of Nicolle Wallace on her ipad, I can hear her announcing to the house in general: “Okay Nicolle, you’ve had your say—and now its time for you to go make sandwiches!” That’s the moment when I flip on my non-reactive male programing, which for most men comes standard with all the usual equipment. Upon finding yourself in an uncertainty with a woman, the prudent response is always a non-response—perhaps while gazing distractedly over her shoulder with an imperceptible smile—like Cary Grant. The underlying principle is simple. Never make too much of the things that women say. Men impale themselves on this error everyday. The affirmation of women has been so clamorous that even women suspect its veracity, and a well-timed non-response can elicit her curiosity and doubt in one compact maneuver. Conversely, you can hardly go wrong overpraising a woman, though she may be swimming in such a sea of positivity, she may not even notice. Heather MacDonald’s observation on the topic sounds almost profound to our ears: “To be female is not an accomplishment.” And yet, wasn’t there a time when the patriarchy in all its glory would have confirmed that a woman’s indispensable contribution to the social order was, indeed, the unique constraint of her civilizing influence? Unfortunately, the victim of that wreck has been backed over five or six times by now and is not likely to recover. The ideal of the male-female relationship, once the darling of western civilization, is now in each individual iteration produced extemporaneously, on the wing, an improvisation executed without encouragement or support from society at large.

Making sandwiches, of course, is my wife’s idea of an ineluctably useful feminine contribution to the world’s betterment—especially when she’s in this mood—and it either includes some females and not others, or is offset by some kind of special feminine knowledge. There is still much murkiness for me around her idea, though I know it has some relation to opinions that men have always held about women, and hold today, if a bit more carefully. You could even say men have fallen into a depression about the subject because as obnoxious to men as women have increasingly become, men still want and need them. Since I was a boy, I have been aware of this peculiar disposition, in which middle-class women exact special treatment over and above the patriarchal special treatment they have historically received. I remember how men first began to accede to these demands—out of a kind of gentlemanly reticence—even as gentlemanliness was being pulled to the ground. So now, some five decades later, my resentment lingers—even if in the factual present, I am a happily married man who is relieved to have the consternation of this particular misery slip forever into my past. Whatever grudge I hold, I hold on behalf of the future, of my millennial son, who had the great bad luck to grow up especially tall and male at a Berkeley middle school. I still see the grim innocence of his ten-year-old face at the mercy of those institutional gargoyles who would not suffer being eye to eye with his boyish manliness.

Many years ago I made it a practice to hold my head up while passing strangers on the sidewalk, despite bearing the ragged appearance of a construction worker. This was, I suppose, a testament to my disputatious nature. But back then men bore themselves with greater pride, and many subscribed to this civic formality, which has gone the way of the fedora. They thought nothing of making eye contact with the men and women they passed on the street, although nowadays, to be sure, it’s considerably more difficult to have the notice of passersby who are all either talking into or looking at their phones. But back then, I thought it my prerogative to make my presence felt by the world, which amounted to a kind of public service announcement for myself. And isn’t it only masculine not to hide but to take up space and be counted? Whatever its precise meaning, that is what I did, and what other men did, and what men today seem to do much less. Just as I will never be comfortable with the aesthetics of the selfie or with the sight of a grown man playing with his phone, nothing can constrain me to accept that this particular purchase of feminine attention has become antiquated. Maybe the saddest part about getting old is the recognition that it is not only your own boat that has sprung a leak and slipping into the waves but that it is going down along with all the habits, values, and characteristics of the era in which you belonged, the whole kit and caboodle destined for the bottom.

It might have been bold back then for a man to walk down the sidewalk making eye contact with the women he passed, but it was not considered rude. It was forward, but men were expected to be forward, and women were used to it, and some even liked it—and some may have noticed its absence as it began to disappear. Even today a man is expected to make some indication positively, negatively, or ambiguously, however it might be frowned upon by his HR department. And just because it is punishable does not put men outside biology, or even women, who remain the choosers of what advances they will favor. A man spreads his attention like a farmer and a woman selects. And while some women get no attention at all, others glory in the power to choose as if that power was the sacred right of all her kind. To describe the advances of men in which she has no interest, she will almost always employ the word “creepy,” which I don’t doubt describes her feeling accurately, and suggests, by the intensity of her disgust, that those feelings are the remnant of some ancient purpose—one that has no equivalent in the feelings of men. And so the eyes are of a few are welcomed, and the rest condemned. A scorning that even the unattractive woman is entitled to pursue with equal or even greater assiduity. About this rejection, men are reluctant to complain, and savvy enough to know what those complaints might sound like to the ears of women. That men have become less bold as a consequence, and have surrendered to women their masculine pushiness in public situations is to be lamented. Unthinking, men have habituated women to an insularity that they previously did not own. And this is a pity because, for most women, it was always the boldness of men they liked the best, regardless of what they might have said. In particular, it was always the boldness of the un-handsome man that once conferred on him a rare masculine beauty.

Today, I too am habituated to this sidewalk privacy, and regularly pass men and women on the street without a glance. Contentment is naturally disqualifying. Although some twenty years ago I met my wife on a dating app, where I learned all too quickly that to not particularly like a woman was ten times more excruciating than to be not particularly liked by her. As a consequence, I bought a dinner for a dozen women who had all in some manner misrepresented themselves. And whenever I tried to deliver the bad news in some sort of tender and merciful manner, I won no award for sincerity, but was, instead, constantly astonished at how frequently women greeted with outrage what a man would have accepted with silent resignation. Today, the front door of our house is not far from a trailhead where we hear groups of hikers assembling all day. I have hiked that trail a thousand times, and observed its population up close, thinking of it as a kind of laboratory for social encounter. From our windows, the voices of young women are the most audible, the most uninhibited, the most vivacious, the most comfortable, the most piercing of the city’s hum, and having the most fun. The lower voices of their attendant males are sedate by comparison. Other than the scarcity of straight white couples, you’ll notice the number of men and women hiking alone yet simultaneously having a conversation by speaking into a headset or into their phone on speaker. As well as I can determine, this is not considered rude, even if the voice of the someone on the phone is as vividly present as the voice of the one hiking.

Once upon a time, greeting a fellow hiker on the trail was an expected courtesy, especially when one party had to step off to let the other pass. In the mountains this tradition persists, if only as a cheerful acknowledgement that being on a mountain trail is better than being anywhere else. Nowadays, it might get you no more than a baffled look and blunt silence because most hikers are wearing earphones, and either they don’t hear you or they assume their earphones provide sufficient cover for pretending they don’t—this chillier protocol can easily be blamed on the proximity of the city. On the lonelier sections of trail, where the pressure to respond is greater, a man usually will offer a grunt, however, from a woman can come a variety of response. One of the endless labors of the liberated woman is the necessity for her to participate in all kinds of activity that she knows to be dangerous simply to preserve the possibility of continuing to do them. So whenever a woman hiking solo approaches me on the trail, I often feel an impulse to aid her, and somehow squeeze myself into a smaller, more innocuous package, although how this might actually be accomplished I haven’t a clue. More often than not, nine times out of ten as she approaches, she will pretend to answer her cell phone, and initiate an imaginary conversation—it has happened too many times to be a coincidence. But how exactly this pantomime is to make her safer is never clear to me, although I suppose the theoretical introduction of a third person to our isolation proposes a kind of witness to whatever barbarity I might have in mind. Which is amusing and annoying both. Who likes to be thought of as a potential molester? And yet, the truth is you can’t help but sympathize with a woman who is afraid for her safety, even if that fear is self-inflicted.

On the farthest reaches of the trail system, this crossing of paths can be doubly bizarre when, although she’s entirely alone, it is impossible to ignore her makeup and attire have been chosen to attract attention to herself. This not uncommon sight is always a reminder of the radical vulnerability of women—for which I always feel embarrassment and pity—for her sake, for her heavy makeup and skintight leotards. And also a vague sense of responsibility, as if I had inadvertently seen something through a window I was not supposed to see, yet with no one around suitable to offer an apology to. From this angle, it seems fair to say that women were not well-equipped to take the place of men: they are fearful in situations a man would not be, although they would like men to believe their nakedness is in itself a kind of impenetrable armor. Which is laughable on its face. Every ten-year-old boy has learned the vivid and unforgettable lesson that to be smaller in the world is almost certainly to be the weaker. Whenever I find myself in this kind of awkward encounter on the trail, I always experience the ridiculous desire to reassure, to explain myself aloud, that I am, after all, not a threat, although I never do, and I know to make the attempt would only frighten her more. Occasionally, I have even seen a woman on the trail, a hundred yards off, and alone, coming my way, who stops abruptly and turns around, and reverses her direction. Or even disappears completely off the trail until I have passed. And I am always puzzled and amazed that anyone so timid would brave the trail at all. And so I try, as much as possible, to cast a veil of benignity over my countenance, so as to give her as much privacy as one can give to a woman in such a high degree of exposure. I feel compelled to protect her sense of well-being even as it effaces my own. And I think it is the peculiarity of this paradox that is the best example of the predicament of being male in this new female world. Which always feels to me like a form of make-believe maintained for her sake. A piece of fiction aligned with all the fictions we are expected to believe. It’s like the experience of coming across a deer in the woods who seems to be all too tame and unafraid—and it occurs to you that the right thing to do might actually be to scare it away before the hunters come.

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