The Male Gaze

This happens to you when you are in your early twenties, on that threshold of becoming a woman. I cringe as I write that last expression. You are in an elevator or at the airport or on the subway and men look at you in a way that is unnerving. They flirt shamelessly, without looking away, as though to test you. And even though they have no real interest in who you are, you feel especially compelled to guard your interior life in these moments, because you know that this is the only part of you that isn't entirely accessible to someone else. Theoretically. Sometimes it's older men, other times it's particularly confident boys your age, but regardless, they don't know that you're still a girl; that is to say, you're not common yet. You haven't learned to shut out the world, and people when it's necessary. You haven't learned to assess others in an instant, to look them up and down and know their intentions, their motives, their way of moving through the world. You don't know yet when it is appropriate to blend in and when it is beneficial to stand out. Because these are the things, the little tricks you learn as you become. And you simply haven't become yet, and you don't even know what this means. You are so vulnerable and bare and new to this world that your very presence in it is bewildering.

I can't speak to what it's like for men. Because they seem to know how to navigate these situations. They don't just navigate them, they create them. They are particularly skilled in groups. In a group of women, they turn themselves into a prize. And in a group of men, there is a kind of majesty in the power of their collective maleness.

And when you're young, you simply don't know what to do with this. Except feel slightly afraid. And slightly unhinged.