At around the time the "Walking around NYC" video, there was a Feminist Frequency video about the "Male Gaze." Basically, men looking at women harms them, and we should avert our eyes, like we're peasants in the presence of the Emperor's entourage in Imperial China.
That’s an impressively warped hodgepodge, and as far as I can tell totally divorced from reality. The whole “Male Gaze” concept is drawn from cinematic gaze theory and the bowels of psychoanalysis, and it doesn’t remotely mean what you take it to mean. It also exists in the context of the feminine gaze, oppositional gaze and many others. It’s an overwrought construction, but that’s also a reflection of how old it is and its roots in even older ideas. There are some interesting points to be made, especially in cinematic analysis using gaze theory, but that’s about all.
One thing is for sure though, it has nothing to do with averting your eyes or harming people by looking at them. Please don’t use what amounts to intellectual clickbait to springboard utterly milquetoast rants about “PC culture.”
while I’m sure out of billions of people it’s trivially easy to find a handful of nuts taking almost any position, it’s dishonest to tar everyone else with that brush.
Not just a few out of billions, but throngs of people on social media, including acquaintances and friends of friends all willing to jump down your throat, as if asking questions or any nuance is an immediate sign of deplorability.
The intellectually honest response to being confronted with the reality of just how far off the mark you were
There is some kind of dramatic disconnect here. There was plenty of weird toxicity on the other side which you seem oblivious to. Its volume is quite a bit louder than your voice and your message, and it's very much the message many received.
> Basically, men looking at women harms them, and we should avert our eyes
This is not what "male gaze" means. The idea of a male gaze, broadly speaking, is that the way women are portrayed in visual media (films, painting, photography, video games) caters to a male, heterosexual audience over other audiences, even at the expense of other aspects of the art. I think Lindsay Ellis does a good job of explaining this with examples [1]; particularly striking is the way Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes in Transformers is shot to maximise her sex appeal (to a straight male audience), so that even though the script ostensibly establishes Mikaela as savvy and competent, all that most viewers remember is that she's eye candy [2].
Heck just pick up any book about portrait photography and you will see the same thing: male postures are typically steadfast, female postures tend towards vulnerability (geometrically weak, camera looking down to subject, shoulders not square with frame) and sideboob.
Male bust portraits tend to cut off at the shoulders, female bust portraits cut off at the cleavage.
It’s just the way it’s done and nobody questions it.
