The Gaze

The fears are understandable. Millions of dollars are invested and it is natural to want to do all that can be done to ensure a profitable return. If similar amounts have been invested in similar projects and been demonstrably successful, it's only reasonable to expect others to follow the formula, seeking equal success for their own investments.

Pamela Anderson, then, would seem like a no-brainer of a choice.

Well, except for a couple of points.

The nature of the role demands a certain authenticity; the audience must gaze upon this character and find her believable - real, even.

And there is something patently unreal about Pamela Anderson!

So, despite the power of the male gaze, Gillian Anderson became Dana Scully.

It just goes to show that even ex-surfer dudes can think with the appropriate part of their anatomy occasionally.

One would have to be either brave or stupid to argue with Laura Mulvey's canonisation of the 'male gaze' in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", in which she argues that "popular movies are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia." (cf. The Conversation)

So, it seems somewhat ironic, that an actress chosen specifically because she didn't meet the characteristics commonly preferred by the male gaze, should, two years later, be voted sexiest woman in the world by that most scopohilic of magazines, FHM.

Kelsey Lueptow, in 4 Ways to Challenge the Male Gaze, an article for everydayfeminism.com, says that even women objectify other women, "seeing each other through the gaze because we’re trained to." The case of Gillian Anderson would seem to imply that males are also trained to see women through the gaze.

In Fearful Symmetry, episode 18 of Season Two, we're confronted with the issue of a modified gaze, in which women share as much as men, whether we're trained to use it or not. The gaze is modified because it is no longer gaining its voyeuristic pleasure at the expense of another human being.

As unwanted as the male gaze is, there are steps that can be taken to challenge its dominance in the media and society at large - hence the title of Lueptow's article. She suggests that by being aware, vocal and active, women can turn the gaze into a mirror. This is not to trivialise either the issue or Lueptow's article, merely to highlight the difference between the experience of a woman being gazed upon and those animals held in captivity, and often appalling conditions, because not just men but human beings gain pleasure from the gaze.

The male gaze has been canonised because women needed to fight for equality and rights that, reasonably, no human being should have to fight for. Nor any other animal.

There is no ethical justification for keeping wild animals in captivity merely to satisfy the human, all too human desire to look. Making zoo habitats appear more natural doesn't mitigate the crime of incarcerating sentient animals for no reason other than we can.

Some would argue that zoos play an important conservation role. But think on that. Why is there a need for this kind of conservation?

Willa Ambrose looks askance at Mulder when he suggests that aliens are taking the animals for insemination. A preposterous idea? Not if we are the aliens. For isn't this exactly what we do to these animals? And how do we justify this as conservation? Are the off-spring returned to the wild where they belong, to play their natural role in maintaining the ecosystem?

We have become - made ourselves - aliens in our own home. We use and abuse the world because, like Mulder's aliens, we stand above the natural world, unaffected by our petty little experiments. Next time you giggle at the idea of aliens and their anal probes, just take a moment to realise who the alien is. The targeting system that directs the gaze is desire, not reason, but what we look at is what we seek to obtain. And we have obtained, taken possession of, the world. But at such a cost!

Climate-change science! The destructive impact of the human gaze on the world has resulted in the birth of a new science! But for every scientist working in the field of climate change, how many are working in the very fields that caused the crisis in the first place?

Mulvey's highlighting of the male gaze, significant and as important as it was, now needs expanding to include the human gaze. As the feminists accurately identified the ways in which the male gaze objectifies and damages, so we need a Mulvey to voice the same concerns over the human gaze.

Maybe Timothy Morton is that voice.