Rock Critic Roundtable: RCR VOL. 2: Round 1 Recap 

speaking here as a person also occasionally inclined to use dude/bro/dudebro/etc. to distinguish a particularly repellent type of male specimen, i have to say this stance, coming from a male-identified person, strikes me as frankly very dudely. i’ll freely admit i lack the theoretical background to thoroughly engage with the concept of the male gaze as outlined first by laura mulvey and developed further by later scholars, but i am nonetheless comfortable in saying that you don’t get to give yourself a get-out-of-misogyny free card just because you don’t want to root for drunk girls making out with each other for your pleasure. i can’t imagine a conversation about gender and media that would be a good place for men to talk about why they are Not Like Those Other Guys, mostly because i can’t imagine it being a good idea to center men in a conversation about gender and media and that’s exactly what’s going on when you rush to clarify that you’re one of the good ones.

or to be more obnoxious but also perhaps more honest about it: “how men feel about the concept of the male gaze” is up there with “what it’s like to be a male liz phair fan” in the world of things i am so thoroughly uninterested in i could plotz.

(via isabelthespy)

I don’t think I was giving myself a “get out of misogyny free card” — especially when my last point is that a lot of stuff that I’m trying to distance myself from probably does have an impact on me, whether I want it to or not (I won’t apologize from speaking from my own perspective, and I will say that I wasn’t trying to make men the center of these conversations, though I think it would be a mistake to exclude them from it).

One thing that I’m saying here, though, is that as someone who doesn’t match the dude-y implied listener of some songs, this gaze has a negative effect on me, too, which might have some (negative) effect on the world that is felt by people who are not me (or like me). What that effect is I’m not sure. And I also don’t think anyone should necessarily care about what effect it has on me, especially at the expense of someone for whom it has a more important effect.

The reason I got into the cognitive stuff is because there are concrete and proveable effects of straight-male-sexuality-centered imagery on our unconscious minds — which is just as interesting, to me (and probably other people, too), as thinking about what we can also infer about the world and how it shapes people from texts. (The study I linked to says that the effects of thinking of sexualized women as objects applies to both men and women. A ubiquitous, fucked-up cultural norm fucks up everybody, even if the fucked-upedness is mostly felt in one direction, i.e. not “my” direction. Though I think it is felt in my direction, and that overall this just adds to the problem, even if it’s not the most important component of the problem by far.)