Looking at Sexy People, and Being Ogled
Today I'd like to talk about visual aspects of sexuality. One person sees another and that person's appearance is sexually stimulating to the observer. A person spends a fair amount of time thinking about their own appearance and whether or not they are sexually desirable on the basis of their looks. A person who wants a sexual partner goes to a singles environment and looks around first and foremost for someone whose appearance appeals to them as sexy and enticing.
The visual aspect of sexuality is gendered. I don't know for sure whether the experience of seeing a visually appealing representative of the sex to which one is attracted is a different experience for male folks than for female folks, but there's not much question that it is widely believed that it's different. The belief is that men are much more visually responsive, that women's visual appearance (for heterosexual guys) or, for that matter, the visual appearance of other men (for gay guys) motivates male people much more emphatically than female people are sexually motivated by the looks of male people's bodies (for straight women) or the bodies of other women (for lesbians).
If it isn't actually true, it certainly wouldn't be the first "difference between the sexes" that turns out to be a myth. Some feminists who have believed it to be just that have said "Hey, this patriarchal society has not been particularly interested in what women want. Until recently, the female orgasm didn't get much press, so it should not come as a surprise that most ideas about what looks sexy are actually ideas about what men find to be sexy-looking". And, yes, there has been more recognition in the modern era of the female erotic gaze: this Optimum Online ad that's running currently and, for that matter, this Diet Coke ad from a couple decades ago. So it's out there and it's not exactly brand new.
But there's still the persistent notion that male sexuality is far more visually oriented, even if we now recognize that women like to look too. When we discuss women as sex objects, what we most often mean is women as visually consumable sex objects. It is women who mostly have to confront the insistence on the importance of their looks; it is women for whom having a potentially sexually appetizing appearance is most totally rendered into social currency, for whom it plays such a prominent role in some people's evaluation of their worth and value, and it contributes to the sense that the trajectory of an individual woman's social power seems to peak so much earlier than that of individual men.
Well, today I'd like us to consider how much this visual thing has to do with another popular notion about the differences between the sexes, the notion that men are more sexually aggressive than women.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it really is true that men are more visual, sexually. A man sees a woman across the room, a complete stranger, and, attracted to her, he acts on those sexual feelings. From her perspective, a complete stranger with whom she has no connection is suddenly coming on to her.
She, with her clitoris less wired to her eyeballs, would have been far less likely to do the same if she'd seen him first.
If we remove the visual from the situation, and look at the rest of sexual interaction and the formation of sexual interest, we're mostly looking at people who come on to other people as an outgrowth of interacting with them. Eyesight, specifically, has that peculiar quality of creating a reaction towards another person with whom there hasn't been any personal interaction.
I've long thought that a good research project on gender could be done by interviewing blind men and observing blind individual in social settings, to see what happens with male sexual behavior in the absence of reactions to visual stimuli. I haven't had a chance to pursue it, though.
Meanwhile, I am curious about your experiences with the visual aspects of sexuality, and your own thoughts on the matter:
• if you are male, does it seem to you that your own sexuality is more driven by other people's visual appearance than the sexuality of women seems to be? if you are female, do you have the sense that male people are more sexually driven by how people look?
• assuming you do perceive such a difference, how do you feel about it? or, if you do not see that kind of pattern in real life, do you have any feelings about the widespread belief that such a difference does exist?
• think about a person who sees someone they don't already know from across the room or on the subway platform or standing on the sidewalk or something, and that they experience that person as sexy, sexually appetizing, because of how they look. if I ask you to imagine what kind of feelings and thoughts are likely to be going through the sexually interested observer's head, can you describe that for me?
• do you, or have you in the past, often experienced yourself as the object of other people's sexually interested gaze? how does or did that make you feel, both "at the moment" and overall as a feature of your life?
• is there any part of the entire phenomenon about visual aspects of sexuality that makes you angry and resentful? for that matter, do you ever feel like other people have resentments pertaining to visual sexuality in such a way that their resentments affect you?
I myself identify as genderqueer, meaning (in my case) that I think of myself as "one of the girls" rather than "one of the guys". And yet this is definitely one area of gender and sex where my own experience matches up with the expected male pattern: yes, a big component of my sexuality and sexual feelings is tied up with my reactions to women's appearance. I see women's shapes and contours and I have strong sexual feelings.
It has long seemed to me that many people equate being sexually visually attracted like that with being a sexual aggressor: you know, you see someone who looks sexy to you, so that inspires you to go try to make things happen. Except that isn't how it is for me. I'm nearly always ambivalent and uncertain about what I want in the "here and now" specific sense of this or that sexy-looking woman. The sexual feelings I experience make me feel vulnerable and shy. Here is this person who may be a total stranger who is having this sexual affect on me just because of how she looks.
Recently, I wrote this:
The social awareness and expectation of female sexuality - distorted though it may be in a zillion other ways - incorporates an acknowledgment of ambivalence, of the possibility of feeling sexually interested or sexually attracted or sexually aroused while, nevertheless, having feelings about that other than hot damn, wheeeee, sex sex sex!
In fact, there's a general awareness (about female sexuality) that having a sexual response to someone, whether physical or emotional or whatever, involves vulnerability. It's an appetite, a situation in which one needs something from someone else, and where the fact of having that desire can sort of leave you open (and vulnerable) to variations on that "something" that are not, actually, what you want and need but come close enough to it to confound your filters, your self-protective mechanisms, or your just-plain-old tastes.
We can relate to women in books or films or real life when they discuss being in a situation where a sexually fascinating guy was doing things and where the woman's reaction was complex and ambivalent and nuanced: "On the one hand, he was handsome and tall and had nice hands and I wanted some of that kind of action, but I wasn't feeling like he was connecting to me, he was too slick and polished about it, and I didn't sense an awareness on his part that he acknowledged that I get some say-so about this, that he isn't just entitled to it because he's learned his lounge act so well, so I found myself not wanting to, and the more he continued the less I wanted to have anything to do with him". Or whatever. Right?
So, I'd also like to pose this question, or set of questions, to other male people specifically: to what extent is it like that for you, too? Does the social expectation that, as males, we're always ready to jump on the opportunity, that for us to be visually attracted always means we are happily ready to have sex... does that expectation annoy you, anger you, do you resent it? Do you feel ignored or silenced by the lack of general acknowledgment that our sexuality is fraught with ambivalences and vulnerabilities too, or do you not feel that that is true for you?
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I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
The visual aspect of sexuality is gendered. I don't know for sure whether the experience of seeing a visually appealing representative of the sex to which one is attracted is a different experience for male folks than for female folks, but there's not much question that it is widely believed that it's different. The belief is that men are much more visually responsive, that women's visual appearance (for heterosexual guys) or, for that matter, the visual appearance of other men (for gay guys) motivates male people much more emphatically than female people are sexually motivated by the looks of male people's bodies (for straight women) or the bodies of other women (for lesbians).
If it isn't actually true, it certainly wouldn't be the first "difference between the sexes" that turns out to be a myth. Some feminists who have believed it to be just that have said "Hey, this patriarchal society has not been particularly interested in what women want. Until recently, the female orgasm didn't get much press, so it should not come as a surprise that most ideas about what looks sexy are actually ideas about what men find to be sexy-looking". And, yes, there has been more recognition in the modern era of the female erotic gaze: this Optimum Online ad that's running currently and, for that matter, this Diet Coke ad from a couple decades ago. So it's out there and it's not exactly brand new.
But there's still the persistent notion that male sexuality is far more visually oriented, even if we now recognize that women like to look too. When we discuss women as sex objects, what we most often mean is women as visually consumable sex objects. It is women who mostly have to confront the insistence on the importance of their looks; it is women for whom having a potentially sexually appetizing appearance is most totally rendered into social currency, for whom it plays such a prominent role in some people's evaluation of their worth and value, and it contributes to the sense that the trajectory of an individual woman's social power seems to peak so much earlier than that of individual men.
Well, today I'd like us to consider how much this visual thing has to do with another popular notion about the differences between the sexes, the notion that men are more sexually aggressive than women.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it really is true that men are more visual, sexually. A man sees a woman across the room, a complete stranger, and, attracted to her, he acts on those sexual feelings. From her perspective, a complete stranger with whom she has no connection is suddenly coming on to her.
She, with her clitoris less wired to her eyeballs, would have been far less likely to do the same if she'd seen him first.
If we remove the visual from the situation, and look at the rest of sexual interaction and the formation of sexual interest, we're mostly looking at people who come on to other people as an outgrowth of interacting with them. Eyesight, specifically, has that peculiar quality of creating a reaction towards another person with whom there hasn't been any personal interaction.
I've long thought that a good research project on gender could be done by interviewing blind men and observing blind individual in social settings, to see what happens with male sexual behavior in the absence of reactions to visual stimuli. I haven't had a chance to pursue it, though.
Meanwhile, I am curious about your experiences with the visual aspects of sexuality, and your own thoughts on the matter:
• if you are male, does it seem to you that your own sexuality is more driven by other people's visual appearance than the sexuality of women seems to be? if you are female, do you have the sense that male people are more sexually driven by how people look?
• assuming you do perceive such a difference, how do you feel about it? or, if you do not see that kind of pattern in real life, do you have any feelings about the widespread belief that such a difference does exist?
• think about a person who sees someone they don't already know from across the room or on the subway platform or standing on the sidewalk or something, and that they experience that person as sexy, sexually appetizing, because of how they look. if I ask you to imagine what kind of feelings and thoughts are likely to be going through the sexually interested observer's head, can you describe that for me?
• do you, or have you in the past, often experienced yourself as the object of other people's sexually interested gaze? how does or did that make you feel, both "at the moment" and overall as a feature of your life?
• is there any part of the entire phenomenon about visual aspects of sexuality that makes you angry and resentful? for that matter, do you ever feel like other people have resentments pertaining to visual sexuality in such a way that their resentments affect you?
I myself identify as genderqueer, meaning (in my case) that I think of myself as "one of the girls" rather than "one of the guys". And yet this is definitely one area of gender and sex where my own experience matches up with the expected male pattern: yes, a big component of my sexuality and sexual feelings is tied up with my reactions to women's appearance. I see women's shapes and contours and I have strong sexual feelings.
It has long seemed to me that many people equate being sexually visually attracted like that with being a sexual aggressor: you know, you see someone who looks sexy to you, so that inspires you to go try to make things happen. Except that isn't how it is for me. I'm nearly always ambivalent and uncertain about what I want in the "here and now" specific sense of this or that sexy-looking woman. The sexual feelings I experience make me feel vulnerable and shy. Here is this person who may be a total stranger who is having this sexual affect on me just because of how she looks.
Recently, I wrote this:
The social awareness and expectation of female sexuality - distorted though it may be in a zillion other ways - incorporates an acknowledgment of ambivalence, of the possibility of feeling sexually interested or sexually attracted or sexually aroused while, nevertheless, having feelings about that other than hot damn, wheeeee, sex sex sex!
In fact, there's a general awareness (about female sexuality) that having a sexual response to someone, whether physical or emotional or whatever, involves vulnerability. It's an appetite, a situation in which one needs something from someone else, and where the fact of having that desire can sort of leave you open (and vulnerable) to variations on that "something" that are not, actually, what you want and need but come close enough to it to confound your filters, your self-protective mechanisms, or your just-plain-old tastes.
We can relate to women in books or films or real life when they discuss being in a situation where a sexually fascinating guy was doing things and where the woman's reaction was complex and ambivalent and nuanced: "On the one hand, he was handsome and tall and had nice hands and I wanted some of that kind of action, but I wasn't feeling like he was connecting to me, he was too slick and polished about it, and I didn't sense an awareness on his part that he acknowledged that I get some say-so about this, that he isn't just entitled to it because he's learned his lounge act so well, so I found myself not wanting to, and the more he continued the less I wanted to have anything to do with him". Or whatever. Right?
So, I'd also like to pose this question, or set of questions, to other male people specifically: to what extent is it like that for you, too? Does the social expectation that, as males, we're always ready to jump on the opportunity, that for us to be visually attracted always means we are happily ready to have sex... does that expectation annoy you, anger you, do you resent it? Do you feel ignored or silenced by the lack of general acknowledgment that our sexuality is fraught with ambivalences and vulnerabilities too, or do you not feel that that is true for you?
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts