The Male Gaze and Makeshift
Today found me thinking about The Male Gaze. (Thoughts prompted by This and this two-part article that a friend linked me to, after we were talking about X-Men one day.) So this afternoon I was reading various essays on the subject.
So now my head's in an absolute freakin' mess, and though I've never entirely bought into this theory, I now cannot help but wonder if I am an inherently flawed individual to my core. Because of, ya know, the way I draw ladies full of curvy, undulating lines running through them, and men full of straight ones (with a few exceptions.) And it's generally true that my ladies are sexy and my men not so much? I've been known to draw some lingerie from time to time, and I don't know that you could exactly call it "ironic", though I be a straight woman attracted to the square-jawed, hairy-chested type.
Actually, I kinda consciously speak in a 'male' voice about my art, but it's never meant to degrade women. It's more that I make some conscious effort to draw characters who have some individuality to their faces and bodies, rather than having that identical golden mean, or whatever, and my idea is that in telling people "She is pretty." they'll believe it, or at least their minds will be open to the idea that different people can be beautiful in different ways.
In an entirely different way, with my male characters, I just tend to insult them, because I don't want folks to think that my work is about me indulging in my personal fantasies of the desirable dude. (That is, to keep off accusations of objectifying men via The Female Gaze.) Eh, but is that an acceptable argument? And what about the way that my stories tend to veer very heavily towards male main characters and male point-of-view characters? Am I anticipating a male readership? But, heck,** my characters that I most* relate to are all male...
...Meh. I've really always thought that a lot of this theory is people seeing what they want to see. And, ya know, if any work of art is created by a man, doesn't that automatically mean it's the male gaze? And is the idea that men like to look at women and women like men to look at them always necessarily wrong? I don't tend to take issue with, ya know, gender dimorphism, so long as we're all polite to one another. I'm a firm believer in politeness.
On another matter, I'm trying to get out a cover for "Black Dog", my (first?) Makeshift Man story. I've got one rejected rough draft and one sketch that I'm in no mental state to assess at present. Ugggggghhhhhh.
...I wanna get moving! The noose is tightening!
Guh. Needs feedback or something. *Crazy.*
*Passes out on desk.*
* I relate to all of them, in degrees. Else I could not write them, 'since I wouldn't know what they'd do.
** For the longest time now I've just thought of myself as being a kind of androgynous female. Shoot, I even made an identity change from the obviously-female "Jolene" to the very neutral "JoJo" and "J. E.", huh? It's not that I've ever not identified as female. It's just that...I'm really not very "girly". Even when I was little, my sister would be interested in pink and princesses and ballet and dolls, and I was playing with Legos and thinking about jungle animals and dragons and Star Wars and superheroes. The kinds of things that...It might be weird, but it kinda surprises me when I hear such things described as being for boys...But I'm rambling, aren't I?