haitangkitty

Recently I watched this youtube video essay called The Lesbian Gaze, which analyzed the male gaze in popular lesbian films.
I don't know what I thought I would be getting out of this video other than get butthurt over someone analyzing my favorite films. Honestly I'm kind of tired of the subject. I personally like erotica and kinkier works and those are usually labeled as male gazey. I don't care if a lesbian work has a male creator, it's all about how it's made.The Handmaiden(2016) is my favorite film of all time and the video critizes some of the sex scenes in which I personally saw no problem.

Year ago I saw this documentary called Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power(2022). It was a great documentary on male gaze in cinema. It discussed the hot topic of fiction affecting reality. Lot of the media analysis today is based on discourse analysis, which is rooted in critical theory, deconstructing power structures. It's what's trending today.

I've done a lot of deconstructing but I eventually grew tired of it and today I'm not focused on the societal perspective but on the intimate individual watching experience. This film shook you somehow. Tell me more how. (rather than this was wrong and this was right about it when it comes to representation). I feel like today we can't escape into art anymore (like the phrase "you ruined this for me" when someone critically examines media).When we analyze media from critical theory, it's not the perspective from individual's sexuality. What lacks is the discussion around the importance of healthy sexuality. Sexual fantasies are in the same realm of fiction, dreams, places where you can escape real life and create a whole new universe. But I am in no way dismissing the term male gaze. It definetely exists in the film canon and I have a problem with it too.

With the history of how women are depicted in art, how common the sexualized woman is, is it possible to create sexual content without male gaze? The video brings up Portrait of a Lady on Fire(2019). It's a commentary on looking and being looked at. I love the film. It's being heralded as being this perfect portrayal of the female gaze or the lesbian gaze but I personally don't find the film erotical (but it doesn't have to be.)

I feel like there is some sort of cultural difference as well since Americans seem to be more shocked by nudity in arthouse films although porn is the most produced and watched film genre in America: maybe it's the inability to separate art from porn - especially when some sex scenes are shot like porn like in the teen(!) show Euphoria.

The video brings up one of the most critiqued lesbian films. When I saw Blue is the warmest color(2016) when I was 16 it was a powerful, emotional experience for me. It was the first lesbian film that depicted feelings and sexuality in such a raw way. But later it turned out that the actresses were mistreated during shooting of the infamous sex scenes and the director has turned out to be questionable in his other works as well. I think I'm gonna have to watch the film someday again to form my opinion it now that I'm more critical, but some part of me wants me to keep my original watch experience unstained from criticism.



Simpy put I have two seemingly opposing views:

1. I hate puritanism and the notion that all sex in media is bad, predatory, fetishistic. I hate that now lesbians can't say they enjoy a film that has sex in it. I feel like some puritans and radfems have this weird notion of lesbians as this "purer" sexuality because there's no men involved. There's such a big difference between online lesbians and my own irl lesbian community. Lesbians are sexy, kinky, messy, toxic etc. I don't know why we are supposed to be held at higher standards than other people.

2. I hate pornographical lense that lacks eroticism: emotion, tension, artistry. It's not about kinks, it's about dehumanization. It's about the overused but much needed term objectification. When you are an object you are no longer a person. Objects don't have agency. Objects don't feel pain. This is where the analysis of fiction creates reality is important: porn addiction and the male gaze in art does tie into how women are treated in real life.


I often come back to the much quoted Audre Lorde essay on "The Uses of the Erotic":

"As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned
against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving sub-stance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the
belief that sensation is enough.The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite,the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling."

Audre Lorde speaks of erotics as part of the spiritual self, as a life force, as knowledge. She says that the spiritual self is not contradictory to the political.

To exist as a woman who's sexuality doesn't involve men is still radical. Society and the artistic canon is not on our side (or on women's side in general.) What is the female gaze? What is the lesbian gaze? I feel like they are something so uncharted, repressed, and new to our culture that they are not easily found or even created in the first place. As someone who is writing a lesbian romance in which sexuality plays an important part I feel like I'm inventing something new, as If lesbian sexuality would be like a new scifi invention!