Perils of the Male Gaze: The Power of Social Norming
At the age of fifteen, during the second semester of my sophomore year in high school, I cut off my hair—as close as I could to the roots—and started wearing my brother’s clothes. I wasn’t trying to be a boy; I was trying to un-girl myself. I was pretty and lots of boys wanted to date me but I didn’t have the voice yet to say no. Fifteen years later I would come out as a lesbian; but, at the age of fifteen, all I knew was that I didn’t want to date boys.
I still remember the look on the face of a boy I’d known since kindergarten when I walked into AP U.S. History the day after I had cut off my hair, wearing baggy corduroy pants, hiking boots with bright yellow laces, and a wool sweater that was several sizes too big. It was somewhere between dismay and disgust. I’m pretty sure he even shook his head a little.
Grammar school, which in our district went from kindergarten through 8th grade, had been a sweet time. No one had started dating yet, though we all knew which boys had crushes on which girls and vice versa. Mostly we went out in groups—to the Medici on 57th for deep-dish pizza or to the Hyde Park Theater for a movie (Silver Streak was a favorite). We were still kids in grammar school, innocent in the most wonderful ways.
Everything changed in high school. The rules, the expectations. Almost immediately, I started wearing Calvin Klein jeans and cute, fashionable blouses. I curled the ends of my hair with a curling iron. I wore pink-framed glasses and a touch of blush on my cheeks. And I went on dates. Lots of dates.
I didn’t want to date boys. I wanted to keep hanging out with my friends from grammar school—with Sallie, in particular. She and I—along with several other friends—had spent the summer before high school hanging out at the 47th Street beach, swimming and playing cards (mostly hearts, sometimes spades). I loved being around Sallie. One time, on the way to her house, I suddenly felt my entire body light up when I saw her walking towards me. I didn’t want to date boys. If anything, I wanted to date Sallie. But dating girls wasn’t an option. It was 1978. I’d never heard anything positive about homosexuality.
Meanwhile, boys were asking me out and I didn’t feel like I could say no. I remember one Sunday afternoon walking with my father in a crowded mall. Not far behind us was a group of boys who had noticed me. Four or five of them. Apparently, I started to slow down—as if to let them catch up to me—because suddenly my father asked me why I was slowing down. It was as if I was being pulled in by some invisible force—the force of their collective gaze. As if I belonged not to myself but to any boy who gazed at me.
After a whirlwind year of dating, I couldn’t handle the attention anymore. I stopped returning phone calls. I stopped answering the door. Consequently, my reputation plummeted. Boys started calling me Cock Teaser (CT for short) and Norwegian Bitch behind my back. It was at this point when I cut off my hair and started wearing my brother’s clothes. In retrospect, it’s clear I was trying to disrupt the gaze I felt so controlled by—as if by making myself physically unattractive, I could free myself from the gaze of so many boys. But dressing to attract or to not attract are two sides of the same coin. Either way, I was dressing for someone else. As my sense of self continued to crumble, I thought about suicide, I drank, and I wrote sad poems—several of which expressed same-sex desire, even though I wasn’t fully aware at the time of what these poems meant.
I made it through the rest of high school and then, after college, a co-worker kindly suggested I get therapy. The therapy addressed certain aspects of my depression but not all. Have you ever thought about prettying yourself up? my therapist asked. Almost immediately, I grew out my hair and started wearing dresses. A year later, I met the man who would become my husband. I was twenty-five when I walked down the aisle of Bond Chapel on the University of Chicago campus wearing my mother’s wedding dress, destined for what I assumed would be a life very similar to my mother’s. We had paid $80 to get the dress dry-cleaned; not a single alteration was necessary.
For most of our marriage, my husband and I lived in San Francisco in a studio apartment, using the walk-in closet as our bedroom. I was happy enough to be married, but I still didn’t have a healthy sense of self. One day, while on the ferry to Alcatraz Island, I told my husband that I didn’t have any dreams of my own. I just want to be with you, I said, shortly before we landed on Alcatraz.
Five years later, as we were sitting on the couch in our living room (now in Nashville, TN), my husband started pointing to female models in the Lands’ End catalog I was casually flipping through, asking if I was attracted to any of them. I broke down immediately and told him that I thought I was more attracted to women than I was “supposed” to be (for someone who was married to a man). We had a long heart-to-heart talk that extended into the early hours of the morning. I love you so much, my husband said, I just want you to be happy even if that means we can’t be together. Two months later, we filed for divorce.
My coming out process was a mixture of joy, anxiety, and grief. Nearly everyone around me was supportive. My friends, my family. But I had lived the wrong life for so long I wasn’t entirely sure how to be a lesbian. When one of my lesbian friends took me to a smoky lesbian dive bar with two pool tables and a dance floor and said Welcome to your new world, I started to second-guess myself. Everyone there looked different from me—muscles, tattoos, and cigarettes. But as the months went by, I was able to expand my circles. Eventually, I was able to just step back and slow down, and I began to feel more comfortable with who I was. I even pretended to date myself as a way of re-connecting and falling in love with myself after so many years of living my life according to someone else’s rules. I made special dinners for myself, setting the table for just me. I took fun weekend trips by myself. Gradually, the longer I was out, my feelings of emptiness and insecurity fell away.
When I was finally in a good place emotionally and psychologically, I met Laurie. We had both been invited to a dinner party hosted by a woman neither of us knew very well. Within a few minutes of meeting, we found out that we both had majored in Religious Studies in college, and this ended up being the first of many things we had in common. After this we saw each other every month at a game group hosted by the same woman who had hosted the dinner party; and then, in June of 1998, Laurie called me to ask if I wanted to have coffee sometime. How about now? I asked. On one of our early dates, I asked her a difficult theological question, and Laurie told me later that my question had given her a stomachache. We still laugh about this. In October 2013, we flew to Portland, Maine to legalize our marriage, though we still consider our actual marriage to have begun in October of 1999 when we bought a house and moved in together. We have a lot in common in terms of interests and background and values, but we are also just different enough to keep things interesting. We never run out of things to talk about (or laugh about or cry about) because each of us independently is always growing and learning new things about ourselves and about what it means to be alive in the world.
A few weeks ago, I came across a “to-do” list I had written when I was twenty-two. Eat less junk food is the first item on the list. Followed by Increase your vocabulary, Learn to read faster, and Get more exercise. The ninth item on the list is Develop a self.
I was never physically or sexually assaulted when I was a teenager. I was just looked at. Looked at and desired by boys who had way more power than I had. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but I see now that I had been trapped by their gaze—their collective male gaze—and my ability to know myself and to speak for myself floundered as a result. I am fifty-six years old now and I still make self-improvement “to-do” lists. But now I make them out of a place of genuine love for myself, not out of a place of emptiness or self-loathing. “Develop a self” never makes the list.
-Lisa Dordal
Lisa Dordal teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and is the author of Mosaic of the Dark, which was a finalist for the 2019 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Water Lessons (forthcoming, April 2022). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and the Robert Watson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Narrative, RHINO, The New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, CALYX, and The Sun. For more information, please visit her website: lisadordal.com