Gazing Monday August 22, 2005
I first became interested in the psychological gaze during my teens. I’d found an esoteric yoga book in the library, which discussed optical cloud busting. If you focussed intently on clouds, it said, you could disperse them because the eyes project subtle energy: also why you can sense someone’s gaze on the back of your neck. Cloud busting may be nonsense; I’m not sure. I am receptive to extra-ordinary phenomena, as discussed in Lyall Watson’s book Supernature, and think conventional science sometimes ‘explains’ what in fact it fails to understand. What I am sure about is the notion that the gaze has subtle-psychological energy.
In Egyptian mythology you have the ‘eye of horus’, one of the primary gods of their pantheon, and in Indian and Chinese yoga you have the ‘third eye’, an inner visual faculty of meditation. Jeremy Bentham developed his ‘panopticon’, the surveillance method for prisons that ultimately relied on uncertainty, that you never knew when you were being watched and could not take any chances. The UK has the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world. In film, you have Sex, Lies and Videotape, Peeping Tom, American Beauty, Rear Window and City of God: featuring the cultural and psychological aspect of the gaze not only mediated by the lens, but also empowered by it. And in social psychology, we understand that gaze behaviour is gender related, whereby men look and women are looked at. The political conclusion is sometimes quite trite, that this phenomenon reflects the sexual objectification of women. In his book Ways of Seeing John Berger discussed this in relation to art, where women were traditionally painted knowing they were being watched, i.e. as an act of sexual display. There is a political dimension to this but it cannot wholly be reduced to these simplistic terms, as a form of arbitrary nurture-based conditioning. What the 1970s feminists forgot is the fact that men and women are different: physically, biologically and psychologically. We behave differently, and in relation to the opposite sex we have a choreographed and complementary interaction, explicable in sociological terms.
It seems that visual appreciation is more important for men than women, that we are first interested in beautiful form, with a secondary interest in emotion and personality. It doesn’t mean the latter are less important, but we have an inbuilt order of attraction. And it seems to some extent the opposite for women, who are more interested in character, status and social power rather than physical appearance. The biological basis is obvious, the primordial levels of instinctive mating where a man seeks a healthy baby-carrying body and a woman wants a man capable of protecting her when she is pregnant. Thousands of years later it becomes less defined, more socially complex and politically questionable, but that doesn’t mean we can dismiss the psychological imprinting that accompanies fundamental biology. Women are looked at sexually and it is sometimes objectionable, but it is also desired: hence the mating display women use every Saturday night. Men groom as well, but the dynamic is different. In this capitalist world when a market can be exploited it invariably is, and male pornography is an enormous industry and the female equivalent is not. It’s changing slightly, but the general rule still exists that women are attracted to character and emotion, as seen in the huge market for romantic fiction.
It’s a complicated subject, operating at different levels. ‘Men can’t help acting on impulse’ the advert said, and women enjoy the secret power of their own attraction. Presumably thousands of them bought that fragrant deodorant because they liked the idea of being bought flowers by a man in the street, irresistibly drawn to their face, form and pheromones. It can be Neanderthal and offensive, but may also be emotional and poetic. On one occasion I literally felt faint standing in front of a stunningly pretty girl in a Greek island jewellery shop. What made me weak was how this combined with her radiantly kind and gentle nature. Men’s emotions tend to be more internal; when they are projected externally you see demonstrable homosexuality or what we call ‘camp’, which is a reversal of the more normal polarity – unpleasant, in my opinion. Women know how to access this inner world of men – consciously or not – and beauty, in whatever subjective form, is part of this choreography.