The gaze

I wonder about all the
"objectification of women"
in the media

If you go back to the years
before capitalistic media
i.e. tv, print, advertisements

you will still find
women are so central
to all the literature
that's been written

on the one hand,
is it so bad?
since it shows how central a woman is
to a man's thoughts, ideas, dreams,
self worth, fulfillment
that his entire life revolves around her

there are so many layers of responses to this
on would imagine that
woman has been objectified in literature
because men have been writing
(almost) all of it
and that if women wrote more
than we would have had more of
objectified men too

but then what women did write
(now that it has been
a couple of hundred years)
does not really conform to the idea
in fact, from jane austen to Toni Morrison
women are central to what women write
but women as full personalities
complexities, histories, feelings,
and not just women as objects

proving what virginia woolf
said long, long ago
that if women wrote more,
men would realize
that they are not at the center of women's live
as they imagine themselves to be

a sort of power imbalance here

so in fact if women wrote more
we would see not more of objectified men
but more of a well rounded pictures
of women's worlds

and the problem with the male gaze
is not that it is there
because, how fair would it be
to ask men to stop writing
what they feel?
how they think of women?
if a woman is central to their life
in a sexual way
is it fair to ask them to refrain from it?
wouldn't that lead to
bottling and frustration for them?
how in the world are they going to
write about or picturise
women in neutral, asexual rules?
and actually that would be as unrealistic
as blatant objectification

what we need of course is for men
to write about women
as complete, wholesome
fully developed persons
sexual, and in control of their sexuality
and not just a pair of breasts

(see I don't subscribe to the idea
that there should be less or no
sexual portrayals of women
or that women should be portrayed in
neutral or asexual ways only
i just think women's protrayal
should be more realistic
sexy and sexual, on top (pun unintended)
of everything else that she can do
and these portrayals should take
women's agency into account,
not just her body)

but since that's not happening
any time in the foreseeable future
(many men have done it successfully, for sure
but then even more so have
never grown out of their adolescent fantasies)

what we need is more women writing
for the balance and the perspective
so that we can see
not just wholesome, interesting, intriguing
fleshed out (pun unintended) women
but also that our assumptions
about what is in women''s minds
what women want and think about
are proven wrong