How to deal with the male gaze (when dating men)

• Hear what our listeners wear when they want to look sexy

• Discuss terms we use to describe attractiveness and problems with the male gaze and beauty standards

• Attempt to answer ‘can you escape the male gaze?’

Can you escape the male gaze, even if you try? This week we discuss the dynamics of dressing for the male gaze, or attempting not to, and how it’s difficult to not dress for the male gaze, particularly when you’re dating men but also if you want to look or feel attractive at all. We touch on why the male gaze is harmful, beauty standards and how the male gaze has been repackaged through social media.

We begin the episode with discussing terms we use to describe our appearance, unpacking the differences within them and how these are a product of the male gaze and our internalised male gaze as women. We then move on to a segment where we ask our listeners what they want to wear when they want to look sexy, to get an idea of what we’re calling the ‘sexy consensus’ (ie. what everyone’s shared idea of ‘sexy’ clothing is), which unsurprisingly involves a lot of black, red, and underwear.

Then we give our own personal feelings about dressing for the male gaze, and what we wear when we want to look ‘sexy’ or ‘attractive.’ We grapple with the idea that we might never be able to escape the male gaze, and that denying the fact that everything we do is in some ways a product of, or scrutinised by, the male gaze in society. We also try to dive into the concept of ‘the main character’ and ‘romanticising your life’ to explain why these concepts might be a little bit problematic when we think about the male gaze and how women, under it, constantly picture themselves and what they’re doing by how it might appear to others.

Ultimately, we don’t have an answer about how to deal with the male gaze, or how to escape it, but we think having some awareness of how we describe beauty and how we ourselves interact with the gaze when getting dressed, particularly for dates, is important.

We also want to acknowledge that we can only give our own experiences with the male gaze, and often when we talk about beauty standards it is within a white and heteronormative framework, which we know brings us an enormous amount of privilege. If you have any personal experience or opinions on the male gaze and how it affects you, we would love to hear about it, however similar or different to our own experience.