The Gaze…
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in September 2026.
An interesting insight column in the New York Times that comes with the weekend Star talking about how men are taking their turn living under The Gaze – traditionally the Male Gaze, which pinioned women and defrocked them in various ways.
The article (Kate Manne) noted that men’s use of cosmetic products and processes is growing apace. Men’s use of cosmetic procedures (think plastic surgery) is increasing at three times the rate of women’s use.
The manosphere plays a part in this, in its perceived requirement for men to be more attractive in order for the elusive Female Gaze to come their way. Gay men, who have long been thought to be more aware than straight men of how they look, are being overtaken by heterosexual men who are ‘looksmaxxing’, a terrifying construct that can involve breaking bones to acquire the right kind of chiseled jawline and liposuction to reshape the face.
The core question is who gets to define the right look: whose Gaze counts? Who gets to define beauty?
The article says men. The same Gaze that brought women into line is now being trained on men, with similar debilitating effect.
I have no idea whether this is true or not, but what it made me think of is the idea of the Panopticon, applied by Foucault to describe how people can most effectively be managed. The Panopticon was a transparent circular building where all inmates could be observed at any time by a single guard. The idea was that because inmates could never be sure they weren’t being seen, they would consistently behave in the prescribed way.
Ergo, a large mass of people managed by a single Eye in the Sky. The idea of inescapable surveillance as a control measure is central to any of the sci fi I read, until I got too terrified by what I was learning and changed my reading habits.
So it’s hugely ironic, and heart-breakingly sad, that we are now doing it – embracing inescapable surveillance -- to ourselves, quite happily. I won’t review what we know about what replacing interpersonal interaction with social media has done to how kids evolve, and how democratic procedures such as group decision-making, voting or otherwise, are warped.
Quitting reading sci fi didn’t stall the momentum, did it? So I suppose that ignoring what is happening to social dynamics as we currently experience them will be equally ineffective.
We should rather focus – turn our Gaze to – what we can do to reclaim our independence.
Well, first, understand that the Panopticon only works if the inmates believe it does. If even some inmates think they can get away with breaking the rules, and even once in a while they are either undetected or unpunished when they do so, the nakedness of the emperor becomes evident. It all begins to fall apart. Social disobedience can spread (apologies for a painfully seasonal metaphor) like wildfire.
Secondly, they can meddle with the details. We are learning, thanks to the lunatic to the south, that by changing regulations, the law is distorted. Call it throwing a spanner in the works. You don’t change the law, you just change the details of how it is applied. (‘Power over the rules is real power.’ Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows, cited in New Yorker, July 20/26)
If you get caught, you claim ignorance, embrace correction, and promise never to do it again. But you might forget to mention that it’s possible you might err similarly with another detail, with similar destabilizing effect. This sets up a whack-a-mole situation that quickly overwhelms the capacity of the boss to boss. It’s hard to correct someone who cleverly plays dumb.
Thirdly, you can redefine the chain of command. (This comes to me from my doctoral work, which has erupted from the depths of history to complicate my life once more.) The concept of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ (Moore, 1987, applied to child welfare by Marilyn Callahan, 1993) held that legislation and regulations were defined in the exchange between the individuals who deliver service and those who receive them.
This stance empowered that transaction. It gave permission for the spirit of the law to be defined to fit the circumstances of the moment, which only the two people directly involved understood in its entirety. In that malleability lies freedom. And responsibility. (And should give us pause in the era of AI, but that’s a future rant.)
I realize that sharing this perspective may re-engage interest in me by the Powers that Be whose job it is to keep us being good, but desperate times may call for desperate measures. It need not be a tidal wave. It could be a ripple in a pond. A rill babbling over a small fall. A steady drip from a leaky eavestrough.
Could be worth a thought.
