The Male and Female Gaze, from a Trans-Masculine Perspective
(Part 4 of 6)
By Orlando G. Bregman, November 17, 2023
(They/He)
(Originally written in late 2019 and saved as a draft on Medium but completely forgotten to publish due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and my mother’s death from it in late 2020, so now slightly updated in late 2023 and published finally in mid-2024.)
My name is Orlando G. Bregman, my pronouns are They/He, meaning I prefer they over he but will also respond to he, and I identify as, or simply am trans-masculine, gender nonconforming, and lesbian. (And I do not personally feel the need to medically transition.)
(Part 4 of 6)
(Click here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6)
WOMEN IN FILM.
When I enrolled in the Film Program at Los Angeles City College in 1992 on my F-1 International Student visa, I was considered “one of the three female film students” in the entire class. I am of course not actually female by my own experience, and that’s why the quotation marks, but that is how I was registered by the teachers and fellow film students in school of course and that is what it says on all my identification papers, female. Which finally brings me to the title of this article.
It at some point occurred to me that while I am being discriminated as a “woman in the film industry” and most likely even more so as a lesbian, (which itself is a complicated term for me to apply to myself, as I feel male and am attracted to women,) and I am not even in actuality really a woman, and so this makes the discrimination even more confusing to digest.
(It is as similarly confusing as being discriminated against for appearing as a Person Of Color, while in reality mostly white but with some and distant Indonesian heritage on my mother’s side due to centuries of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies, and so identifying as bi-racial, white-Asian, purely by necessity only.
In reality I do not “feel” Asian at all and am also not accepted by Asian minority groups in the US, as anyone with distant Indonesian Dutch heritage, like Eddie and Alex Van Halen of rockbound Van Halen, are not raised as Asian at all but have entirely been colonized by the West, mentally included, much like Black or partially Black people in the US have very little in common culturally with actual Africans. But that’s another story, or not exactly as all identities in reality intersect but at least I will save it for another one.)
But essentially the film industry doesn’t accept me as a woman of course, and not because I don’t feel like one, but because supposedly I would make female films, and supposedly those films don’t sell. In reality however I wouldn’t truly know how to make a female film if my life depended on it.
So this is obviously strange and confusing and frustrating for me to digest as someone who feels male, besides the fact that I do not actually believe that women only make “female films,” and as if there would be something wrong with that in and of itself, or even that “female films” don’t sell, which simply is not true, as box office grosses have proven plenty by now.
In all reality the big fuss isn’t at all about women not being capable enough to make good or successful films, nor about making genre-limited films only, “women’s films,” as if that is truly a genre to begin with, and nor even about whether films made by women might underperform at the box office. As in most cases of inequality, the primarily goal isn’t even maximizing profits exclusively but moreover maintaining the status quo, even it means losing money. It is about retaining heterosexual white male power, especially in an increasingly diverse society.
In reality film, and its’ predecessor, art, as in literature, photography, painting, etc., has been a mostly male-dominated industry, besides white, and predominately heterosexual, with the very specific function even of using the very medium of art to control women, to look at them and objectify them and record them and even immortalize them that way, as muses exclusively, and take credit for themselves, as creators exclusively.
It is a way to specifically use voyeurism, and feel proud of it rather than ashamed. It is a way for a man to truly and freely and openly stare at a woman and capture her and get rewarded for it. Not a bad way to make a living and get recognition for it, for men of course.
It only makes sense that since artists portray what is on their minds and in their hearts, so many portrayals by men are of women exactly, and of women in secondary roles, as looked at, not as looking themselves, and owned, not as owning themselves, as topped by a man in screen dominance just as he would want to dominate her sexually.
I do believe this is the real reason for all the gatekeeping, to keep the patriarch rule in place, and no real other reason exists, certainly not commercially. “Allowing” a woman to make films on her own terms is like letting your wife play with your Playboy Magazines or something. Pretty soon she’ll have a good time of her own and won’t play with you anymore, or she’ll play with you on equal terms, whichever is worse to the male ego, but this is essentially the reasoning behind all that resistance.
AND YET THIS FEMALE GAZE CONCEPT HAS BEEN NAGGING AT ME.
Because it is obviously an important and underrepresented point of view, but it is not one I actually share, yet is imposed on me nonetheless, and by male and female society alike. But as a trans-masculine person it is not truly my own gaze, and there is nothing I can do about it.
One could suggest that I could listen to, and learn from, women but the problem is not that I cannot hear or cannot understand women at all, for I’m not deaf nor a brute, but that I would be going against my own trans-masculine gaze if I were to prioritize the female gaze in my own art. I am not trying to become a woman after all, yet do in fact sympathize, something that probably does set my gaze apart from many cis-male POVs.
And not that anyone is demanding this female understanding explicitly from me, or anymore at age 50, but it is in fact still implicitly expected from me nonetheless. Just as a whole host of female or feminine behavior is generally still expected from me, and projected onto me, and in actuality imposed onto me, and portrayed by others as actually coming from me to top it off.
Many cis-guys throughout my life have asked me for my opinion on female artists or female created art, or entertainment, without asking me about male artists ever, or even wondering out loud why I would like certain male artists at all, and automatically assuming it must have been some guy’s influence on me, usually some “invisible boyfriend” or that I was somehow infatuated with male artists, if even only mentally, as in “you fall in love with men’s minds”, despite being openly lesbian and very visibly masculine.
This would in the past often leave me confused and speechless, besides frustrated and disrespected afterwards, since more often than not I had not heard of most of these female artists, or at least did not gravitate towards them naturally. “I think you’ll love her” they’d often say, as a way to offer me both artistic advice and a sense of direction in life, not at all considering that I most likely wouldn’t “love them”, or very likely might “love them” for primarily their sex appeal, as I am exclusively sexually attracted to women, and certainly also creative ones, something these mostly men but sometimes even women would also automatically negate.
There have been female exceptions, and increasingly over the years, like Nina Simone or Patti Smith or Stevie Nicks or Agnes Varda, or particularly queer artists like Virginia Woolf or Anais Nin, or Kimberly Peirce or Lisa Cholodenko, or Nan Goldin, but my main influences have always been primarily male, and mostly heterosexual, like John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Jack Keroauc, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, though also containing many queer ones, as inevitably the artistic cannon does, like Gus Van Sant, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Allen Ginsberg, John Schlessinger, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, to name a few.
And while there is no shortage of the male gaze, and it still is the default even today, the trans-masculine gaze is actually more woefully underrepresented than the female gaze altogether.
Trans-masculinity is in fact disrespected and erased altogether, and even in crucially important matters that also very much include us, like violence against women and LGBTQ people and all forms of hate crimes and discrimination in general, but even in reproductive and abortion rights, so not only erasing us but also very much endangering us, and sadly enough even by trans-women who in their own understandably desperate need for “a seat at the table” wrongfully frame heteronormative discrimination as exclusively targeting them. We trans-masculine and trans-male people, and whether straight or gay or anything in between ourselves, more often than not do also mention trans-feminine or trans-female discrimination, in my experience anyway.
I must therefore add, if it isn’t obvious, that the trans-masculine gaze is not exactly the same as the cis-male gaze, or that while the gaze itself might be very similar, the trans-masculine experience itself is certainly not the same as the cis-gender male experience in life, since we miss out on all the initial male privilege, and the legal and social empowerment that comes with being cis-gender male, and we only gain some of it if sufficiently passing as cis-gender male, while still never ever being cis-gender, and certainly not born into male privilege of course.
Lastly I want to add to this that besides this difference even between the trans-male gaze and experience and the cis-male gaze and experience, and whether gay or straight or anything in between, the male gaze does not truly and necessarily have to be toxic, although it more often than not unfortunately is, and certainly is socially rewarded for it as well. It is in fact of course rather risky and requires a certain amount of unlearning of stereotypically toxic behavior for a cis-male artist to become more humanly balanced and empathetic, for he will be seen as weak by the majority and the powerful for it.
Yet this is where the trans-masculine gaze and experience can potentially have the upper hand. Chances are that by having been conditioned as female, some of the female experience, or understanding of it, has in fact rubbed off and one can sympathize with women more easily than cis-gender men can. This still varies per individual and personal background of course and some transgender men can in fact become just as toxic as many cis-gender men are, in some cases even worse, if only out of sheer envy of cis-gender male privilege.
(Part 4 of 6)
(Click here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6)
Orlando G. Bregman
(They/ He)
Writer/Publisher at The Auteur
Documentary Filmmaker at Bregman Films
All Rights Reserved (2024)
Click here for a List Of Essays
