Reckless Eyeballing in the Locker Room
the male gaze now looks out through women’s eyes
It’s hard to change into your workout clothes in the cramped quarters of a toilet stall. Your purse is perched precariously against a pipe running between the toilet and the wall. When you remove your shoes to get into your athletic sneakers, your bare feet slide into the water tracked on the tile from women coming from the pool or the showers.
Why would I want to change in a toilet stall instead of out in the open in the women’s locker room? I don’t always do it, but sometimes I do. And other women do as well. It’s because of the girl-on-girl eyeballing taking place within the confines of the locker room.
It’s because, as women, we’re not free from being stared at in the women’s locker room anymore.
A woman can’t be free of the male gaze in the women’s locker room because now women are looking at each other in the way that our culture has taught us to: with the eye of a man.
As soon as your jeans come down, as many pairs of eyes as there are women in the locker room move to, well, check out your butt.
The first time I noticed it I thought the women’s eyes turned to me when I had stripped to bra and panties were an aberration, some sort of behavioral fluke that couldn’t, wouldn’t happen again.
We were all women, right? While our body size, height and skin color varied from person to person, we were all female and therefore had no curiosity about what each other’s bodies looked like when our clothes came off, right?
Wrong.
It happened the next time, and the next. I started taking more notice of being eyeballed as I undressed. Interest, by the amount of looking time, increased with greater amount of skin exposed.
Full clothes on doesn’t warrant a second glance. Most women walk through the locker room without so much as a glance at their surroundings — including fellow gym members — until they locate an available locker.
When bare skin is revealed, all eyes in the room move — however discretely or indiscreetly — to the naked body. Bare breasts, even flashed only for an instant between bra and workout top, are sure to draw looks, as is pubic hair.
The reckless eyeballing is aided by the use of mirrors placed strategically throughout the dressing room at angles so that members can view themselves on all sides. This reflective set-up allows women standing in a different section of the changing room to sneak a peep with impunity, by staring into the mirror.
Eyes will stay on your body until, sensing yourself being looked at, you look up, eyes meet, or start heading for, theirs, when the look will instantly be withdrawn.
The male gaze of men versus the male gaze of women
These dressing room looks between women are qualitatively different than those given by men to women on the street, at work, or on the subway. These are gazes not meant to incite, but to measure, gauge, compare.
A man checking you out may look away when you catch him at it, but his gaze lasts long enough — a second or two — for you to play “gotcha.”
However, the women in the locker room are boldest when they know you’re not looking. When you do turn, feeling yourself under observation, they turn away, or at least turn their eyes away, avert their gaze to their gym bag or something inside their own locker.
Why have women become voyeurs of other women? Like so many other elements of modern culture, it’s both more and less than it appears.
The male gaze, it seems, has through some sort of osmotic process, taken over the female gaze. I am feeling nostalgia for the old days, when there was a deferential turning of the head at another female’s nudity in the locker room.
The casting aside of the eyes to protect another woman’s modesty indicated a lack of interest, therefore displaying no judgment, comparison, or unfriendliness toward another woman who was naked and therefore at her most vulnerable. That action of looking away has been replaced, it seems, by the social attitude once considered to be the exclusive domain of the male: “If it’s being shown, look.”
After all, women live in, and participate in, the common culture — one in which women are used to sell every type of product via the multiple venues of the media — movie, TV, radio, film, the magazines and print media, the internet.
Everywhere the commodified female body is offered up for visual consumption to titillate and to provoke desire in order to sell products. Women’s bodies are offered up for display not just in the male dominated realm of porn, but in mainstream magazines as well, the type that “nice girls” read, as in television shows and movies. The consumer culture has taught women how to look at other women as commodities, as sex objects.
There’s also a sense of women, so continually on the alert for what her boyfriend might find more desirably tempting than her own assets, the my boyfriend would like her butt line of thinking. Unwittingly, women checking each other out appraisingly in the dressing room are guilty of exactly the same behavior they’ve been nagging their boyfriends to stop doing.
“We” women have become “them.” So a woman in America today has as much chance as getting “scoped out” and “checked out,” having her body appraised in a women’s locker room, as she’d if she wandered into a men’s locker room.
It’s a problem because for women to check each other out in locker room means the loss of one more safe space for us to be rid of the never-ending torrent of display and consumption that characterizes our world.
In the gym locker room, the gaze stops when the breasts are fitted back into the t-shirt, when the jeans are pulled back on. We are, all of us, in the game of postindustrial international corporate consumerism culture too deep. Sadly, and unintentionally perhaps, we have commodified ourselves.
