I Can’t Stop Perceiving Myself Through The Male Gaze
Step one is to be aware of it. Step two — who knows?
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Don’t ask me why, but I recently began binge-watching the VH1 nostalgia-driven docuseries, “I Love The….” Of course, I gravitated more toward the episodes around the 90s and 2000s, but the series initially debuted in 2002 with “I Love The 80s.”
Within the hour-long episodes, random celebrities and comedians comment on pop culture, news, and music of a given decade. Rewatching these clips has not only been an entertaining crash course in pop culture history but it’s been eye-opening in terms of my social conditioning.
I remember when the show debuted and I begged my parents to let me watch it with them. This was when I was young enough to feel like viewing it meant I was in on all the “grown-up secrets”. I was fascinated by human behavior and applied it to my knowledge of the world.
I was also old enough to understand the glaring message that came with exposure to any adult humor in the 2000s.
I couldn’t watch a consecutive three minutes of a given episode without hearing some dude talk about how much he wanted to have sex with a video girl. And it wasn’t only video girls. Any woman who was relevant to address for the decade was subject to these gratuitous comments.
Boys will be boys…
While male actors and artists were praised for their work, none of the men dared to say a word about a woman’s artistic or political contribution without first mentioning that she was totally bangable. And most of the time, her actual contribution was reduced to masturbation material for all the male interviewees.
To this selection of ever-so-gracious men, Janet Jackson was remembered for her curves and sex appeal. She was unanimously labeled “bootylicious.”
What about her groundbreaking music, choreography, and performance style that paved the way for an entire generation of entertainers, you…
