If I were to make a coming-of-age film about my life, I would know which moment would represent my first significant “loss of innocence”—that is, a change in my self-perception, a change in the relationship between my body and the world.
Peeping Tom
When I was about eight years old, I was at a public swimming pool with two friends my age. The unisex changing rooms had lockable stalls arranged in rows. Since I was very shy back then, I went into a stall by myself, while my friends went into the stall next to me—or so I thought. I saw a hole the size of a pupil in the stall wall. I pressed my eye against it, with the mischievous intention of seeing my friends and scaring them, but when I looked through, I didn’t see my friends—instead, I saw the back of an older man who, like me, was peering through the stall wall.
I remember feeling a shock and an immediate sense of danger. I quickly ran to my friends’ stall to let them know they were being watched.
I’d caught a peeping Tom because I was one myself. My intentions had been playful, but that playfulness was shockingly interrupted when I witnessed my friends being objectified by an older man.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that we become aware of ourselves when others see us. His “Peeping Tom” theory doesn’t quite apply to what I experienced at the swimming pool, because he talks about the unconscious feeling of shame one experiences when one realizes one might be watched while secretly watching someone else. This turns one into an object in the eyes of another. Watching this man watch my friends unlocked a new level of self-awareness within me—an awareness that bodies like my own are objectified and sexualized.
Public Disgrace
The next time I can recall a shift in my self-perception was at age 13, when I realized men were staring at me. Their gazes turned my body into something consumable. There is no single specific experience that marks this change; rather, it feels like an emotional collage of many moments of being watched.
I had a similar feeling when I watched a scene from the second season of The White Lotus (2022)—a recreation of a scene from Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). Both in the film and in the series, we see a female protagonist walking slowly across a piazza, surrounded by leering men. The vast, open piazza begins to feel claustrophobic as the men use the architecture to crowd in on her. We see her observing herself as the look of fear on her face transforms into serenity.
My emotional collage consists of the feeling of becoming aware of myself, but not in an empowering way. I remember feeling confused and awkward. I didn’t have breasts, so I didn’t understand what I had to offer them. It wasn’t until after a few unsolicited comments from others—classmates, strangers, my friend’s mother—that I realized I’d developed an ass. I’d never thought to examine the back of my body for signs of puberty; it was all about big boobs back then.
Meta-Masturbation
What led me to reflect on these moments—which have changed my understanding of myself as a cis woman—was my reaction to a video I’d made with the intention of sending it to my long-distance poly partner. I filmed myself masturbating in front of the mirror in my bedroom with my cell phone. My head was the only part of my body that wasn’t visible, and after I came in front of the camera in the mirror, I watched the video right away to see if I was happy with it. That made me horny all over again,
and I masturbated while watching myself masturbate.
In hindsight, I had to giggle at my level of… self-love, narcissism, horniness? But when I recalled the situation a few days later, my reaction had changed: Had I objectified myself? Had I filmed and observed myself through the “male gaze”? And if so, would that be problematic?
The terms “gaze” (Sartre and John Berger) and “male gaze” (Laura Mulvey) describe the portrayal of women as passive objects from a male, heterosexual perspective in the media (to put it simply). If I’m the one filming myself, I’m not passive—but I’m still filming myself through the male gaze by seeking to fulfil heterosexual male desire… yet this had clearly aroused desire within me.
Dissociation de luxe
I think this self-questioning stems from the fact that, for decades, I was involuntarily objectified by (mostly) men and saw this as something to be rejected. But now, in my mid-thirties, I can play with being objectified and objectifying myself. And I would argue that objectification is an essential part of human sexuality.
What I filmed and how I filmed it is, of course, shaped by the “male gaze” because I live in a society shaped by it. And when I masturbated while watching it, I was probably aroused by the fact that I had objectified myself with the intention of turning on my heterosexual male partner. In the end, I never sent him the video—not because I didn’t like it, but because, without my intending it, the video had served its purpose for me. Mulvey argues that women in cinema are not only capable of adopting the male viewer’s perspective but can also derive pleasure from doing so for a moment, and that’s what I had experienced.
I’ll never be fully able to take control over who objectifies me, when, and how, but I’m gaining more confidence to experiment with the “male gaze” and play with it—at least in private spaces. When I told my lover that I’d briefly worried about what it meant to objectify myself through the “male gaze,” she laughed and said, “That wasn’t the ‘male gaze’—you were masturbating to yourself through your ‘bi-gaze’!” And that’s something I hadn’t even considered yet…