Last week my daughter, Chelsea, and I bumped into a friend of hers who is a first year college student. Chelsea is a high school senior. The topic of college is always interesting and relevant, especially because she will be making her own decision within the next couple of months of where she will spend her next four years. Right now, leaving the nest is simply a concept to her. Her college friends have provided her with a window into their own transition from adolescence to young adulthood, but she must climb into her own window to truly understand the new world that awaits her.
Her friend lives in a college dorm on campus. During our conversation, she happened to mention the creepy security guards who leer at her when she heads to the gym for her workout. She said that one of the guards is a retired New York City detective and knows her father, a detective himself. Although she imagined a more paternal type of protection from campus security, instead she has received a form of sexual harassment. She lamented that this man never fails to comment on how good she looks as his eyes follow her backside down the road. It was obvious that this unwanted attention makes her feel very uncomfortable.
There is strangeness, an unprepared-ness, that a girl feels when she leaves the shelter of her family home for the starkness of a bleak college dormitory. She will quickly domesticate her surroundings with the familiar: sheets pillows, blankets, a stuffed animal or two, the scent of home still lingering in the threads. The most profound change however, occurs once she steps out of her dorm and into a new world of sexual scrutiny. Under the light of this new glare, a girl feels unnerved. Her confident adolescent roots are plucked and exposed as nothing more than last year’s performance art. This is the big time baby. Grow up or go home!
My daughter’s friend’s confession got me thinking about my own post-adolescent period. It brought back similar memories and feelings. As a young college coed in New York City, my college experience was a bit different than most girls. Instead of simply contending with new attention from boys my own age, adult men were suddenly and shamelessly marking their territory at my expense. I can still recall how disconcerting this felt. Inside, I was still a girl feeling my way in the dark woods, yet to men, I was cast as sexual nymph with special powers that made them loose all control. This male snare confused me. I started to temper my behavior around men. For it was just a short six months earlier that I was a shy, nerdy senior attending an all girl high school, passed over at school mixers for blending in with the wallpaper. Suddenly, men were looking at me as if I was a fresh-faced sexpot. Men would tell me I looked like a piece of candy. I would have rather been looked at as a more of a healthy, low calorie item reserved for those who had more willpower.
I knew that I wasn’t doing anything different or even dressing different, but there was a paradigm shift in the way I was being treated. As much as I tried to divert my eyes and show no reaction to their crude attention, inside I was feeling angry about this bold exploitation. Someone had handed out free tickets to my own reality show and every man was tuned in to watch.
This voyeuristic and objectifying male gaze seems to target girls who aren’t quite accustomed to their new surroundings. This young thing is untethered by parental protection and somewhat naive to male scrutiny. Men believe she is newly ripened fruit ready to drop onto the lap of anyone who stands under her tree. Say the right thing and you may just get a taste. If you’re not lucky enough to taste, you might at least get a response. This serves to reaffirm his masculine appetite. The adult male collective gaze is identified in Maiden USA by author Kathleen Sweeney:
This male gaze dupes itself into a myth of sexual availability based, like pornography on illusion. Are viewer and performer in complete collusion? It marks another opportunity for self-pleasuring through scopophilia- Freud’s terms for sexual pleasure derived by the act of looking (Sweeney, 51).
Permission is granted by easy access to sexual content in the media. Magazine covers and centerfolds feature youthful smiling faces and perky figures, all for the taking. They beckon men to look, leer and fantasize. The gap between fantasy and reality narrows when a living, breathing young girl comes into focus. If these media infused girls want me, she must want me too.
Sweeney describes female coming of age as a visual product. The magical age of 18 makes every girl open season (Sweeney, 52). This girl is now a visual free-for-all for any man. She has no choice but to deflect it, accept it or use it to her advantage. The latter will involve a riskier form of maneuvering, as she recognizes exposure as her own commodity.
If my daughter’s friend was not forced to contend with this visual bullying, her adult awakening may have been softer, kinder. She would have claimed her power to choose if and when she felt ready to share her sexuality. This should be her right. It saddens me, as a mother of a beautiful, blossoming teenage girl, to know that this moment of entitlement may be robbed from her by the insensitivity of the male ego. Should his right to look, to leer, and to objectify come at the expense of her comfort?
Works Cited
“Leery Men Cartoon 1.” Cartoon. Cartoon Stock.com. Web. 12 Mar. 2010. <http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/tzu/lowres/tzun352l.jpg>.
Men Showing Thier More Primal Manner of Communicating. Photograph. Whistle In: An Exploration of the World of Whistling. WordPress.com, 22 Feb. 2009. Web. 12 Mar. 2010. <http://roosterharrison.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/leering0204_468x349.jpg?w=300&h=223>.
Sweeney, Kathleen. Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print.
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