Male Gaze Quotes

“There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
― Joanna Russ

“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I wish men would decide if women are heavenly angels on high, or earthbound sculptures for their gardens. But either way, we're beauty for consumption.”
― Joy McCullough, Blood Water Paint

“It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside their own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself.”
― Michel Foucault

“There’s something different about when a female directs versus a male. The level of maturity, mutual respect, and energy that you get from a female director is so different. I’ve worked with male directors who aren’t good, and no one says anything about it, but then we had one female director who was kind of all over the place and everyone complained. It’s so gendered. I feel safer when working with a female director because I know it’s from a female gaze.”
― Rowan Blanchard

“On a scale of ‘one’ to ‘middle-aged man asking you to put on a smile for him,’ how uncomfortable did that make you?- Yizhi”
― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow

“Instead of criminal, women's bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“The male glance has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her--in other words, turning her into an object.

What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man with the eyes of an object. It is though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stare up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb.

The worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I've watched the process, many times now. It's those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts - the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I have an impulse to apologize, but my mother always says that many women apologize when they´ve done nothing wrong, like they´re apologizing simply for existing.”
― E. Lockhart, We Fell Apart

“In fourth grade we played hard. The fifth-grade girls played four square, too, but they didn't jeer at each other when they played, and they hit the ball gently from square to square.
Their slowness seemed deliberate, as if they were dancing. Their skirts brushed slowly against their knees as they swayed. It wasn't so much that they looked different; they just looked as if they knew they were being watched.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open -- on the bus, in the pharmacy -- and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and desperation.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“For sixty years I've been shaped by men's point of view on every aspect of my life, from history, politics, music and art to my mind and my body – and centuries more male-centric history before that. I'm saturated with their opinions. I can think and see like a straight white man. I can look at a woman and objectify her, see her how a man sees her. I can think like a male criminal. To stay safe you have to anticipate their thoughts and actions. I can think like a rapist for fuck's sake.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Like most women, I grew up with the looking, grew into it.”
― Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife

“My body, up until now, has been just a thing that bled. A thing with vast reserves of pain. A strange instrument that I don't always understand. But something kicks in, triggered by the looking.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“The Default Male gaze does not just dominate cinema, it looks down on society like the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Every other identity group is ‘othered’ by it.”
― Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man

“I was being photographed by a gay male who was imagining me as what he thinks a straight man wants to fuck, and he was doing so on behalf of a director, a straight male who was interpreting me with his little boy brain on behalf of the studio, also male, who were interpreting me based on who they want to sell tickets to, which is this invisible horde of boys and men. The male gaze is real, ladies and gentlemen, and it is deep.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“Alle Frauen sind im Grunde ihres Herzens Huren, erklärte er immer und immer wieder, wobei er seine traurigen, großen Augen rieb.”
― Ernest K. Gann, Soldier of Fortune

“Vreemd bleef de vrouw van het heden de drie primitieve mannen van een vorige generatie aanzien met den voor hen onbeschaamden blik. Zij hadden het pijnlijke gevoel met den blik gemonsterd te worden, waarmee zij vroeger zelf vrouwen aankeken en op haar vrouwelijke waarde schatten. En het was een oogenblik, als voelden zij zich het zwakkere geslacht en stond daar voor hen het sterkere: de moderne vrouw.”
― Henri van Wermeskerken

“I was also ashamed. I hated myself for trying to impress you. It didn’t feel as if I’d hustled you to get on in life. Instead, it felt as if I’d betrayed and fetishized myself to be appealing to you. Even the way you called me “smart” stung. I hated that I’d used the things I loved to win your attention.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“Surely you would like to be immortalised in art, fixed forever in perfection?”
― Lucy Ashe, The Dance of the Dolls

“He imagines dancing with her, the two of them arm in arm under the stars. Silent, of course, but that is no matter. It is better that way. She is a dancing doll, his Coppélia, created at last.”
― Lucy Ashe, The Dance of the Dolls

“...the straps down my shoulders and to settle back, to feel his gaze on me like water, like a thing I deserve.”
― Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure

“Since 1971, an iconic image of a silhouetted woman has moved from truck mudflaps into popular culture. She is perceived through the eyes of people who live in different decades.

Mudflap Girl has at different times been considered a reflection of male self-image, symbolic of declining family values, and a feminist figure. However, even as an empowered woman, her identity has been problematic. Is she a mainstream inspiration, a subcultural icon or an unrealistic representation of the female form? Is she more than just a two dimensional figure based on her appearance? What is her story?

And most mysteriously, who is she?”
― Sya Sen, Mudflap Girl

“Oh, natürlich", rief Emma, "einem Mann ist es immer unverständlich, daß eine Frau einen Heiratsantrag ablehnt. Ein Mann bildet sich immer ein, daß eine Frau den ersten besten nimmt, der sie fragt.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“la prospettiva maschile, considerata erroneamente neutra nonostante sia fortemente determinata, ha costruito il modello culturale a cui tutte e tutti apparteniamo.”
― Silvia Grasso, Filosofia di Barbie