Exploring the Psychology of Female Desires: The Connection Between Looking and Pleasure

In an essay by E. Ann Kaplan entitled: "Is the gaze male?" She poses the question "would it be possible to structure things so that women own the gaze?...What does it mean to be a female spectator?"

Females have strong desires and looking can be a great pleasure that's certainly linked to desires that run deep. When a man looks at an attractive women it doesn't necessary mean he owns the gaze. The female activated the gaze and is in the masculine position of holding it. For example, in cinema, a response to the movie is entirely different to the hot female acting in it, or a picture of her (like a publicity still from the movie).

Rather than men looking at women, who are objects to be viewed, what about women, looking at men?

The Levis' ads in the 80s, featuring models Nick Kamen and James Mardle pouted gorgeously as they unbuttoned their flies in the launderette, or slipped slowly in the bath wearing their jeans to shrink them to the proportions of their body. In the Levi jeans ad in 1994 two girls, leaving their picnic, stood behind a tree to watch a young, well muscled, and attractive man rise out of the water slowly. Stiltskin's crashing chords crescendo vibrated in tune with the quivering excitement of the two young girls as they clearly got a great deal of pleasure looking.

This was known as the image of the "New Man". Think of the naked torso of New Man to be found in Calvin Klein (Eternity), Austin Reed (Grey Flannel), and Yves Saint Laurent (Kouros) perfume ads, in Dormeuil cloth ads, jockey Y-fronts...

Here men appear and women are active spectators.

The Dandies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carefully schooled a detached narcissism and spent hours before the mirror. As Beau Brammell puts it "If John Bull turns round to look after you, you are not well dressed". Dandies were intensely interested in their own appearance and spent a lot of time defining and refining codes of dress. Dandies loved women, and their display of sexual attraction, and challenged women to look irresistible, desirable, and unattainable.

In the case of the Levi ads women are squarely in the role of the voyeur and are responsible for their own voyeurism.

To own and activate the gaze is to be in a masculine position. To reverse the position or the identity of genders is to leave the original structure or set of oppositions untouched.