We Just Be Vibing

On occupying one’s corporeal form and engaging with the ever-present specter of the male gaze.

When I was eight or nine, I wanted nothing more than to be a Limited Too girl. For those of you unfamiliar with the store, it had a neon pink and purple sign and an aesthetic perfectly suited to people who also adored Lisa Frank. At the mall, I always begged to go inside, hoping I could persuade my mom to let me try on one, just one outfit. During the Webkinz craze of 2006-2007, I sourced a good chunk of my friends’ birthday presents from Limited Too (couldn’t pass on a buy one get one free deal), but I never managed to leave with a clothing item. After the 2008 recession, Limited Too shuttered most of its stores and rebranded others to Justice, thereby ending my dream. 

Limited Too represented, to me, a non-threatening girlhood—a comfort, when middle school and all its attendant changes loomed large on the horizon. Its clothes were trendy but remained very tween, decidedly on the cutesy side. The Abercrombies and Hollisters of the world frightened me with their dimly lit entrances and pulsing music, the thick scent of cologne that accosted you as you walked by. Abercrombie and Hollister were for cool kids, which at that time meant either teenagers or those who desperately wanted to be teens, those who contemplated first kisses and periods and what it would be like to finally grow a pair of boobs. Abercrombie, I was convinced, was for those of us who would not only survive puberty but actually enjoy it.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with puberty and adolescence, by which I mean that for the first eighteen years of my life, I blithely avoided thinking about my body. In a way, that served as a blessing; I escaped middle school largely unscathed by any insecurities regarding my physical appearance. (Instead, I worried about being seen as weird and overeager and secretly unlikeable, nervous chuckle!) I didn’t put much work into developing a sense of style because my mom had the final say on everything I wore. As a result, my high school wardrobe contained a lot of “timeless” pieces more at home in a 30-year-old woman’s closet. (As a working woman now, I’m grateful for the early investment, but there’s a photo of me from senior year where I look vaguely like Jean Yoon in Kim’s Convenience. I won’t link it here because #regret, but it’s definitely floating somewhere on the Internet; real ones know.)

College marked the first time I had total agency over my appearance. All the Instagram outfits I’d ogled could become reality. I learned how to apply eyeliner. I borrowed clothes from girls living down the hall. I had a credit card and could purchase things online, stashing them out of my mom’s sight over the summer. The first time I wore a crop top made me positively giddy (and still convinced, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my mom’s sixth sense would kick in and she’d call me from 1,700 miles away to scold me for exposing my midriff). 

College also marked the first time I perceived other people reacting to my appearance. After attending a K-12 school, where confessing felt like a game of Minesweeper and one wrong step could leave you imbedded with the shrapnel until graduation, the idea that you could just approach someone at a party and start talking to them based solely on the assessment that they were “cute” took me by surprise. I was just another face in the crowd, without backstory. All I had going for me was a first impression, and it was weird to know that impression relied so heavily on how I looked.

It is a surreal feeling, to notice yourself being noticed. With the right person, it can be thrilling; otherwise it becomes frightening. There’s not much I can add to what’s already been said about the fraught interactions on college campuses: the alcohol, the rampant hook-up culture, the need for firmer discussions about consent. And it’s complicated because I don’t dislike attention. I enjoy dressing up and I like being seen. My four years in college put me on different stages via dance and spoken word performances; I found myself growing into my skin, wanting to own it, maybe even flaunt it. I got really gung-ho during Halloween with costumes that toed the line between sly and sexual: junior year I walked around in a little black dress and water bottles as a “thirst trap,” senior year I spent entirely too much energy re-engineering a hula-hoop, PVC pipes, and a curtain so that I could be a shower thought/thot. Given all this, I’ve been trying to parse my feelings on the male gaze, and what it’s meant for me to interact with it, even use it to my advantage, on occasion.

The quandary of the male gaze is that you know it’s not about you—or, at least, not about the you that actually exists in the world, a person with your own boundaries and dreams. One time, as I walked a friend home from the bar, she stopped to vomit in the middle of the street. Some guys walking by catcalled us anyways, and I thought: men will really holler at anything. And yet there is also the part that recognizes humans are visual creatures, that pretty can get you things. (For a fun short story on what might happen if we countered the “beauty premium,” check out “Liking What You See” by Ted Chiang.) In New York, a bartender gave me a free drink because my freckles were “super dope.” The one guy in our group complained, “That would never happen to a man,” so I went back to the bar and wheedled my way into an extra tequila shot to give to him as appeasement. The whole time, I felt a thrill. Simultaneously, I was hit by guilt and a small dose of terror, as if by knowingly using my appearance as a tool, I was cashing in on some karmic balance, consenting to whatever misfortune might befall me later down the line because I bat my eyelashes a certain way or looked like I was “asking for it.” 

The worst part is that once you start hearing that internal voice, it never shuts up. I absolutely hate it when I dress up and someone (who is perfectly well-meaning!) goes, “Ooh, who’s all this for?” The assumption that I’m playing to an audience, that my looking nice must designate a recipient, rankles me. It’s for myself, I want to say, but then immediately afterward my psychoanalytic ass goes: but is it really? Or have you been socialized by the patriarchy into secretly seeking male approval, even if you try to convince yourself otherwise? Whom does your adherence to beauty standards benefit? Furthermore, in the cacophonous clusterfuck that is 21st-century society, are we ever alone, or has social media and the ease of surveillance conditioned us to always be performing?

What it comes down to, at least for me, is that the male gaze is backed by expectation. It’s not as simple as stranger = bad, friend = good. The reason I’m perfectly at home next to a drunk girl in a bathroom gushing you’re soooo pretty is because she doesn’t really care how I respond. If I ignore her, she’ll forget about it and move on; if I compliment her in return, we’ll probably end up advising each other on our shitty love lives and exchanging numbers. Meanwhile, my interactions with men feel so loaded because they’ve staked their entertainment on my response. They want their presence to be felt, whether that be a stammered “thank you” or the sudden staccato of my pace picking up in fear. It’s like a bad joke, where the teller grins at you with a smug sense of entitlement, waiting for your laugh, bidding you play along.  

I’m not saying that all men are like this. But I do think that all of us owe it to ourselves to be honest about what we’re demanding from another person, what responses we’re hoping to elicit in our interactions. 

In Chicago, I was walking with a friend through Chinatown when some boy approached us on a skateboard, calling, “Miss?” I stopped and turned around, thinking I’d dropped something, but all he did was say, “I just wanted to let you know you’re beautiful” before jetting away. It happened so quickly I don’t remember anything about what he looked like. I was startled but not unsettled, and then, in recollection, fond—precisely because our exchange lasted only an instant. He didn’t linger and wait for a reaction. He asked nothing of me in return.

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Tell me about your favorite Halloween costume you’ve dressed up as in the comments! Here’s to virtual trick-or-treating. 😢

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‘Til next time. <3