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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32884 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached

Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything[...]

(emphasis mine)

This is probably a lost battle at this point, but it's worth pointing out that "male gaze" as a term is not synonymous with "the gaze of males." The article where Laura Mulvey coined the term is full of Freudian academic bullshit, but it is pretty clear "male gaze" is related to film, and not just something men do:

To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create [a convincing] world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.

I don't blame you for this misuse. I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had. This has affected a lot of terms in wider folk feminist discussions. Another big one that comes to mind is "toxic masculinity", which is notably not the thesis that all masculinity is toxic.

Mulvey never really says what she means by "male gaze" in that particular article. I've usually heard it as referring to the way the camera takes on the perspective of a (sexually interested) man; e.g. slowly panning up the figure of the provocatively-dressed femme fatale, perhaps pausing at her ass as she's walking with an exaggerated sway. It definitely has to do with the camera, not an actual man. Referring to actual men looking at actual women was an obvious extension though.

I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had.

I think the issue isn't specific to academic jargon - it is more to do with negative terminology. Negative terminology is mostly used in phatic communication bashing the shared outgroup, and pointing out that Bad Person A may be Bad Word B but he is not in fact Bad Word C is a buzzkill.

Consider "Enshittification", which is definitely not academic jargon. Cory Doctorow only coined the term three years ago, and he used it to describe a specific process where the experience of a non-paying user of a platform like Facebook gets worse over time as the platform owner shifts from attracting users to monetization. The term is already debased to the point where it can be used to describe any case where a product or service gets worse over time, and the Wikipedia article says it is a synonym for "Crapification", which originally referred to the entirely different process where a product or service (most famously, US domestic airlines) gets worse because price competition is more vigorous than quality competition.

[caveat: Doctorow didn't coin the term, so much as popularize it.]

If I coined the term "black stealing" for shoplifting, nobody would be satisfied with my claim that it isn't talking about all black people.

I think the problem is that about 30 years earlier, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term "the gaze", and Laura Mulvey was understood to be developing an extension of the concept in her original essay about the "male gaze."

So it's not like you coining "black stealing" in isolation at all. It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

EDIT: As the Nybbler said elsewhere in this thread, "male gaze" is generally taken to be something the camera is doing. A female director can give a film a "male gaze" if she films a female subject in a particular way, and a male director can give a film a "female gaze" if he films his subjects in a particular way. This is part of what I meant when I said that a "male gaze" is not equal to "gaze of males." Using it to refer to "looks/gazes of males" is a bit like talking about "charmed quarks" like they're under a literal magical spell. Sometimes jargon takes on a very specific meaning, slightly disconnected from the words that compose the jargon.

It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

If this is what happens, it would be entirely predictable that "black stealing" would come to be interpreted that way, even if it's "incorrect". Jargon phrases whose straightforward meaning is something hostile will predictably result in a motte and bailey between the jargon meaning and the straightforward meaning, especially by hostile people.

"'Black fatigue' does not equal 'fatigue caused by blacks'! Trust me bro!" - an avid fan of Steve Sailer somewhere, probably

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