If you hadn’t heard of the 'male gaze’ before, you will have certainly heard about it on TikTok. On the app, and in wider popular discourse, the term has been used to describe the many ways men objectify women through their appearance; the ‘female gaze’ has been offered by feminists as the antithesis of this, where women determine representations of women as subjects, rather than objects. The male gaze was originally coined in Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, and while it nodded to larger societal issues at play in female objectification, it was actually used to describe the specific ways narrative cinema frames its female characters as objects of sexual pleasure for both its male characters (whose perspective the camera usurps) and a cinema’s audience. It wasn’t exclusively referring to male objectification of women— the voyeur, or subject, could be of any gender— though in recent years the term has been used more loosely to refer to the objectification of women by men. Another widely accepted idea related to the male gaze is the way women internalise this objectification, policing themselves and other women according to standards set for them by society.
So what is the female gaze? In response to Mulvey’s essay at the time, feminists coined the female gaze to show that women could be represented through the eyes of other women, particularly in cinema, though there is substantial debate about whether the female gaze can actually exist. It does seem to have had a lot less of a grip on society as a whole than the male gaze, particularly in the film industry where, to date, only two women have won the Oscar Academy Award for Best Director— Chloé Zhao and Kathryn Bigelow. On TikTok, a trend has recently emerged where people show what they wore when they ‘dressed for the male gaze’ versus when they started ‘dressing for the female gaze,’ but does clothing really have anything to do with the gaze, and if so are there ways we can dress to escape the male gaze and conform to the female gaze? What does dressing for the female gaze even mean?
Judging from TikTok, younger generations view dressing for the male gaze as wearing clothes that appeal to men whilst dressing for the female gaze appeals to women, or dressing ‘for yourself.’ Whilst dressing for the male gaze, in this trend, involves wearing more form-fitting, revealing, and more typically ‘gendered’ clothing, dressing for the female gaze involves having shaggier haircuts, wearing comfier, edgier, more colourful and arguably less gendered clothing with lots of emphasis on styling and layering. It’s fair to say, then, that ‘dressing for the female gaze’ is a move away from dressing for male validation, or wearing a singular item of clothing specifically because it exposes your body in just the right ways, or is recognised by men as a typically sexy or attractive piece of clothing for women to wear. Does this shift signal any meaningful change in the objectification of women, though, and is it fair to assume that clothing can be a means of achieving that?
A huge issue with the concept of dressing for the female gaze as a solution to the male gaze is that it does not unpick the differences between objectification and desire (whether that’s a desire for sex, friendship, status or style). What this trend ignores is that the objectification of women doesn’t disappear by changing the ways we dress, it merely shifts who objectifies or desires the wearer (or to be the wearer). On no platform or through any medium should we conflate individual style with women’s efforts to undo rape culture on a collective level, and in many ways, TikTok’s format lends itself to oversimplifying issues which do have wide-spreading implications on the ways we view women. Its trends should be examined so that its users don’t perpetuate the objectification of women they aim to undo or draw attention to. The idea that any individual can change how they are objectified by changing what they wear speaks to the narrative that some women are ‘asking for it’ by wearing certain items of clothing, even though clothes that reveal certain body parts don’t signal anything intrinsic about someone’s sexuality. It seems like somewhat of a regression from the lengths taken by queer, feminist and anti-racist movements to link solving the objectification of women with getting dressed, though it is of course important to encourage people to use clothing as a means of self-expression.
What the trend does do is expose just how deeply the straight male gaze is internalised by young women, regardless of their own sexual desires and individuality. Dressing for the female gaze, for the subjects of these videos, is a way of reclaiming some of that power over their expression of individuality. Where this power is in some ways lost is in the context of the app and being watched. It could be that this is a product of social media apps in general- in that you upload photos of yourself specifically knowing that you will be perceived- but having an audience for this ‘dressing for the female gaze,’ regardless of the audience’s gender, obscures the power the subject might have originally felt in this ‘transformation’ of sorts from dressing for male validation to ‘dressing for the female gaze.’ In the same way, Mulvey’s use of the male gaze plays to an audience, whoever watches these TikToks is most likely viewing the dresser as an object by judging them by their clothes or viewing them as a character in the movie of their lives (just like we are all probably guilty of through our fascination with internet trends like ‘get ready with me’ or ‘daily vlogs’ or ‘what I eat in a day’ or ‘my morning routine’).
Because of this, it’s important to examine who the intended audience is when dressing for the female gaze. There is a juxtaposition in the logic behind dressing for the female gaze: you are both ‘dressing for yourself’ and dressing in a way that can be appreciated by other women, regardless of whether the wearer wants to be attractive to those women or not. How can this be a solution to the male gaze if and when the audience is made up of men and women alike who haven’t themselves recognised the full extent of the complex ways they internalise the male gaze and how it shapes their lives? Credit must be given to the trend for at least exposing this phenomenon, but it is difficult to not see it as simply repackaging who gives the dresser validation- ie. women commenting that they love another woman’s outfit. It is helpful to acknowledge how much we have internalised the male gaze, which in some ways the trend has done quite well, but arguably it is not enough to believe that ‘dressing for the female gaze’ undoes all of the wider damage it does. As Margaret Atwood writes:
‘Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’
Though we might think we’re escaping the male gaze by dressing more in ways that appeal to women, in doing so we ignore the fact that the male gaze is not exclusive to men, rather that it exists in all of us: in how we dress ourselves; how we act as our own voyeurs; and how we scrutinise other women by the same standards we hold ourselves to. The distinction between not centering your being around men and seeking external validation (regardless of the gender of whoever provides that validation) becomes blurred in the process of trying to dress for the female gaze, or any gaze at all.
We could also ask how trends associated with dressing for the female gaze can be reconciled with heterosexuality or rather women who date men and presumably want to be desired by them. This is unclear when the goal of dressing for the female gaze is to appeal to other women, and the trends recognised as ‘for the female gaze’ are usually edgier and sometimes originate from lesbian style. One TikToker explains that some styles we recognise as mainstream now but were once exclusive to the lesbian community (such as wearing Doc Martens, dungarees, Dickies trousers, and having multiple piercings and dyed hair) have been appropriated over time due to the ‘subconscious desperation of straight women to escape the male gaze and therefore adopting trends that they see on people who don’t centre themselves around men, ie. women who like women.’ Whilst it is obviously an significant step for heterosexual women to move away from centring themselves, or at least their appearance, around men, there is something problematic in the way dressing for the female gaze is framed as a way to appeal to other women, though for heterosexual women not because they want to date other women despite wearing clothes that have been, up until now, used as a signal of lesbianism amongst those who identify as such.
This becomes even more blurry when men who identify as straight begin jumping on this trend. What’s more evident in the videos made by men is their attempts to appear attractive to women. Unlike the women who partake in this trend, it is not a matter of survival (in the same way) for men to escape the dangers that come with the male gaze, because they don’t face the same objectification in their day-to- day lives as women (such as catcalling, unwanted staring, comments and touching). Therefore, dressing for the female gaze acts in almost opposite ways for straight men and women: women are desperate to escape the male gaze and everything that comes with it in pursuit of the safer sphere of female validation, whilst men use it to appeal to the women they want to sleep with or, sometimes, date. Because an interest in fashion and style has been reduced to a trivial female pursuit, like most things women value and enjoy, its adoption by men has been used, in some instances, to signpost their diminished threat— that they’re not going to objectify you in the same way as other men, you and they are not really so different, when it comes to matters of style at least, so this must be true of other aspects of their personality. Disappointingly, this often doesn’t run any deeper than the clothes these men wear: it doesn’t truly reflect any meaningful inner work to undo unconscious misogynist beliefs, as exemplified in TikToks where women tell experiences where they thought they could trust quiet/ fashionable/ artsy men but ended up being disrespected by them in the same way as men who display more stereotypically ‘male’ attributes and style. This raises questions about the power the female gaze really holds in society. Whereas the male gaze is deeply internalised by women, something which those women who are aware of its power make efforts to work away from, the female gaze is dressed up for sporadically: put on and off to, falsely or not, draw a ‘common thread’ between the subject and its voyeurs— unlike the male gaze whose objects have no agency over their bodies; whether they are gazed upon or not and to what end.
It will be interesting to see the long-term implications of dressing for the female gaze; whether it will change the dynamics of heterosexuality. It seems as though women are beginning to dress more for themselves, theoretically leaving room for them to explore what makes them feel ‘sexy’ (if that’s a term that will remain applicable) or powerful (whether that’s clothes, movement, or a less tangible feeling), but straight men and women are notorious for not having the same ideas about what makes someone attractive. Does this mean straight men will have to adjust their standards for women (in which case ‘dressing for the female gaze’ might actually have partially achieved the job it set out to do) or that heterosexuality is doomed for failure (more so than it is now) as men progressively find women less attractive? Or, will women’s internalisation of the male gaze and programmed need for male validation override their attempts to dress for themselves once they realise that men are not attracted to what they are wearing? These are, of course, extreme outcomes that might be exaggerating just how much weight straight men place on what women are wearing, and neither of these outcomes will necessarily pose any challenge to rape culture and the objectification of women, but a girl can at least dream.
There is hope for this trend and beyond its scope. We are living, at least in the West, in a world that’s more willing to call out how much objectification women and sexual and racial minorities deal with on a daily basis, and to use our clothes as a means of rebellion. Rape culture still undeniably exists, though, so it remains urgent to in the meantime look at how we interact with trends and social media, and to not oversimplify issues which can begin to be unravelled by changing how we get dressed, but certainly cannot end there.
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