Fenella speaks her mind
As a woman in my fifties, I look back on my thirties with a kind of pity. I then suffered from a surfeit of beauty: the object of the male gaze. I inherited it from my mother, the formidably famous and indomitable Viscountess Vorpel. She, as the record shows, wielded that gaze like a whip. Men adored her even as she thrashed them, and she made them grateful for the privilege. Her beauty was armour. Her title and her friendship with the Queen were weapons. I have neither, nor do I wish them.
I watched those same men gaze at me and remarked often, in my own books and articles, on their idiotic devotion to Venus. Worship, they called it. Idiocy with a Latin name, I called it. It was the same blindness that condemned my aunt Octavia to “spinsterhood”—or, more recently, to the lazy label of “lesbianism.” She refused the conjugal sentence, and men could not forgive her. They declared her “wantonly barren,” a woman who had wasted her life. Evidently an Order of Australia Medal for contributions to the intellectual capital of the nation carries less weight than a squalling infant.
For my great-aunts, the cost was higher still: miserable deaths in childbirth, no control over money, barely an education. Even my ducal cousins, those gilded Duchesses, were shackled to men who might discard them like last season’s gowns.
Now we call this “progress.” Women may decline children, but only at the price of careers in men’s worlds, on men’s terms. We may sit at the table, so long as we wear the right skirt, paint over the blemishes, accept lower salaries, and nod at patronising colleagues. And when we are raped—for dressing “provocatively”—or murdered by husbands, the law murmurs its sympathy while warning the rest of us not to make too loud a fuss.
So yes, the male gaze has shifted. From Venus on her pedestal to “empowered” women in glossy magazines. From the worship of goddesses to the marketing of lipstick. It is still the same gaze: stupid, controlling, and endlessly self-justifying.
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