The Male Glance

In the spring of 2013, HBO conducted a sly experiment on the "elite" TV-viewing public. It aired two new shows—both buddy dramas—back to back. Each was conceived as a short self-contained season, limited by design to a small number of episodes. Each had a single talented and idiosyncratic director for the entire season, and each dispensed with the writers' room in favor of a unified authorial vision. Both shows appeared to belong to one genre but gestured at several others. Both used terrific actors to anchor a meandering, semi-disciplined style. And both ended by reasserting the romantic bonds of friendship. Those shows were True Detective and Doll and Em.

Their reception was drastically different. One got analyzed and investigated to the point of parody—so much so that, in the aftermath, multiple critics wrote articles about their experiences of so badly overreading the show's ambitions. The Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber, for instance, described True Detective as "a high-budget genre retread with the false veneer of profundity. (As opposed to what I'd hoped for: high-budget genre experiment with actual profundity.)" The other show, a much tighter work of art, was breezily and inaccurately labeled a "satire" and forgotten.

To be clear, the show about boys got way too much credit, and the show about girls got way too little. This is how we approach male vs. female work. Let's call it the "male glance," the narrative corollary to the male gaze. We all have it, and it's ruining our ability to see good art.

The effects are poisonous and cumulative, and have resulted in an absolutely massive talent drain. We've been hemorrhaging great work for decades, partly because we were so bad at seeing it.

A nefarious impulse strikes when we look at faces. It's the result of advertising combined with centuries of male-dominated image-making. Perhaps you've noticed: When you look at a face you've been told is female, you critique it at a much higher resolution than you do that same face if it's labeled male. Women's skin should be smoother. We detect wrinkles, discolorations, and pores and subtract them from a woman's beauty in ways we don't if that same face is presented to us as masculine.

There's a long history to grading aesthetics on a gendered curve, and we're often tempted to consign the bad habit to history in hopes that we've evolved. Unfortunately, our philosophy outpaces our snap judgments. A famous Susan Sontag meditation on this aesthetic paradigm is worth repeating:

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks—heavier, rougher, more thickly built. . . .There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.

This is not an essay about beauty, it's an essay about story, but we perpetuate a critical (rather

than cosmetic) version of the double standard Sontag describes here when we encounter female-driven texts. The relevant cognitive processes are intertextual, entwined. If our ability to see detail in a woman's face is magnified by our visual habits, our ability to see complexity in a woman's story is diminished by our reading habits. Centuries of experience in looking at the one through a magnifying glass has engendered a complementary practice of looking at the other through the wrong end of a telescope. Faced with a woman's story, we're overtaken with the swift taxonomic impulse an amateur astronomer feels on spotting Sirius—there it is! he says, and looks to the next...