Helen of Troy's beauty was said to have "launched a thousand ships."
Men can understand this by and large as it's a bittersweet thing that happens to nearly all of us. At some point in our lives, our eyes fell onto a young woman's face, and it changed us forever. This woman's features, her body, her mannerisms, her scent, and her voice became permanently tattooed into our memory. The luckiest among us get to marry the woman we can't seem to get out of our heads.
But it all starts with seeing, and for intersectional feminists, men seeing things is a huge problem.
My colleague Brad Slager wrote a fantastic piece on the left's pearl-clutching over the return of the "male gaze." Over at CNN, Madeline Holcombe cried into the ether, fist-shaking, that Sydney Sweeney selling American Eagle jeans through sex appeal is, at the end of the day, "backlash" for women accomplishing have transformed society into being more accepting of beauty standards that fall outside traditional bounds. Moreover, men's natural inclination to see female beauty stops us from seeing the woman:
Throughout history, when the pendulum swings one way, it tends to eventually swing back the other way. “Historically speaking, there’s almost always a backlash after women have achieved something,” said Dr. Katherine Sredl, lecturer of marketing at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business.
[...]
The male gaze also limits men when it encourages viewing women as objects rather than complex, multidimensional human beings, Zayer said. In a world where male loneliness is a crisis, the isolation problem gets even worse when the culture tells men that women (about half the population) are for beauty, sex and running a household, and are not viable options for real emotional connection and partnership.
I don't accept Holcombe's take. In fact, I don't accept her entire premise, because it is based on the idea that the male gaze is a bad thing, or that it's even detrimental to women and men alike.
The male gaze isn't evil. In fact, it's a necessary component of keeping the human species ongoing, safe, and advancing.
Helen of Troy didn't launch the ships; she inspired men to do so, and this is part of the major pattern throughout the human species. Women inspire men to act, to provide, to protect, and to endure. Her beauty is something that would border on physical pain to be without, and so he does what he can to make her happy, healthy, and safe. This leads, more often than not, to children who then grow up to become their own productive adults who go through their own process of seeing (or being seen) and restarting the process.
The intersectional feminist left sees this natural process as a great evil. They love using terms to describe marriage and motherhood as "slavery," and describe the traditional nuclear family as adherence to a "patriarchal system" that has to be dismantled for women to be free and live up to their full potential. While most of the feminist left's attacks are actually against femininity, their attacks on men include denouncing natural masculinity as "toxic masculinity," and that starts with the suggestion that men even looking at women as sexual objects is a bad thing.
But here's the brutal truth about human nature: Women are sexual objects.
Of course, it's not all they are to a man, but sex is a major component in the natural male/female dynamic. It's written so deeply into our DNA that both men and women do what they can to attract sexual attention from one another. Funny enough, for women, step one is attracting the male gaze. They want to be seen, noticed, and admired. They want to be pursued.
That brings me to the second brutal truth about human nature: Men are sexual objects too.
It's just not as talked about because the attraction to men is less physical and thus more easily disguised in polite company. That said, women are very apt to see men's physical attributes as good or bad, but oftentimes a woman's concerns gravitate around a man's ability to provide comfort, safety, and excess. A woman who finds a man attractive will actively begin the seduction process that will eventually have her in bed with him.
And it all starts with getting him to look.
Physical attraction is not an evil thing, and men wanting to see attractive women is hardly malicious. A man staring at a woman can be creepy in many contexts, but if we're being honest with ourselves, a man staring at a woman happens a lot and in purely innocent ways. He can't take his eyes off her. He drinks her in. Then, if he's brave enough, he approaches her, and if he can woo her, the circle of life begins anew.
What the feminist left is indignant about isn't women being ogled, but what they're sticking their noses up at is nature. They can't stand the idea that what they consider to be the "proper" way for humanity to conduct its business runs contrary to everything they believe, especially when it comes to what we should be attracted to.
If it reeks of traditionalism to any degree, it's automatically evil, oppressive, and Nazi-ish or something.
But in truth, both men and women are so deep into working with the male gaze that no amount of liberal arts education is going to shake us free from it.
