Rituals for De-Internalizing the Male Gaze

Be honest: do you ever perform for no one? Do you spectate your own life instead of living it? Have you ever caught yourself changing pieces of you, from your clothes to your voice to your hobbies, in order to impress someone you don’t even like? 

This episode is for you if you’ve ever sucked in your stomach in a completely empty room. Or scrolled through your own social media posts, imagining someone else looking at them. It’s for you if you've ever looked at yourself through someone else's eyes for so long that you've forgotten what you look like through your own.

In it, we’ll unpack how we get trapped under the male gaze through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and more. Then, I'll walk you through 7 rituals that have actually helped me climb out from under it.

This is not an episode about giving up on love. It is a field guide on how to stop twisting yourself into inauthentic shapes to earn validation to fill the void of love. If you want to become the subject of your own life again, I think you'll like this one.

RITUALS FOR DE-INTERNALIZING THE MALE GAZE: EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00 Intro

07:28 1. The gaze audit (Sartre)

08:40 Subject self versus object self

10:01 Foucault’s panopticon & self-surveillence 

10:54 How to do a gaze audit 

14:11 2. Photo and mirror detox (Sontag)

15:42 3. Interrogate “I do it for myself” (de Beauvoir)

16:50 de Beauvoir v. Sartre: existence precedes essence?

17:21 Do we have to stop shaving to be good feminists?

18:14 How to trace the origins of your grooming habits

18:47 The marketing origins of shaving

20:02 5. Bechdel mode

21:35 The importance of non-man focused conversation

22:25 6. Pleasure inventory (Mary Oliver)

22:56 The antidote to self-surveillance according to psychology

23:45 How to take a pleasure inventory

24:49 7. Pre-situationship prep

26:44 Love poem with apologies for my appearance (Ada Limon

27:51 The surprising unobjectifying power of being really loved and really seen

28:48 Lightning round recap

EPISODE LINKS

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