very filled with dreams

me: 24, nyc, works with kids. email: isabelthespy [at] gmail [dot] com. this place: like emails from me to the internet, if the internet were my best friend. feminism. cartoons. poetry. andy samberg. fat acceptance. education issues. working with kids. things that fall under the irritating phrase "social justice issues." books. too many words. profanity. things that are pretty but not twee. stupid internet humor. pop music. non-pop music. pop culture. rants about pop culture. questions i can't answer. love.

books 2012
"Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions...." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side Of Paradise

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Jun 7

“I tend not to like “male gaze” as a phrase, tend to personally adopt, when necessary, a concept something like “dudegaze,” a word I use for the spectator-in-the-text (or whatever you want to call it — the implied listener) of a certain kind of male’s gaze. A more specific social class with a broader definition of what counts as “class.” (What comes to mind is something like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.”) “Male” feels too broad, since the kind of male it’s targeting doesn’t feel like it’s me, even if it has a (dude-like) affect on me that I may or may not be aware of.”

Rock Critic Roundtable: RCR VOL. 2: Round 1 Recap

speaking here as a person also occasionally inclined to use dude/bro/dudebro/etc. to distinguish a particularly repellent type of male specimen, i have to say this stance, coming from a male-identified person, strikes me as frankly very dudely. i’ll freely admit i lack the theoretical background to thoroughly engage with the concept of the male gaze as outlined first by laura mulvey and developed further by later scholars, but i am nonetheless comfortable in saying that you don’t get to give yourself a get-out-of-misogyny free card just because you don’t want to root for drunk girls making out with each other for your pleasure. i can’t imagine a conversation about gender and media that would be a good place for men to talk about why they are Not Like Those Other Guys, mostly because i can’t imagine it being a good idea to center men in a conversation about gender and media and that’s exactly what’s going on when you rush to clarify that you’re one of the good ones.

or to be more obnoxious but also perhaps more honest about it: “how men feel about the concept of the male gaze” is up there with “what it’s like to be a male liz phair fan” in the world of things i am so thoroughly uninterested in i could plotz.