All my life, I have always felt invisible. (No, girl. Don’t worry – this isn’t going in a sad, boo-hoo, poor-me direction.) I felt invisible in the sense that I was irrelevant – not part of the system.
Some of my friends often describe feeling like they are constantly being perceived – that prickly, constraining feeling when you sense someone’s eyes scanning you. They might not be looking at you, but you constantly feel the pressure of knowing all of your movements are being monitored.
Although I understand and have felt that way in certain situations, it’s not an omnipresent feeling for me. Most of the time, I feel completely uninhibited. I’ll open-carry an ultimate frisbee in the dining hall or to class. I’ll throw a bad blueberry across the Kresge lobby into the trash can. I’ll sprint after someone just to say hi. In some sense, I don’t feel the need to curb my actions because I don’t feel perceived at all. But I’ve realized this isn’t a sentiment many share. I enjoy this sense of freedom because I legitimately don’t believe anyone notices me. I feel invisible and that makes me feel invincible.
I think I’ve always lived outside of the male gaze. The way I understand it, the sense of constantly being perceived results from the male or masculine gaze being the standard by which people are judged. For example, when my friends are catcalled, they are perceived as attractive according to the straight male gaze. On the other hand, if we assume that the male gaze functions as a binary, if you’re not being catcalled, then you are perceived as average or unattractive. Essentially, not worth calling out.
In a 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace delivered a parable that perfectly outlines how the male gaze functions in our lives:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
The male gaze is the water that we swim in. Initially, I thought I was the fish that said, “What the hell is water?” Many people are awfully aware that weird men are staring at them. But as someone who’s never experienced racist or sexist comments, never been catcalled, never been approached by strange men on the street, I wasn’t aware that I was swimming in water. Or that I was supposedly swimming in water.
For the longest time, I perceived myself as unattractive or, at least, not conventionally attractive (whatever that means), so I felt no one had any reason to notice me. I didn’t meet the standards the male gaze upholds for being ‘noteworthy’. It’s not that I would want to be told to “go back to my country” or be catcalled, but without those experiences, my invisibility has been solidified.
However, going back to the parable of the fish, being invisible makes me feel like I’m not even swimming in water. Rather, I’m a bird flying over the river and I watch all the fish below interacting, but I’m not part of that ecosystem. I feel the greatest distance from this ecosystem when it comes to romantic relationships. I watch as people play these seemingly scripted games with each other where they hook up and date, get into situationships or relationships, etc. Yet all of this feels so otherworldly to me. It’s irrelevant whether I want all that or not – I’m just not part of that world. I’m not a fish and there’s nothing I can do about it. So it makes sense that I’m invisible because I exist in a completely different world. No one is better or worse – it’s like living in 2D vs. 3D. What you can see and experience is just different.
Given that I am queer and present more masc, it might seem like the male gaze is less relevant since I’m not the typical object of desire. But the male gaze continues to define beauty standards in the queer world as well. In my opinion, the queer gaze is highly influenced by the male gaze, and shares many of the same values. Most of the queer content I see online is dominated by gorgeous femmes or “hey mamas” (If you don’t know, according to Urban Dictionary, a ‘hey mamas lesbian’ is “usually a white masculine lesbian who wears tight-ass top knot buns, Nike sports bras.”) Here, we see that the cisgender and binary beauty standards are still upheld in the queer world.
Despite differences in sexuality or gender orientation, the people who fit the binary beauty standards under the male gaze have advantages in the queer world. I feel like I’m getting judged under the framework where the more masc a lesbian is, the more attractive they are perceived since they are presenting closer to a white man – the “ultimate form of being” in a world under the (white) male gaze. No matter what framework I am put under, whether it be the male or the queer gaze, I’m not “meeting the threshold,” so to speak.
Because the standards of the male gaze and the queer gaze are so closely intertwined, I continue to exist in a way that feels invisible. Regardless of the sexuality of the fish in the river, I’m still a bird flying above the river. Sexuality feels irrelevant here because regardless, entry to that world is nonexistent. There simply is no door. It’s not like tank tops. I used to feel uncomfortable wearing tank tops but over time I got more comfortable wearing them. It could be that I’m asexual but that label is not satisfying either. With the very few experiences that I’ve had, my body has given such differing feedback on the positive-to-negative spectrum that I’m not sure what to take from it. I just have no clue.
But at the end of the day, I know that the different gazes that exist out there don’t have to define how I also see myself. I’m trying hard to minimize how they influence my self-perception, but it’s impossible to live in a vacuum void of any beauty standard. But at least I’ve found a way to use this invisibility in an empowering way in everyday life. Maybe that’s good enough for now.
