Doesn’t everyone go thrifting in the hopes of finding a dead ringer for that pink velvet dress from My Date with the President’s Daughter for $2 or is it just me
honestly men have the weirdest and most skewed perceptions of what women and feminine people’s routines are like
and you can tell this because of the idiotic ass questions they ask when they think they’re being slick. “What would you do if i was there” “Oh really getting ready for bed? What does that entail” “Ohh you’re getting ready for work, can i watch”
it’s like they think everything has to be this incredibly sexual, borderline pornographic experience, and it’s so strange to comprehend
like, i’m getting ready for bed, not masturbating. i’m getting ready for work, not putting on a strip show. it’s like everything is this weird ass “for men’s eyes only” brand of performance art to them, and they honestly get disappointed when it doesn’t turn out that way irl
i don’t get it at all
I feel like this is closely tied to the fact that femininity is pushed on women from childhood as ‘the only way to be.’ Women are forced (and yes I mean forced - women who decry femininity face harassment, assault, employment discrimination and are pathologised by medical professionals) into roles which have been constructed by men to appeal to male heterosexuality. This ensures that our mere existence in a public space provides low-level titillation, and men living in a world where women are forced into inadvertently catering to them develop the misogynistic notion that we exist as sex objects to arouse them. The natural progression from that is assuming that our private lives are hypersexual and performative as well.
It’s probably also got a lot to do with voyeurism and entitlement to our bodies. They harass us in public to degrade us and make us aware of their arousal as paramount, and their fantasies impose that desire upon us in private, too.
witness all of the ‘woman bathing’ / ‘woman sleeping’ / ‘woman caught in a private moment’ paintings in art history.
and tbh I think that men have pretty weird ideas of what women masturbating entails, too. just watch any masturbation scene with a woman in a movie directed by a man–they’re over-the-top and hypersexualised (I mean I get that it’s masturbation, but come on) and the women tend to do a lot of performative things that are intended to titillate male viewers rather than to be realistic. comparatively scenes with men masturbating seem efficient and kind of mundane.
as well as art being a big perpetrator throughout history, and obviously porn as well, film plays a huge role in this. the passive female object/active male subject mode of viewing has been around in film for some time (mulvey, 1989) & perpetuates this gaze. male filmmakers and writers have their women characters do the most mundane things in the most weird and sexualised ways. no one showers like that, Cameron. not only does it force viewers into the position of the voyeur, but it tells us that the male gaze & heterosexual male voyeurism peeking in on the “private moments” of unaware women (showering, dressing, masturbating, literally anything) is not perverse, but sexy and rewarding. and know that the unawareness is central to its appeal. it works to reinforce the idea that women’s private space is performative and not their own.
i don’t know how anyone could possibly risk plagiarising on purpose like i am so god damn terrified of accidental plagiarism that every time i submit something on turnitin i can literally feel my individual arm hairs standing on end as i wait for the police to show up at my door and arrest me for writing a string of words too similar to some paper about the mating habits of hoot owls from 1965
