{"id":73069,"date":"2014-01-04T14:00:32","date_gmt":"2014-01-04T19:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=73069"},"modified":"2014-01-03T15:23:11","modified_gmt":"2014-01-03T20:23:11","slug":"the-gaze-and-the-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/the-gaze-and-the-game\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gaze and The Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s what Isaac refers to as \u201coutkicking your coverage.\u201d It means aiming a little high for a partner, usually in terms of appearance.<\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve also heard \u201cfighting above your weight,\u201d as in boxing. Just recently, I was watching an old episode of the HBO show Treme<\/em>, about New Orleans, and the young chef (now paired with a handsome sous chef), runs into her old DJ boyfriend at Jazzfest. He\u2019s with a gorgeous musician, and she says, half-joking: \u201cYou\u2019re fighting above your weight, there.\u201d He replies: \u201cI always have.\u201d Meaning: You, too, were too good for me.<\/p>\n

Oh, my! This is how those of us who consistently outkick our coverage get away with it: charm, flattery, a measure of humility (that only comes from confidence), and just damn sincere appreciation for those we admire. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling that the metaphors come from sports, because as much as those idiot pickup artist types have tainted the term, love and romance has plenty of aspects of a game. You can play it like the pickup \u201cartists\u201d or like the warriors in Dangerous Liaisons<\/em>, where the prize is not the love or pleasure itself but social status, economic benefit, or the winning of a prize \u201cobject\u201d one believes will convey such status or meaning to one\u2019s existence. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Or you can, as Ram Dass says, \u201cdo it as if it\u2019s all part of the dance.\u201d Just play.<\/p>\n

I have to remind myself of that a great deal when it comes to my guys and my friends, who are beyond my coverage and only getting more so as I age. The other night I went with Chris to what shaped up as an oddly competitive swinger Meet and Greet. He was, as usual, the handsomest man in the room, a room filled with ladies in sheaths and stilettos.<\/p>\n

I was jealous of every inch of skin I saw. For at least five winters now, I\u2019ve suffered from a combination of allergies, dryness, and nerve problems that turns the skin on my arms and sometimes on other patches of my body into an itching, tingling, scratched and scarred mess of torture. I know, it sounds so exaggerated, but it\u2019s true — Big Brother would only have to put me in a room full of mosquitoes and I\u2019d be selling out everyone in no time; itching is my nemesis. Right now, all the dust and detergents and solvents from the home repairs aren\u2019t helping matters much.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m essentially feeling like an old lady in a mu-mu at the swinger cocktail party in an elegant hotel bar.<\/p>\n

Like I should have brought my knitting basket and taken the role of the gossipy chaperone sitting in the corner.<\/p>\n

It was a tremendous opportunity to experiment and meditate on phenomena including female display, competition, rejection and the power of the gaze. Venus in Capricorn is offering many such opportunities to look at the \u201cwork\u201d of relationships, their strategies and tactics, the value of patience, the value in what is hard-won. These are all Capricorn values; I have a sense of them within me (Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn) but being with Chris and another heavily Capricorn man before him brings out an appreciation for them. I\u2019m a flitter; I get bored easily. I see them sticking with things, taking so many pains, and I get frustrated and impatient. But if I wait with it for a little while, I realize how much their taking pains benefits me and others. I\u2019m bent on using this time to do some of this myself.<\/p>\n

Another Venus in Capricorn lesson is this chestnut used on the less-lovely everywhere, one that is absolutely true: when you look less than lovely, you know for sure that people love you for something other than just your looks. I was watching Chris doing painstakingly careful paintwork on our little second bathroom the other night, turning it into a glamorous mini-spa for my princess daughter, and thinking just that.<\/p>\n

(Another thing I\u2019ve noticed about Capricorns: they are very good at repair jobs. Whether it\u2019s healthy or not, they like to scavenge for the dusty or dinged. In relationships, it looks like they\u2019re fighting below their weight. But the joke is on everyone else, who had underestimated their partner\u2019s charms.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, the very next morning, Eric Francis opened up a big can of Facebook whup-ass about \u201cthe male gaze.\u201d Nothing would make me happier than to have this discussion extended here, so lay it down! <\/p>\n

While there were dozens of branches to the stream, the one I can look at briefly is the question of why would a woman get all dressed up beautifully — or \u201ctantalizingly,\u201d as Eric put it — and then get mad about being looked at?<\/p>\n

Right now, I can see in my mind\u2019s gaze my copy of John Berger\u2019s Ways of Seeing<\/em>, a primer on gaze in art. I can see the volumes on Hitchcock and Welles, the feminist film criticism anthologies and magazines, the graphic novels and literary criticism, and somewhere in there is Joanna Russ\u2019s How to Suppress Women\u2019s Writing<\/em> —
\nbut I can\u2019t get at any of it, because it\u2019s all in boxes. So you\u2019ll have to supply the feminist theory in the comments, and what I\u2019ll share is what came to me out of my less-lovely party experience:<\/p>\n

I was seeing many women who wanted to be looked at, but not necessarily looked at by me. I even complimented a few, and those compliments were either accepted and led to a conversation, or were deflected. I let myself explore the feelings a less-lovely person might have in such an encounter, man or woman. <\/p>\n

I felt rejected or unwelcome once or twice. Once, I thought: \u201cWow, she\u2019s pretty happy with herself. She must think she\u2019s pretty great. I bet she\u2019s not too smart.\u201d Another time: \u201cThat\u2019s kind of lame, her response. She should be more appreciative of my awareness and my appreciation.\u201d Another time: \u201cThat must be nice, to be so admired that you can reject more admiration.\u201d And this: \u201cDoes she think I\u2019m a creepy stalker? I\u2019m not a creepy stalker! I\u2019m a nice person, dammit! Look, I have friends! Check out my handsome boyfriend! So there!\u201d<\/p>\n

Defensiveness, jealousy, insecurity, attack, resentment: check! And check, please. And check yourself, while you\u2019re at it. The message I was feeling, whether any woman meant it that way or not, was: I dressed this way because I want to be looked at, but not by you. You\u2019re not good enough to look at me and appreciate me. You make me feel bad and uncomfortable when you notice me. That\u2019s because there\u2019s something wrong, not good enough, about you. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking this may be the way some men feel. I\u2019m also thinking that on my better days, it looks as if I\u2019m sending the same message.<\/p>\n

The problem comes from the power imbalance that\u2019s layered on top of this. If I felt that I had a right, an entitlement to attention from the women, on demand, it got nasty (luckily, only in my own mind). <\/p>\n

In thinking it over the next day during a run in the woods, I realized what I needed to practice was what I knew how to do well: compersion. I could get pleasure out of the fact that someone else was enjoying herself and her appearance, the same way that I enjoy that the people I love are with other people, enjoying themselves, and it doesn\u2019t have to have anything to do with me.<\/p>\n

Really. It\u2019s as simple as that. It doesn\u2019t have to be about me.<\/p>\n

As soon as I start thinking that, and get into that compersion state, it\u2019s like getting into a yoga posture where I can suddenly breathe. Even the damned itching stops for a minute. And it\u2019s not about games, or weight, or kicking, or playing offense or defense. It\u2019s just about love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila It\u2019s what Isaac refers to as \u201coutkicking your coverage.\u201d It means aiming a little high for a partner, usually in terms of appearance. I\u2019ve also heard \u201cfighting above your weight,\u201d as in boxing. Just recently, I was watching an old episode of the HBO show Treme, about New Orleans, and the young … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}