You Are Your Own Voyeur

What science-fiction (sometimes accidentally?) has to say about female agency under the male gaze.

Pictured: Sean Young as Rachael, Alicia Vikander as Ava

Trigger warnings: this essay discusses instances of sexual assault and exploitation, primarily in reference to works of fiction.

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I watched Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, for the first (and so far, only) time in February of 2021, eight days before my nineteenth birthday. That's not relevant at all, but happy early birthday to me last year, I guess! It wasn't a good one.

I should probably welcome you to the inaugural issue of this newsletter — welcome! I’m sincerely grateful to everybody for taking the time to read my work; I’ll try my best to make it worthwhile.

Before I get ahead of myself, I’m going to touch on why I wanted to write this piece. As you may have picked up, the title of this article is taken from a Margaret Atwood quote on the subject of male fantasies. The quotation is as follows:

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

It's not a secret that male fantasies govern the media; men hold an irrefutable stake in how stories are told. Male fantasies have historically dictated how women are represented in media. None of this is new. However, in revisiting this quote, I was reminded of the film Ex Machina (2014), directed by Alex Garland. More specifically, the reference to 'the woman with a man inside watching a woman' when considering a literal robot born of and programmed by a male consciousness prompted me to consider the role that the male gaze has in science fiction in particular, and what that has to do with the media and pop culture on a broader scale.

Back to business! For those of you who haven’t seen the film - and probably some of you who have - let me offer you a quick synopsis. Blade Runner is about a cop called Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, who is tasked with hunting down a group of four synthetic humans called replicants who have escaped from their space colony and fled back to Earth. We’re already off to a great start!

Blade Runner is one of those films that has been subject to a whole lot of discussion ever since its release and is now very much situated in its cult status. There are plenty of conversations surrounding this piece of cinema that are worth delving into. However, I want to home in on one in particular. There's a scene in which our supposed hero Deckard assaults the female protagonist Rachael (Sean Young), who also happens to be a replicant. I watched this scene over a year ago, but I remember it clearly. I remember that Rachael had only recently been made aware of her replicant status. Imagine finding out that your past has never belonged to you, but to your male boss, who has given you his niece's memories as an emotional cushion. Having been stripped of this false sense of autonomy, Rachael finds herself second-guessing her every thought. Having been thrust into a reality in which she lacks ownership over her ideas, ideals, and values, Rachael cannot trust herself. This sets the precedent for what follows: in what is surprisingly often referred to as a ‘love scene’, Deckard forces himself onto Rachael. He takes advantage of her fluctuating sense of identity and dissociative mental state by repeatedly demanding that she asks him to kiss her. Then, the screen fades to black. It’s a scene that has imprinted itself into my mind — because of how much it has to say.

Pictured: Sean Young as Rachael, whilst being questioned by Deckard.

Ex Machina, though much more contained, has similar ideas to Blade Runner. It’s one of my favourite films, and I think that Alex Garland is one of the most intriguing filmmakers around. Ex Machina follows Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson (who always seems to be playing a weird guy in sci-fi nowadays), as he performs the Turing test on a humanoid robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). It’s worth noting that Ava was designed by seemingly rampant misogynist and general douchebag CEO Nathan, portrayed by Oscar Isaac. Yes — its interrogation of male entitlement is far from coincidental. If you haven’t seen Ex Machina, go and do so now and come back in one hundred and eight minutes, because I’m about to hit you with some spoilers!

To summarise, the film ends with Ava killing Nathan, leaving Caleb to die, dressing up as a human, and getting flown to an unnamed city where she blends into the crowd, unnoticed. Hooray! Unsurprisingly, Ex Machina has been featured on countless “good for her” Letterboxd lists.

So, what do Ava and Rachael have in common? Okay, a lot. They’re both potentially sentient robot-adjacent characters in science fiction. Beyond that, they’re also both women who are desperately attempting to escape the grips of the men that have so far dictated their entire existence. Ironically, both women were written and directed by men.

You may have noted that I refer to these characters as women. While we are made to question Ava and Rachael’s personhood, we are never in doubt of their womanhood — be it through constant sexualisation, or their dire circumstance as a startling mirror to the patriarchy. When a man takes advantage of them, we don’t see them assaulting a machine — we see them assaulting a woman.

The thing is that ultimately, neither of these women can escape. Even Ava, who is given the seemingly satisfying ending of murdering her creator, will never truly be able to evade his gaze. Nothing can change the fact that Ava was born from male fantasy for male consumption, and she literally cannot survive when removed from this ever-present, dictatorial gaze. Eventually, Ava will have to return to the house that she has just escaped from to recharge, thus hinging her survival on the dead man who manufactured her. Otherwise, she’ll die – that is, run out of power. Two riveting options: death, or the continued dependence on an institution based on a foundation of male entitlement! Rachael doesn’t get that choice; she dies off-screen during the birth of her child with Deckard.

Pictured: Alicia Vikander as Ava.

While these characters demonstrate the brutality of being a ‘woman with a man inside watching a woman’ in the more literal sense, they amplify a paradox that is reflected in women across all genres and forms of media. The male gaze is characterised by its manner of perceiving women and the world through a masculine lens of sexualisation and objectification. It refers in particular to that idea of voyeurism — to what is seen, by the filmmakers, the characters, and eventually, the audience. I’m interested in what exists outside of this gaze. After we are done with this myopic grazing, what exists then? Think back to the inferred ending of Ex Machina. Ava is free from the tight restraints of patriarchy! Remember? Except that she’s not. Removed from the male gaze she faces impermanence, and instability. Under the male gaze, women are never offered immortality in the way that men might be. They exist for as long as the watcher carries on watching. Oscar Wilde once said that “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” Janelle Monáe also said that in their song ‘Screwed’. The male gaze is as much about sexualisation as it is about the power of holding a woman hostage within that sexualisation. As such, the male fantasy doesn’t even have to be a lingering camera. If a man gets to watch a woman or woman-aligned person, content that that individual exists within their grips, that he might banish or summon them as he sees fit, that their survival is contingent on his continued engagement with them… then all is well.

Well. That feels like an unsatisfactory and dejected note to end this essay on. But here’s the thing: the male gaze is this insidious, awful thing that fascinates me because of how much it dictates our media, but no matter how hard it attempts to undermine the existence of women and non-binary people: we ARE immortal. In my next newsletter, I’ll talk about my favourite ‘immortal’ women in film, tv & literature — and if that interests you at all, I'd love for you to subscribe! Goodbye for now, look after yourself, and hopefully, you'll swing by again!