The Universality of the Threatening Male Gaze

This will be a short post. And an angry post (as most of my writings tend to be) about what it’s like to be a girl or a woman in a world full of men who feel entitled to encroach on our self-autonomy, even if only through a stare or a seemingly friendly “hello” from across the street.

I have been coming to Tanzania for work for over a decade and the largest threat I’ve ever felt here is from men who aggressively approach me on the street to say hi or who gawk from a passing motorbike or bajaji. I often work in schools, and the number of times I’ve had to pull my hand away from a male teacher who deliberately holds on after I’ve let go of a handshake is such casual an act that I’ve lost count. The nerve that men have, to think they can exist in this world saying and doing whatever they want in relation to women and girls. And men saying and doing the things I’m personally offended by here is arguably their least problematic transgression— I will get to worse ones in a minute. But it is a transgression nonetheless and one that men everywhere seem to be programed to make.

I have traveled somewhat extensively and my biggest take away from getting to see different parts of the world has always been how many things unite us all as humans. Underneath every cultural facade that makes us seem different from one another is a genalizable truth about human kind. We celebrate the same things everywhere, we care about our kin everywhere, we love sports and animals and food everywhere. We are corrupt everywhere, we like power and money everywhere, and we can be the cruelest and most selfish of all animals, everywhere. And, then, there’s a man’s gaze: a look that can infringe upon the wellbeing of a woman in a way that few other things can, everywhere. A man’s stare — when he wants it to be — is the most intrusive and disturbing thing he can do to a woman or girl that comes without physical action. But it is threatening and dangerous nonetheless. And the truth is that if a man feels he can stare at a woman or girl so intrusively, he is not far from feeling he can act in that way too.

Men, for reasons I don’t know enough about and are likely too complicated to get into here, are either naturally compelled to impose themselves on women, or have been raised to feel as much in most cultures around the globe. I think a fair assumption is that both these things are true and it is up to the very cultures that raise men in this way to turn things around. And some of them have. The threat of the male gaze is much stronger and pervasive in some countries than others, but it is a common experience for women nonetheless and its permissibility in countries like Tanzania increasingly shocks me. And — to be clear — I am by no means singling Tanzania out as worse than other countries. Tanzania likely melds into the standard rather than an exception. And my point is exactly that; this experience for women and girls is much too common. It is universal.

I have been coming to Tanzania in recent months, researching its education system. And going into schools on field visits has given me a fresh perspective into just how permissible and pervasive a thing it is. A school’s uniform policy, in particular, is a curious microcosm of the country’s relationship to the male gaze, at best, and to the kinds of assault it can turn into, at worst. I work with schools that serve marginalized children from very remote areas and from households of extreme poverty or instability. These schools do what they can to provide education outside of the formal school system and do so under very constrained conditions. Students in these schools often can’t afford school fees; they are young teenage mothers who, by admission of teachers and peers, were impregnated against their will and they are students with disabilities or emotional burdens that create insurmountable disadvantages within the country’s national education policy. These schools, working under these very challenging circumstances, make it a priority to have their students wear a uniform — especially girls. The issue keeps coming up in the interviews I’m conducting and, time and time again, both male and female teachers point to uniform policy as an important step in ‘keeping students safe, especially girls.’ When I ask teachers to expand, they all respond with some version of this: if I girl appears to be a student, she will be seen with more respect and if she gets in trouble with a man on the street, people in the community will be more inclined to protect her. That is a loaded explanation and in my attempt at keeping this post brief I won’t deconstruct the layers of problematic gender relationships it implies, or of the vulnerability of girls in Tanzanian culture. Instead, I’ll let you sit with the fact that girls from extremely poor families, who for one reason or another can not stay in government formal schools and often cannot even pay for school lunches, are told to do whatever they need to do to secure uniforms when attending these informal schools that work so hard to help them get an education. “Borrow a uniform if you have to,” is the advice I’ve heard from teachers more than once, “even if you can’t afford one, any uniform will do.” And borrow one they do (most of them anyway), because the slight protections it comes with are necessary. They are necessary because the country has no real institutional or cultural repercussions for the transgressions of the male gaze or all that can come after it.

Years ago, when I first started coming to Tanzania, an amazing local woman pioneer and mentor mentioned in passing that if a girl’s mother died in her community, she made it a point to take the girl in because she could not be left alone at home with her father or male relatives. I couldn’t quite register the weight of that at the time but the uniform policy speaks directly to it. Females are things to be looked at and used; objects that are abused by a man’s whim and to his satisfaction. And it is up to community leaders, teachers or schools, and society at large to make female protection an explicit objective. It takes a country institutionalizing these protections into some sort of legal standard to somewhat deter men and — by consequence — keep women safe.

The threat to women and girls can come in the form of an unwanted stare, an assault, or anything in between. It can happen in our homes, at school, on the street, or countless other places (literally anywhere). We are never safe from the threat of the men the world has created. And here we are, in the 21st century, developing artificial intelligence and attempting to colonize the moon but unable to solve the most basic protections for women and girls across most of the world. The problem is universal and our neglect of it, in culture after culture, seems to be equally so.