Dear Zsa Zsa,
I'm an eye man. What most immediately and decisively attracts me are your eyes. It's not the color or the shape of your eyes, and it's not your eyebrows or lashes (I sometimes don't even notice any of that). It's the look in your eyes.
I've been reading a lot of phenomenology lately. In the French tradition, Sartre's famous account of "the look" (or "the gaze") has been deeply significant and problematic. Sartre seems to most interpreters to be saying that when a subject/consciousness fixes a look upon an Other, the look reduces the Other to the status of an object. The look sees the other as something.
There are some obvious examples. The cis-hetero-masculine-chauvinist-misogynist look objectifies a woman as a sex object, even as nothing but some part of her body. He sees her as, e.g., "a piece of ass."
One of my favorite academic philosophers, Geraldine Finn, wrote some terrific stuff about the masculine look ("gaze") that, along with stuff by other feminists, has made this a serious personal issue for me, for the last 25 years or so now. I am acutely aware of the power of the c-h-m-c-m gaze in our visual culture, and how it affects me as a basically cis male. I do objectify others' bodies (I think all of us do, really), but I stop myself in it whenever I find myself doing it. I feel extremely awkward and guilty about it too. It's a constant effort to undo the effects of patriarchy on a cis-male body, if that's something you're wanting to do.
Despite the troubles with looks, I'm still looking. Most of the time, I look others in the eyes. (I believe I make "eye contact" more than most people. I'm not sure why I do that.) It's looking others in the eyes that almost always first attracts me to them.
What I see is not your eyes, but, I'd say, your look -- the "look in your eyes." Now, if I can actually see the look in your eyes, that suggests that what I see is your looking -- your looking at me. So I see in your eyes the expression of your perception. I see your intentional directedness toward me, the "ray" of your attention. To some degree, I see your looking, I enter into a dialogical intertwining that is characteristic of all visual perception, per Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (And it's interesting that he discusses the way "things" enter this dialogue, like the way painters are addressed by landscapes or bowls of peaches or whatever, and does not discuss the way we enter dialogue by looking each other in the eye. At least, I can't recall any passage where he does.)
My attraction is so often allured by that look in your eyes. I see, as though in a reflection, an attraction that is like mine. And sometimes I see a "light," a "glint," or a "sparkle" in your eyes. That expresses the affect of your intention, and your passion, or at least addresses me as passion would.
I could be wrong. You could be deceiving me. I suppose you can fake passion, play-act the shining eyes of an attraction you only want me to believe you have -- for whatever reason you might have. But I can never be entirely wrong. Your eyes shine or they don't, and when I see that look in your eyes, it tells me something, even if it is still inarticulate or inchoate, and even if I read more into it, or if it is fleeting.
(I could similarly write about other looks in others' eyes: the dull look of incomprehension or boredom, the empty look of antipathy, the abyssal look of sociopathic contempt, for instance. But that look is a lot more fun to contemplate, and fits well with the phenomenological/existentialist tradition of interpreting our looking as sexual maneuvers.)
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
all fun and games until somebody loses an eye
Dear Zsa Zsa,
So far, I've written about play as though it can only be good. That's obviously not true. Play can harm people, because what is play to one can be deadly serious to another, and because play can be destructive. Children are tremendously destructive, after all.
A story of my childhood often comes to mind whenever the subjects of play or games come up. It's a story I tell in my classes, to provide an example to consider the merits and limits of game-playing as a model of various other activities (including ethical conduct of a professional).
In fifth grade, my cis-male-gendered friends and I played a game during recess, based on a common game boys play, where a “runner” tries to run from one base to another while two “basemen” try to tag out the runner. Basically, it’s two people playing catch, while someone else runs between them trying to avoid being tagged. It's fun for a while, but we started to get a little bored with it. What kids do when that happens is innovate.
We got to thinking: In baseball, a base runner struck by a ball is out. We had already incorporated this rule into our base-running game, so it was a simple matter to extrapolate from this rule, and come up with a game in which seven or eight of us would stand in a line against the brick wall of the school, and one or two would throw a baseball at us trying to hit us and thus tag us “out.” Sometimes we used a tennis ball, or a softball, and a couple times even a hockey puck, but for the most part we threw baseballs at one another.
The line of targets was permitted to jump, duck, or turn to one side or another. The more of us were lined up against the wall, the less space there was for evasive action, so more of us were tagged out in the first few rounds. The last man unstruck by a baseball was the winner, and the prize was the option of being a "pitcher" for the next round.
After some trial and error, we added a rule that the ball had to be aimed at the knee or lower.
I want to emphasize: No one with any supervisory responsibility ever tried to stop us from playing this game. We only stopped playing after the terrible incident when Ted Saleh struck Mark Brebberman with intent to injure. It was somehow related to the Hundred Days War, believe it or not.
(My loveliest Lauren's favorite part of this story is that we were the misfit and castoff kids. While the cool and athletic kids got to use the grassy field to play football or whatever during recess, we were relegated to the asphalt slab and the thin strip of lawn by that brick school wall. So while the supposedly tough kids played touch football on grass, we supposedly wimpy and dorky kids played on blacktop. My shins were permanently black with bruises and I always had scabs on my knees.)
There's a lesson in that, I guess. I also remember it fondly, which tells us all a thing or two about my sense of play and its limits.
So far, I've written about play as though it can only be good. That's obviously not true. Play can harm people, because what is play to one can be deadly serious to another, and because play can be destructive. Children are tremendously destructive, after all.
A story of my childhood often comes to mind whenever the subjects of play or games come up. It's a story I tell in my classes, to provide an example to consider the merits and limits of game-playing as a model of various other activities (including ethical conduct of a professional).
In fifth grade, my cis-male-gendered friends and I played a game during recess, based on a common game boys play, where a “runner” tries to run from one base to another while two “basemen” try to tag out the runner. Basically, it’s two people playing catch, while someone else runs between them trying to avoid being tagged. It's fun for a while, but we started to get a little bored with it. What kids do when that happens is innovate.
We got to thinking: In baseball, a base runner struck by a ball is out. We had already incorporated this rule into our base-running game, so it was a simple matter to extrapolate from this rule, and come up with a game in which seven or eight of us would stand in a line against the brick wall of the school, and one or two would throw a baseball at us trying to hit us and thus tag us “out.” Sometimes we used a tennis ball, or a softball, and a couple times even a hockey puck, but for the most part we threw baseballs at one another.
The line of targets was permitted to jump, duck, or turn to one side or another. The more of us were lined up against the wall, the less space there was for evasive action, so more of us were tagged out in the first few rounds. The last man unstruck by a baseball was the winner, and the prize was the option of being a "pitcher" for the next round.
After some trial and error, we added a rule that the ball had to be aimed at the knee or lower.
I want to emphasize: No one with any supervisory responsibility ever tried to stop us from playing this game. We only stopped playing after the terrible incident when Ted Saleh struck Mark Brebberman with intent to injure. It was somehow related to the Hundred Days War, believe it or not.
(My loveliest Lauren's favorite part of this story is that we were the misfit and castoff kids. While the cool and athletic kids got to use the grassy field to play football or whatever during recess, we were relegated to the asphalt slab and the thin strip of lawn by that brick school wall. So while the supposedly tough kids played touch football on grass, we supposedly wimpy and dorky kids played on blacktop. My shins were permanently black with bruises and I always had scabs on my knees.)
There's a lesson in that, I guess. I also remember it fondly, which tells us all a thing or two about my sense of play and its limits.
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