eyes and the look

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.)