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I can remember it perfectly. I was in a class during undergrad at Central Connecticut State University. The professor was telling us about the male gaze, which like Foucault’s panopticon is one of the core theories you’ll very likely be taught in the humanities in the modern university. The concept of the male gaze defines the way that men looking at women reflects and intensifies certain patriarchal dynamics in society. When a man leers at a woman, he’s not just taking part in a little harmless pleasure, but casting women into a role of fundamental passivity and reducing her to her sexual value. It’s a concept that was originally most associated with film studies, but branched out to many corners of cultural studies and critical theory. From an explainer:

The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire. A key idea of feminist film theory, the concept of the male gaze was introduced by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

We all murmured along to the lecture and admitted that the male gaze was real. (And I still do think there’s a lot of truth in the idea, now.) Some of us college-aged dudes did the customary apologetics for those classroom situations, and one guy raised his hand and pledged not to do it - not to use the gaze, to take care how he looked when he looked at women, never to leer. I very solemnly told myself the same thing. But aha! The professor told us, with just a little condescension, that we couldn’t just choose not to use the male gaze. The male gaze was not a choice we were making ourselves but the product of structural forces of society far beyond our control. When we went out into the world, we would reflexively check women out (those among us who were straight, anyway), and in doing so we would oppress them, even if they didn’t notice us looking at them. As was common to what we learned in those classes, the social problems described were intrinsic, mass phenomena, not subject to our individual moral choices.

And the thought that struck me was at that moment, well, then I guess I’m just happy to be the one that looks.