Growing up in the early 2000s, the only gaze we knew to see the world through was male, and it had a particular way of asking women to objectify themselves before anyone else got the chance to. Lacan had a name for this, more or less. For him, the gaze was never just about being looked at. It was the feeling of being watched by an Other, some organising authority whose approval structures your entire sense of self, whether or not anyone is actually looking at any given moment. You don’t need a male figure in the room. You just need to have its eyes already installed in your head.
So we chose our fighter. For some, it was a hockey playing, pillar of the community kind of woman. For others, it was the I’m going to travel the world, I want to open my mind and see what’s out there woman. For others still, it was just being really hot. Each of us were drawn to a persona that articulated enough of who we thought we were, and was close enough to something we might actually be able to become. The closer we got to that persona, the more eyes it drew and the more stable we felt. This, I thought, was what it meant to be a woman.
Thin ran under all of it, of course, but none of the personas wore thinness quite like the cool girl aesthetic did. In the early 2000s, that meant heroin chic. Hollow cheeks, jutting bones, a fragile doll aware that life hurts, that was the ultimate ‘it’ in my world. So I did what I thought I had to do to be lovable. I smoked cigarettes as soon as I was old enough for it to not be too extreme. I scrolled Tumblr religiously. I made sure I was thin in that way where people continuously were shocked when they asked me my age. And I partied with a kind of defensive declaration that screamed this is who I am, man.
The problem with turning self-destruction into an identity for others to gawk at is that, firstly, the death drive – which for Lacan isn’t just a wish to die, but a compulsion to keep repeating the same painful pattern because the repetition itself, not any actual death, is where the pull lives – doesn’t know it’s being performed. You can start out enjoying how free you look to others and end up needing that feeling for real. The line between the two disappears faster than you think it will.
Secondly, there’s this brilliantly impossible paradox to the whole thing. I spent my twenties partying with people who, like me, were infatuated with the likes of Nirvana and Janis Joplin, figures who seemed so brilliant and yet ached in a way that made that brilliance impossible. That, to me, held a kind of truth to it. Like they were free from the weight of normie expectations that so suffocated others. Yet, the lady doth protest too much, as always. While we may have walked and talked like people who had found some kind of freedom from the gaze of that relentless Other, I look back now and see how entrapped we were, far more than those we thought were not getting it. We were so tormented by the idea that life asks something of us that we had to get it, quite literally, out of our heads, even if it meant taking ourselves with it. We weren’t aching out of brilliance, we were cracking under that same weight we judged others for facing head on.
I didn’t get out of it through any great insight, or through wanting a different life. It was so much more banal than that, and in its own way perfectly fitting: I gained weight. The weight made me wobble in that gaze, and that wobble made me anxious, which had its own way of forcing a kind of reckoning.
Because the truth is, none of us were ever going to find our way out of that gaze by becoming a better object within it. Fragile enough, thin enough, cool enough, ruined enough; it didn’t matter which adjective we chased. An object is still an object no matter how well it performs its own destruction. The only way out was never going to be a better version of being looked at. It was going to be putting the gaze down entirely, and figuring out not only who I might be, but also how I might survive, when that gaze becomes indifferent towards me.
And if nothing else, once you stop objectifying yourself on someone else’s system, you get to pick your own. Mine, right now, is you, reading this.
Written by Molly Fitz