http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/opinion/longing-for-the-male-gaze.html 2016-09-21 10:20:34 Longing for the Male Gaze Having cerebral palsy means I don’t get sexually harassed by men. But it’s no fun being invisible. === When I was in my early 30s, I practiced When I was younger, in my 20s, I was a thin, slight woman. I have also always been beautiful and a nice dresser. I also happen to have “Cerebral” refers to the brain and “palsy” refers to the To put it bluntly, people with cerebral palsy appear to have strange movements. Since they are not in full control of their muscles, they may have facial expressions or spasticity that most people find surprising, if not unattractive. People with cerebral palsy are often mistaken for having a mental impairment, although the two are not necessarily linked. I have a speech impediment and awkward gait. My disability is visible, but not necessarily significant. I do have some physical limitations, but am able to do most things that a typical person can do. My primary difficulty has been with people’s negative reaction, or what disability-studies scholars call the “social construction” of disability. This primarily means that the main challenges disabled people face come from societal prejudice and inaccessible spaces. Recently, the popular feminist Jessica Valenti published a memoir titled “Sex Object,” which focuses on the toll the “male gaze” has taken on her. She wrote an article on this theme for this paper, “ My experiences have been quite different, nearly the opposite, of Valenti’s and that of most women. I was never hit on or sexually harassed by my professors in college, or later, by my co-workers or superiors. I have not felt as if my male teachers, friends or colleagues thought less of me because of my gender. I’ve never been aggressively “hit on” in a bar, despite the fact that I have frequented them alone throughout the years. In fact, I’ve rarely been approached in a bar at all. I do remember being sexually harassed by a man on the street. Once. I was 18 years old. I was waiting for a bus, and a man pulled up and offered me a ride in his car. When I declined, he got hostile and asked me if I was wearing panties. I was more startled than anything, and I left the curb to go to the nearby movie theater where my friend worked. I didn’t tell my friend what happened, but waited with him for the bus. This was very frightening, but I wouldn’t say the incident traumatized me, nor is it something that deeply affected my life. And it happened only once. Let me rephrase that: It happened only once while I was visibly inhabiting my own body. Virtually, it has been another story. In 2013, I began experimenting with the dating website OKCupid because I wanted to explore this concept of being desexualized. I created a provocative profile. The photographs were recent, but in photographs, I look “normal.” I did not mention that I have cerebral palsy. I wanted to use the opportunity to explore the sexual world as an able-bodied woman, if only online, and see what all the fuss was about. As a pretend, able-bodied woman, I received all of kinds of messages. Men wrote stupid things, aggressive things and provocative things. I had a flood of messages coupled with a flood of advances. Often, while I was in a dialogue with a man who didn’t know of my impairment, I would disclose it, and almost always, the man vanished, no matter how strong the connection had been beforehand. After a while, I changed the profile to reflect that I have a disability. Fewer men wrote. Sometimes, no men wrote, depending on the content. But over all, the messages changed. They could be called more respectful. The men who wrote primarily wanted to know how my disability affected me. This all feels like a political act, and in some ways it is. Strangely, my disability makes me feel as if I have license to play with and deconstruct sexuality in ways I might not have the bravery to do as an able-bodied woman. One of the privileges of being an outsider is that you are not expected to play by the insiders’ rules. I watch men on the street. I will watch a man visually or verbally harass women who pass him. I am invisible enough to do this. Sometimes men look at me, but the reaction is different. There seems to be some level of shame or confusion mixed with the lust in their eyes. Does this mean that I am lucky? Am I blessed to be sexually invisible and given a reprieve from something that has troubled women for centuries? Is there a freedom in not having to be privy to the struggles of the typical woman? It certainly does not I also do understand what it feels like to get attention from the wrong man. It’s gross. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary and tedious. And in certain cases, traumatic. But I still would much rather have a man make an inappropriate sexual comment than be referred to in the third person or have someone express surprise over the fact that I have a career. The former, unfortunately, feels “normal.” The latter makes me feel invisible and is meant for that purpose. I