Female Reading of the Male Gaze, and Sherlock
Why the dismissal of women’s readings of Sherlock bothers me so much
Male showrunners and actors: They’re just friends. Why are you reading sex into this?
Female fans: They obviously want each other.
Male showrunners and actors: No they don’t. You’re hysterical and oversexualized and deluded.
Female fans: No we’re not. It’s OBVIOUS they desire each other.
Male showrunners and actors: NO THEY—
Female fans: YES THEY—
[ad infinitum]
Film and television are visual mediums. The text comes from what we see, not just the script, and definitely not extra-text commentary. Sherlock especially is a strikingly visual story that is all about looking.
Any woman with any sense of self-preservation spends her whole life learning to read the male gaze. The reason is not because women are constantly checking to make sure they are desirable (as many men like to think); the reason is because women have to. The consequences for not noticing when a male gaze equals “desire” are very dangerous, and so obvious I don’t even have to explain them. Any woman who walks through a parking lot at night, who has to spend her days avoiding a co-worker who sexually harrasses her but not enough to make it worth it to fight back, who deals with members of the public service who laugh at her when she is being threatened (I am thinking of that woman in San Francisco who tried to get a BART bus driver to call the police when a man was threatening to rape her and got ignored)—any woman who LIVES ON THIS PLANET has to learn to be aware of the male gaze and interpret it for signs of arousal and/or danger from a young age. This is SO MUCH BIGGER than “women want romance” or “women want love” or any of that ignorant shorthand for “women aren’t reading this show correctly.” It is definitely bigger than Sherlock.
If a man stood right in my personal space and stared into my eyes I would know how to interpret that. If a man licked his lips while staring at my face I would know how to interpret that. If a man belitted and chased off my romantic partners I would know how to interpret that. If a man asked me to reach into his jacket and pull out his phone I would damn well know how to interpret that. Any time I have tried to brush aside suspicions under these circumstances, I was proved right that I should have trusted my instincts, and I wound up in dangerous situations (luckily, nothing terrible resulted thanks to being able to escape, but the danger was real). If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but at least I don’t get locked in a basement in Cleveland for a decade. Women have to err on the side of caution. People are right when they say the sexual tension moments in Sherlock are brief, but that doesn’t matter: if you’re a woman you have to take even the briefest flashes into account. There is a reason we call these moments “eyefucking.”
Sherlock is all about the power of sight, of the gaze, specifically the male gaze. (There’s a whole article in that, but I’ll resist.)
We get Sherlock POV when he interprets a scene, with those subtitles and graphics; we get John POV for everything else (that’s my reading, anyway; Watson is the narrator of the Sherlock Holmes tales, after all). There are only a few establishing shots/omniscient narrator scenes that aren’t from John or Sherlock’s POV, e.g. the victims at the beginning of ASIP, or Moriarty texting in front of Big Ben in ASIB or in a cell in THOB. We briefly see Irene’s POV as she looks at pictures of Sherlock (in that beautiful sequence where they look at pictures of each other), but that’s about it. (I’ve never been certain whether that dream sequence of Irene interpreting the “bed scene” was from her POV or Sherlock’s or both.) I have hopes we’ll see Molly’s POV in TEH but of course I haven’t seen it yet.
The denial of the male showrunners of Sherlock and the firm disagreement of the female fans just proves to me that even in the 21st century, men and women live in different worlds.
5 men: There’s no sexual tension.
Thousands of women: Yes there is.
5 men: Clearly you’re wrong!
I don’t need this ship to be canon, it’s not the differing opinions that bothers me. The writers are free to write whatever they want and I’m on board. I just want some acknowledgement—from the world at large—that women’s perspective on human interactions is just as valid as men’s and doesn’t come from wishful thinking. Quite the opposite.
Bottom bit bolded, because THIS. Fucking THIS, a thousand times THIS. It cannot be said strongly or loudly or often enough: we get so, so fucking tired of being told that we’re delusional, when everything - everything - is telling a different story than the ones TPTB think they’re telling.
Women are forever being told we’re imagining it all - from PMS to actual hostility and danger to narrative romance, and everything in-between. Women are always 'imagining things’, and men are always there to set us straight. Well, fuck that.
I love everything in this post.
This is a really important point, and a big part of what makes this such a problem is the extent to which men are socialised to not read male behavioural cues as being potentially sexual or romantic generally, and especially not when directed at other men. As I remember vividly from high school, the no homo fear ran deep enough for most guys that accusing another guy of being attracted to them or coming onto them - even as a joke - was verboten, because it signalled to everyone that they’d been thinking about gay men, and was therefore more likely to backfire when this was pointed out (and it inevitably was) than to succeed.
So what you have, then, is this perfect collision where women, as the OP says, are raised in a culture that necessitates their paying very close attention to male romantic and sexual cues as a simple survival reflex, but where men are taught to unsee and deny the existence of such cues unless they’re directed grossly, suggestively and obviously towards women (whose cues of disinterest, fear or rejection they’re seldom taught to respect, either). And meanwhile, because this same culture assumes that relationships between women are always going to be emotional and intense and tactile, we all get taught to misread the same romantic and sexual cues that pass between women as being irrevocably platonic, no matter how extreme, which is also part of why there’s so much femslash blindness in shipping. (The other, larger part, of course, is the dearth of well-written female characters who routinely and meaningfully interact with each other. But I digress.)
So: while there are some, let’s call them suggestive behavioural cues which are base commonalities of human interaction, regardless of the gender of the participants - things like intense eye contact, or standing too close, or certain types of speech or touching, or finding excuses to touch - which, depending on the context, might be either romantic, sexual or platonic with roughly equal frequency, there’s a massive asymmetry to how we’re trained to perceive them. Thus
F/F: suggestive cues made visible and/or encouraged, read as platonic to deny romantic/sexual interpretations
M/M: suggestive cues made invisible and/or discouraged, read as platonic to deny romantic/sexual interpretations
F/M: suggestive cues made visible and/or encouraged, read as romantic/sexual to deny platonic interpretations
The added complication in the F/M spectrum is that, whereas women learn early on to pay very close attention to male behavioural cues, to read them comprehensively and to assume a sexual motive ahead of a romantic one, men are simultaneously taught to pay little attention to female behavioural cues, to either disregard them or to interpret them with frightening inaccuracy (not because inaccuracy is the aim, but because the sexist logic underpinning the lessons can’t achieve any other outcome; see elsewhere re: the literal entirety of rape culture), and to assume a romantic motive ahead of a sexual one (but to really, really hope for a sexual one).
This is why you get so much lazy visual storytelling wherein the potential for a romantic heterosexual romance is “established” by little more than putting a single female character in the vicinity of a male protagonist and having them interact: by default, the woman’s presence is deemed to have romantic narrative significance until or unless explicitly stated otherwise (and even then, people struggle with it). By the same token, two female characters can spend the night in the same bed, cuddling, and our first assumption is meant to be close platonic friendship; but if two male characters do the same thing - well. Once upon a time, that actually used to happen quite a bit in films and on TV (see, for instance, Charters and Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes), because the cultural implication used to be a platonic one; but now that we live in the Era of No Homo, you very rarely see guys do this precisely because it’s assumed to be purely sexual.
Thus: it’s not just that women, by and large, are socialised to pay very close attention to suggestive male behavioural cues - it’s that men are actively discouraged from doing likewise, and so can recreate those same cues between each other in a way that’s highly visible to female outsiders, but often invisible to the men themselves, whether as participants or viewers.
(There’s a more in-depth, complicated point to be made here about queer analysis and interpretation vs straight and the extent to which queer male readings of the same scenes often mirror those of both straight and queer women, but not straight men, with the major skew factors being self-repression and denial, but it’s late, and I’m tired, and, well, this sentence kinda gives you the basics.)
