Because it’s 2017: Time for you to go, male gaze

“Dance as if no one is watching” is a popular slogan. But when you’re a young woman, someone is always watching, aren’t they?

One of the truly awful things about being young and female is putting up with what has been termed “the male gaze.”

Even here in liberated, liberal Canada, women going about their daily business have to contend with whistles, leers, shouts from a passing car, being grabbed from behind in a train station, and lardy compliments from a boss who wants to take you out for a drink after work.

It makes you feel like prey, or as if you were constantly swatting away a swarm of flies. It makes you hyperaware of your own body, because everyone else is. It’s exhausting.

And even though these interactions appear to be couched in desire and pleasure, make no mistake. It is a violent interaction, right to the core, because overwhelmingly, one group is judging and dominating another.

But something’s changing. Now, accusations of sexual assault and harassment have reached the highest levels.

The latest shocking headlines belong to Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

As we all know, police are investigating allegations by 30 women, including actresses Angelina Jolie, Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow, who told news media that Weinstein had sexually harassed or sexually assaulted them.

It only serves to illustrate the complexity of our species that, during that time, Weinstein was also a great supporter of the Democratic Party; and that the showbusiness community that enabled Weinstein and kept silence for so many years is also the creator of liberal movies that sympathize with the outsider and celebrate the human spirit.

The expressions of shock and outrage coming from every celebrity and politician are strangely off-centre, making it sound as if this is a one-off thing and not a deeply rooted system of “abuse the vulnerable, because you can.” It wasn’t just Weinstein. Think of Jian Ghomeshi, the former CBC radio personality.

Think of the police: the classaction lawsuit that was settled against the RCMP this year after hundreds of women came forward to talk about violent sexual harassment they witnessed.

Same story with the Canadian Armed Forces, where degrading treatment of women has been widely documented.

It goes on and on, even here in Waterloo Region. Kitchener Centre MPP Daiene Vernile, a former television journalist, revealed that she had witnessed sexual harassment at work. So have I, when working both in the media and in higher education.

You get a bit of relief as a woman when you hit middle age and instantly become invisible to strangers.

There’s something about the thickening waistline, the wrinkles and the greying hair that puts a thick blindfold on that male gaze. I have no idea why so many of us “fight” aging (as if you even could) with expensive skin creams and endless exercise regimens. It’s peaceful over here.

But that only solves the problem for some of us, some of the time. The bright side of the Weinstein, Cosby, Ghomeshi stories — and so many more — is that in their collective disgrace, our daughters and granddaughters may enter a better world.

Young men are hungry for a “kinder, gentler version of masculinity,” Judah Oudshoorn, a professor in Conestoga’s community and criminal justice program, has said.

And we do sometimes learn from history.

Let’s hope that in a few years, a leering boss is as unacceptable as the N-word is now.