Female Reading of the Male Gaze, and Sherlock
Why the dismissal of womenâs readings of Sherlock bothers me so much
Male showrunners and actors: Theyâre just friends. Why are you reading sex into this?
Female fans: They obviously want each other.
Male showrunners and actors: No they donât. Youâre hysterical and oversexualized and deluded.
Female fans: No weâre not. Itâs OBVIOUS they desire each other.
Male showrunners and actors: NO THEYâ
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 âdesireâ are very dangerous, and so obvious I donât 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)âany 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 âwomen want romanceâ or âwomen want loveâ or any of that ignorant shorthand for âwomen arenât reading this show correctly.â 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 Iâm wrong, Iâm wrong, but at least I donât 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 doesnât matter: if youâre a woman you have to take even the briefest flashes into account. There is a reason we call these moments âeyefucking.â
Sherlock is all about the power of sight, of the gaze, specifically the male gaze. (Thereâs a whole article in that, but Iâll resist.)
We get Sherlock POV when he interprets a scene, with those subtitles and graphics; we get John POV for everything else (thatâs 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 arenât from John or Sherlockâs 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 Ireneâs POV as she looks at pictures of Sherlock (in that beautiful sequence where they look at pictures of each other), but thatâs about it. (Iâve never been certain whether that dream sequence of Irene interpreting the âbed sceneâ was from her POV or Sherlockâs or both.) I have hopes weâll see Mollyâs POV in TEH but of course I havenât 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: Thereâs no sexual tension.
Thousands of women: Yes there is.
5 men: Clearly youâre wrong!
I donât need this ship to be canon, itâs not the differing opinions that bothers me. The writers are free to write whatever they want and Iâm on board. I just want some acknowledgementâfrom the world at largeâthat womenâs perspective on human interactions is just as valid as menâs and doesnât come from wishful thinking. Quite the opposite.
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