After Isla Vista: The New Male Gaze By Nicholas Mirzoeff

http://tidalmag.org/blog/intensify/after-isla-vista-the-new-male-gaze/

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And now, despite all the obvious gains made by feminism and LGBTQ activism, the new male gaze is visible in porn, video games, sexts, Snapchat, Tinder, Grindr, okcupid and all the other ways of commodifying excitation. With 2.5 billion people online and half the planetary population under thirty, this new form is still working itself out.

The Isla Vista massacre, like most such events, was a horribly perverse form of this media spectacle. Initiated by the perpetrator on YouTube, disseminated worldwide by all forms of news media and rebutted on Twitter by the #yesallwomen project, it horrifies above and beyond the awful specifics because we know not only that nothing will be done but this is how things now are. Everyday—but a new everyday because YouTube and Twitter are not ten years old yet, let alone Snapchat and so on.

The new male gaze is violently intersected with white supremacy. The Isla Vista perpetrator killed three Asian men and was obviously (and tediously) conflicted over his Asian mother. The gun is the tool of white supremacy, from its use in the white citizen militia deployed against indigenous people or fugitive slaves to today’s almost routine slayings. In the classic male gaze of narrative cinema, the action centered on what Hollywood actors call “The Gun.” It was a representative symbol of Cold War domination, never more notably than when deployed by a woman, as in High Noon. The films of the period expressed by displacement the police and army massacres in U.S.-dominated developing nations around the world that still relativize (without diminishing) what happens in the United States.

Since at least Gran Torino (2008), the Young Man (with apologies to Tikkun) has known that the old cinematic ways and the old actors like Clint Eastwood don’t cut it any more. The Young Man, who is the subject and object of the new male gaze, embraces digital media in all its forms and experiences as his reality. He is not a single person but a set of ideas about people that shape how actually existing people act.