Thoughts on Parties and the Gaze

For cultural studies I've been reading Berger's ways of seeing, and I just had a lecture on the gaze, so it is fresh in my mind as a concept. One of the things that came up during the lecture was that in modern culture with social media etc. men are much more affected by a form of gaze than they might have been in the 70s.

So I was at a party where I knew nobody yesterday night, and this morning I had a thought of sorts about it. It was a wicked party, I was relatively drunk. The story of how I got to the party basically warrants its own blog post, I don't know if I'll give it one or not.

Regardless, at some point in the party I hit this moment of weird social anxiety where I all of a sudden very much felt like an intruder. Part of it was that people had sort of gotten past the small/medium talk phase of the party and were talking to their better friends or people they were trying to fuck. The thought I had at the time was "this is the point where I fuck up at a party" and I was trying to think of what I'd done wrong. For reasons beyond me I shared this thought with someone, and they did a very notably cool thing in telling me that they had social anxiety too and that it was all in my head etc. etc and then I felt better and stayed for a bit longer and overall my reflection on the party is that it was a Good Time.

But reflecting on that moment (in the shower) this morning, I had a moment where it connected to the aspects of the gaze I have been studying.

When I am enjoying myself at a party, talking to people, making bad jokes, I feel like a subject. I feel like myself, I am a person sharing my views and stories and listening to those of others. The moment I switched over to being nervous I hadn't done anything in particular. I couldn't even pinpoint a trigger. Regardless, something in that moment made me self-aware, and aware of my appearance and how my existence would seem at the party. I tried to kind of blend in. All of a sudden, I was looking at myself as an object intruding on this group of friends. 

I don't know if that's what it's like to feel objectified as a woman, or if that's how the gaze affects women, but it felt like an interesting connection to the material.