The Power of The Female Gaze

On a recent trip to Italy, I viewed sculptures and art depicting the female form in various states of dress and undress. From the angelic, petite, fully-clothed Virgin Mary carved out of Italian marble and cradling the infant Jesus in Gothic churches to buxom, sensuous women painted in florid colours on a multipanelled scroll (Cloisonné de théâtre) at the Venice Biennale, their bosoms unafraid, like fully ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. It wasn’t surprising that the latter was the psychedelic vision of a woman artist for whom unbridled sexuality — both in fantasy and reality — could co-exist. Quite in contrast to the incredibly beautiful statues and oil paintings of the Madonna and Child in which I discovered innocence, modesty and the incarnation of idealistic purity that is meant to be embodied by the epitome of divine femininity — a woman capable of giving birth without having been touched by a man.

This contrast hit me hard. I tried to uncover something in between that would address my own innate sense of the feminine but all I saw were tourists and locals, men and women, dressed in similar raiment, sporting unisex sneakers, T-shirts and backpacks. Outside of medieval churches and thoughtfully curated art exhibitions, in the everyday world, had gender boundaries blurred so much, I wondered. In the woke world, did it really not matter anymore whether you identified as male or female in your dressing?

Traipsing through charming streets brimming with trendy cafes in a country known for proliferating fashion brands, my gaze, like a predictable female, looked out for the fashionista — someone on whom I could model my own idea of Western feminine charm and allure. Think Sophia Loren. Instead, I came across comfort dressing, athleisure, blah T-shirts and crop tops in neutral colours that emanated from a bland palette. Sultry almond eyes and wingtip eyeliners have been relegated to being a trademark of yesteryear’s sirens. 

At an evening opera at the Arena di Verona too, this indistinguishable street style remained somewhat the norm, and even blurred the front rows into a democratic mass of simple opera enthusiasts, except for a bright-red speck which threw in some oomph during the intermission. The concierge at the hotel had earlier advised that we walk in comfortable shoes to the Arena and in a matter-of-fact way advocated, “Be casual, you will need to walk a lot, and don’t dress up too much as it’s very crowded inside.”

In some magical alignment to this reinvented Italian universe, away from the catwalks of Milan, my own dressing changed dramatically in these weeks; when one evening, more consumed by the pink-streaked Venetian skies and the outline of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore than my footwear, I paired a pair of black Skechers with a silk pantsuit to a tony restaurant. It was a game changer. After some navel-gazing I wondered if Italy had liberated me from seeing myself through the male gaze, where sexy meant stilettos. But on cobblestoned streets, these foretold a sprained ankle and a dampened holiday. Has the male gaze become obsolete because of androgynous dressing, even in the land of Fellini who flaunted prostitutes tumbling out of his movies?

Ah no! At that nobby restaurant, I spotted a couple, and wavy blonde locks on the woman who looked straight out of a Modigliani painting. She was poised for seduction as she began a slow baring of shoulders as the evening progressed. All eyes were on her. She became the cynosure of the men in that intimate space where her sensuous air mingled with the chandeliered glow and the atmosphere became heavy with the onerous expectation of stereotypical gender roles.

Straining to eavesdrop through notes of Verdi playing in the background, I realised she wasn’t Italian. But the idealistic romance of being a “showgirl” in the floating city, one of the world’s most beautiful places, had rubbed off on her. As I sipped the smooth Italian Barolo, I wondered whether Ms Goldilocks had unwittingly nailed her own self-objectification, which became a magnetic force for the spectator. A concept that the author Mona Chollet elaborates on in a chapter named “Becoming Erotic Subjects”. Her book, Reinventing Love, deals with patriarchy and heterosexual relations and coincidentally, I happened to be reading parts of it before my trip to Italy.

Earlier that week, I had met a 60-something female powerhouse, chairperson of a large Italian firm, with four degrees under her belt and a passion for mathematics. When I asked her about the secret of her success, she quickly replied that from the age of five, she could remember that her mother raised her brother and her as equals. She grew up fighting against the labels of “wonder women” or “career girls” traditionally applied to women who chose to follow their own independent dreams. Now, surrounded by these contrasts at 65, my year of reckoning, Italy jolted me out of my conditioned sanctum, and perhaps the all-knowing grace of the Madonna had something to do with it. Behind the demure veil in those hallowed basilicas, she bestowed on me the grace of changing my own vision, of lifting my own outdated veil to a newer sense of a more universal self. Divinity lies in the eyes of the beholder, I said to myself, as I saw a fleet of sleek gondolas drifting on the Canalazzo or Grand Canal, where the swaggering gondoliers in their iconic striped T-shirts became for me emblems of stability. Day in and day out they paddle through Venetian life, seemingly without the burden of change.

When I visited 25 years ago, the gondolas and gondoliers had been there as symbols of the city, and now in 2024 too, I watched them expertly navigate the narrow lagoons and canals with the same grace and aplomb. In their unique backward stroke of the single oar, a rhythmic, comforting monotony of motion. Occasionally, they drifted along the direction of the Mediterranean breeze when their seamless movement flowed into a living form of universality. Of life that is being propelled by a confluence of forces that are both human and natural. “Lady, lady!” is the call I heard from the Venetian water taxi driver or the concierge at the hotel or the server in the restaurant in order to grab my attention. A lady indeed I am, and in that call, I might also have heard a hint of formality and respect instead of the swagger of entitled and traditional machismo.

Italy devoid of maschilismo or machismo is an oxymoron perhaps. Or, maybe not, with Giorgia Meloni’s election as Prime Minister in October 2022, making her the first woman to occupy this post. Here in Bel Paese — between the classical and the poetical — I saw it as a modern-day woman’s leap over the vaulted medieval ceiling. Now, had I, in a serendipitous moment, begun to feel the power of the female gaze (not the male gaze superimposed on the female gaze)? On my next visit to Italy, perhaps, I will possess the right distance to put under my “gender-agnostic” scrutiny, sculptures and artwork of the male and female forms. And just to prepare for the unpredictable evening high tides at Piazza San Marco, I will definitely throw into my luggage a pair of my own sturdy gumboots. Even though the elegant 18th-century-built restaurant, whose entrance was flooded the night I ate there, handed out pretty cool disposable ones that slipped very easily over my innocuous and trustworthy rubber-soled black Skechers. I left Italy feeling that a new aesthetic and paradigm of identity and empathy in the seductive worlds of Fellini and Modigliani is in the making….