The Gaze

Jon Vagg

I know about the Gaze. I’ve studied philosophy and semiology, read the postmodernists and the feminists. The Gaze is power and sex, danger and opportunity, possessing and being possessed.

I submit myself to it; at the same time, I take control, direct the Gaze on those who look at me. This is my obsession.

Is this confusing? The Gaze is a concept of French postmodern philosophers. I’ve read the books and been to the seminars. It’s a perspective and a power relationship – who can look, who can be looked at. Men look at men with the question in their mind: am I more powerful than you? They look at women with the question: can I fuck you? Women look at women with many questions: are you more attractive? More powerful? And occasionally: can I fuck you?

Theory talks about the indirect Gaze, looking at somebody who is not aware of being viewed; and the direct Gaze, where the person being viewed demands the attention. And yes, I am that attention-seeker.

The Gaze can be between people. Or between a person and a picture, or text. It can be represented in a picture or text, or come out of a picture, looking at the viewer. It can be a camera, looking at me; it can be my picture, looking at you.

 I am putting into practice what I’ve learned. I’m here to corrupt you, and that’s my addiction, obsession, and sexual fulfillment.

With a lens focused on me, my life contracts to that frozen moment of a quarter, a tenth, a hundredth of a second. I look into the eye of the camera, hold the pose, my pulse quickens and I feel the blood in my veins. In that moment, I am truly a sexual being. At that moment, whether I’m smiling, pouting or grimacing, looking into the lens or away from it, my message is: “I am fucking you. My avatar, my image, is engaging you in sexual congress”.

Canon. Nikon. Older models, Leica, Pentax or Hasselblad. It doesn’t matter, I respond the same way to them all. You think the images are captured, catalogued, autoerotic experiences? No: I am seduced, defined, made moist through congress with that elusive third sex, the imagination of desire. And that imagination is in your brain.

The Gaze of the camera: the Gaze of the picture. Twin lovers between which I am, in the current slang, spit-roasted.

I want the image to be more authentic, more powerful, than the flesh. I want the image to capture you in its Gaze. What you see on the page, the screen, the billboard, is just the start of that control. It burrows into your subconscious and brings forth desires you didn’t know you had.

There is craft and art in this. I am critical of my own performance, and that of my photographers. I look at the clothes, their texture, the way I wear them. I look at the flesh, the makeup, the posture, the props, the background. I interrogate the details, arms, hands, legs, ankles, the triangle of cleavage, the eyes. Especially the eyes. I cast a careful eye over the work of the photographer, the computer manipulation of light, focus, exposure, filtering, color gradients. These all become points to be connected by the viewer, points at which meaning is injected. I know how the pic came to be shot, the position, the setup and lights, what was in my head at the time. But is that the truth of the image? Hell, no. The truth lies in your own head, in the visual impact that connects with, shapes and moulds your guilty fantasies.

In magazines, I am striding across a deserted factory in a floor-length latex dress, coiled whip in hand; or my feet are in close-up, six-inch purple heels, chain binding my ankles. Dominant or submissive? Wrong question: the posture is submissive but the Gaze from that image still dominates you.

On the cover of the latest Fantom Nightmare Slasher CD (self-issued by my favorite goth band) I am dressed in a corset and shadows, a bloody chainsaw in the foreground. The colors are lurid reds and greens, the image posterised. The picture speaks to a certain cultural icon: the girl who has no fear of the dark and disturbed mind, who holds nightmare and deviance within her, who casts it out to the world. She is on a mission to disturb and deprave, simply by lodging that vision of her in your brain.

And yet, being in front of the camera was funny and somehow charming, in the way schlock horror can be when it is properly lit and staged. It took all evening to prepare, and I was wearing just the corset and boots, hair in two pigtails, drinking vodka from the bottle. Contact lenses made my eyes chrome, with triangular pupils. Behind me, visible in the shot, the wall had been decorated with the eviscerated guts of computers, with dolls’ heads and limbs wired into them. This was my own design. I remember the smell of the blood – we used baby oil and ketchup. Afterwards I took the corset off to clean it, spattered myself in the gunk and played with the chainsaw, kneeling over the blade, allowing the teeth to dig into the inside of my thighs until I came. One of those photos was heavily edited for the inside cover of the disk.

I wouldn’t fuck the photographer until he’d downloaded the pics and shown me the slideshow. I insisted we kept the chainsaw on the bed. He had to throw away the mattress afterwards. And I’ve never even thought, until now, that it’s probably only me who’d use the words “funny” and “charming” to describe that scene.

The shots remind me how sex is so much more transient than the erotic energy raised and captured and transmitted by the Gaze. For the record: I fuck without a camera. But it’s not sex. It’s warm bodies and nice feelings, but it doesn’t reach the scalpel-sharp intensity of the Gaze.

What the Gaze reflects back to me, to you, is an illuminated woman and a dark spirit. Mostly I am beautiful, in a strange and twisted way. Eyes wide-set, innocent or sinful depending on liner or shadow, and the angle of the shot. There are real stories there: tears of memory for a dead friend, the feral snarl of effort while hanging upside down and tied by the ankles, the pain of an undeserved insult, the lips-parted glow of a good spanking before the shoot. But what’s important is the imaginative recreation, the story that lodges in your head: tears from the impact of a whip, the feral snarl of a woman with chainsaw, the pain of being won at cards by a gambler, the lips-parted glow of anticipation that a new lover’s blood will taste sweet...

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Jon Vagg writes nonfiction books for a living. However he often has bad thoughts and gets them out of his head by writing stories. Once they are in someone else's head he feels better. He has published SF/fantasy tales in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction and elsewhere.