Clockwise from
top left: Natasha
Lyonne in Russian
Doll, the star was
also the show’s
co-creator; Orange
Is the New Black’s
“Taystee”, Piper,
Janae and Poussey;
Beyoncé performing
in 2014; musician
Frank Ocean –
the rapper came
out as queer via a
letter on Tumblr
in 2012; Issa Rae
in HBO’s Insecure;
the show was based
on her web series,
The Misadventures
of Awkward
Black Girl123GETTY IMAGES; HBO/MERIE WEISMILLER WALLACE; NETFLIXO
n a recent sick day, I found myself browsing
Netflix. I wanted to watch something light and
ended up opting for a textbook Adam Sandler
film. Click, released in 2006, tells the story of a
man who acquires an otherworldly remote control that allows
him to travel through time. I saw it in a cinema the first
time around, when I was a teenager. Back then, I consumed
media in which women were white and straight and pretty
and docile; the long-suffering, beautiful, caretaking wives
of clueless dolts. Watching Click now, I was struck by how
much it had aged, like milk, in just over a decade. It was
steeped in what the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey
coined “the male gaze”, a perspective that traps women within
the confines of heterosexual male desire.
Thirty years of watching and reading men’s cultural output
has led me to a deep familiarity with the male interior life.
They can be shy or outgoing, tall or short, loving or
sociopathic, and none of these attributes serves as a metonym
for what the wider world would expect of them. “Men look
at women,” wrote the art critic John Berger, while “women
watch themselves being looked at.”
Through watching their creations, I know intimately what
it is like to be regarded as an object. I think everyone who
does not benefit from a routine centring of their experienceAs the decade draws to a close, author Reni
Eddo-Lodge applauds the changing face of pop
culture – and the moments that transformed itARTS & CULTURE
can relate. You start to wonder if someone who looks like
you might ever be a protagonist, or if your existence is just
a figment of some white guy’s imagination.
Thankfully, the 2010s seem to have made some headway
in changing this. I came of age in the last decade and watched
as the internet aided a rapid reshifting of what it means to
be human. These years have also seen a fresh crop of cultural
creators seizing control of their subjectivity, through film,
books, television, music and media.
Things have begun to make more sense. There could be
no sassy black friend in Issa Rae’s HBO comedy-drama
Insecure, which debuted in 2016, because both the protagonist
and her best friend were black. The naive, precocious ingénue,
straitjacketed and dreamlike in so many male fantasies,
suddenly had a rich interior life in each main character of
Lena Dunham’s 2012 series Girls. The myth of the maligned
yet invisible gay man in hip-hop was broken when >WATCHING ME,
WATCHING YOU
12-19-FOB-Arts-RepresentationInCulture.indd 123 14/10/2019 10:21