Really beautiful boys

It doesn't take knowing me very long to know that I have a thing for extremely beautiful men. I've never been shy about that fact, and indulging that part of myself is something I really enjoy. Female gaze is my pet feminist issue, partially because I think it's a small thing that is a good indicator of a number of much larger, more important matters of respect towards women. An acknowledgement of female gaze is the acknowledgement of women as sexual beings with preferences, agency, and desires of their own, and do not exist solely for the needs of men. It's an equalizing thing, an indicator that women aren't so different from men after all-- we're all visual, we all physically objectify each other sometimes.

But also it's important to me because I feel it so strongly. I get A LOT of joy out of looking at men I find physically attractive, probably more than the average person. It makes me feel good to exercise my ability to be the subject rather than the object; it makes me feel powerful, like my viewpoint and my desires matter. Generally, it's a fun thing for me. Sometimes, I want to just spend an evening parked in front of Tumblr or one of the Marvel films and do nothing all night except abandon myself to hard-core objectification mode and enjoy that warm, tight feeling it gives me in my chest.

I've also mentioned before, with no small degree of bemusement, how... stupid it can make me. Sometimes I have literally been so consumed with the beauty of a particular gentleman that I cannot think straight. It's like a cloud creeps into my brain, so slowly I don't notice it at first, but before I know it it's like my judgment has been fogged up. It sounds completely idiotic to say that, but I swear it sometimes happens and I feel like an absolute moron. It's like the worst stereotype of men, and here I am actually experiencing it. Most of the time it's not that big a deal-- I'm sure I've frustrated a friend or two with my occasional inability to hold a conversation after discovering a new screenshot of Captain America, but generally it hasn't really been a problem. I just sort of muddle through it and when it passes I move on.

But recently it's struck me just how much trouble this tendency in me can be. It's mostly been no problem because it usually only happens to people who aren't actually present, who I'm not interacting with in real life. But it can color my interactions with real person to an absurd degree. It makes me place a value on those people that they might not otherwise deserve-- what might otherwise not be appropriate. And when my judgment is already demonstrably less objective. That part of myself scares the hell out of me.

It takes me back to when I was obsessed with Alain. I just found him so attractive that I couldn't think straight around him. I mean, I was also eighteen and had never experienced feelings of romantic attachment to a real person before, so I had much worse sense of how to handle that situation. But because I found him so beautiful I made decisions as if he were a much better man that he was, as if it gave him a value he didn't really have. And this did not work out well for me.

I learned a ton from that awful experience and would never get into that mess ever again. But there's a small part of me that's really glad he's put on weight and doesn't have that raw beauty anymore. And I can feel that tendency in myself still. I have to watch myself really carefully to make sure it doesn't lead me to do things I'll regret. And I hate that shallowness in myself. I would do well to find the way to rip that part out of me. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the physical beauty of others, but it shouldn't have so much control over me.