Lili Loofbourow, “The Male Glance”

If we were less busy celebrating our perfect vision, we might notice that under the mask we spotted there may lurk a rather interesting and even intentional subjectivity which—in addition to the usual universal human things we all share—has been trained from birth to constantly consider and craft its own performance from a third-person perspective. In other words, women—in addition to being faces whose deceptions we seek to expose, because they are that too—are walking around with the usual amount of self-awareness and a few meta layers to boot. There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos.

It generally goes unsung. When a woman is too overt about her performativity in a private context, she’s not so much iconoclastic and brilliant as manipulative and crazy. In a public context, she’s an attention-whore.

Lili Loofbourow, “The Male Glance”