How Does the Male Gaze Impact Female Friendships?

Many of us can’t help but fall for the trap of the Prettiest Girl in the Room game. At some point during my tween years, I learned to play in my head to entertain myself during class. I’d assess upon entry: Who is the prettiest girl in the room, what’s the pecking order, and where do I fall?

I rarely found myself anywhere close to the top of my own ranking. Amongst friends, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful I found them in comparison to myself. Even in our awkward years, I knew my friends to have a breadth of beauty. No one knows the beauty of our friends like we do. The way that their nose curves is beautiful, and the shape that their half-used lipstick takes on after a month of use is fascinatingly different from ours. The way that they pronounce their S’s is swanlike, sharper than ours. And, conversely, no one quite looks at us like our friends do.

What we admire in our friends most is often what makes us unfathomably distinct from one another, and their beauty invokes not jealousy but an incredible sense of sisterly admiration; to us, our friends are beautiful beyond belief.

Other girls seemed to have it down. It happened slowly and then all at once—one by one, my friends gained an intangible but apparent air which painted them in a gorgeous shade of desire. They knew the necessary contortions for a flirting smile, how to switch on a certain look that made boys hold the door open. It began to happen everywhere too. Standing in line for the Gravitron at the Labor Day Fair where the boys had dibs on my friends, swimming in the public pool where the life guard wanted their numbers, but not mine.

What I felt was not jealousy, but instead defeat. I began to believe that beauty was a fact of nature, that it was something intrinsic and essential, meant for some and not others. I could always change jobs and cities, buy new blush, talk raspier, talk less, lose weight, be flirtier, get breast implants, and wear a sundress. But I was born with the face of my lifetime, and you were, too. So I stopped playing Prettiest Girl in the Room. I asked a guy friend for help. How long did it take for him to figure out whether or not he was interested in a girl? He said somewhere around two seconds.

So, I too learned how to paint myself in shades of desire for my two seconds, to crack a juicy smile, to make entertaining conversation, and eventually to sit through hourlong camera roll tours to coax a boy out of hesitation like a stray cat from a boxwood shrub.

I began to find myself on the other side of the wall of male desire. But as Lorde sings in “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” you can outgrow your awkward years, but don’t you still “Remember all the hurt you would feel when you weren't desired?” I have been the girl ditched, crouched in a suburban basement with no cell reception while I wait for my friend. And I have been the girl ditching, a boy’s arm around my waist, the moon made more beautiful for it.

I do remember all the hurt I felt when I wasn’t desired, and yet, my memory of the hurt was not enough to be the friend I wish I had in the past. It’s hard to ask our friends not to leave us behind, and it’s hard to say no to sexual and romantic validation.

It’s a conversation that most of us never have. It’s not so much an issue of beauty disparity as it is one of male attention disparity. You would never rate and compare your friends on a scale from one to ten based on their two second impressions. Imagine your closest friends reduced to a two second performance, all of their depth flattened and condensed, a their pearlescent warmth reduced to rough contours of hip and flesh and blush, glassy teeth under sticky lip gloss, a floating face above a set of collarbones.

The mere idea of your closest friends having their two seconds is surreal. Their beautiful bones in a blue life vest and bikini blur in the distance in a raft down the Delaware. Their swan-necked S’s as a shout in a freshman bar over a loud din. Their perfume, tuberose redolent of curled hair and drives to the shore, as a singular breath in passing.

The the two second look is not a modern phenomenon. Men have been looking at women since the beginning of humankind and vice versa—sexual attraction and beauty’s relationship to the dynamics of power are central questions throughout art history, literature, and the human condition. It seems it’s only natural. In Pride in Prejudice, this disparity is addressed by Charlotte, who says, “I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects.…And I’m frightened. So don’t judge me, Lizzie. Don’t you dare judge me.” And on TikTok, it’s addressed perhaps more humorously by @jayrscottyy who said, “I ain't never seen two pretty best friends. It's always one of them gotta be ugly.”

This isn’t to say though that the issue should not be broached, addressed, or verbalized. Part of the reason we still struggle to discuss beauty between our friends is because our vocabulary is so black and white—hot or not, pretty or ugly. Our vanity and fear of hurting one another get in the way. We aren’t friends with one another because we find each other physically attractive, but the issue of attention disparity is aggravated by our digital age obsessed with visual image. Each of us is flattened to less than two seconds; in the eyes of the world, we become no more than the blink of an eye on a screen.

I consult my close friend Sophia about this, who is very beautiful, but this of course is besides the point. She calls me from Dartmouth to explain a phenomenon taking place in her friend group. They call it Pretty Time—she and her friends stop conversations to call out when one of them has an air about them, not a shade of desire but one of warm beauty. It is ephemeral and only visible to those close to the one who possesses it. They each acknowledge it and then continue on gossiping. By acknowledging our friends’ beauty outside of a romantic or sexual context, we express an appreciation that doesn’t have to be gushing, sappy, or forced.

I’ve been bad at appreciating the beauty of my friends, but I think that there’s something to be said about making an effort. I’ve ditched my friends for boys and had my fun, and to those friends: I fell for the trick of Prettiest Girl in the Room. I wanted to know if even I wasn’t the Prettiest, I could still be wanted. And for that, I am sorry.

Now that I’ve moved into college, I find myself playing again, toeing a careful line. It’s not necessarily Prettiest Girl in the Room, but sometimes it’s Prettiest Girl in the Frat Party Bathroom or in 20th Century Art History, where my professor says that many male artists believed that the world’s central conflict was the issue of woman. I tell my roommate that she’s having Pretty Time. I begin to believe that Freud could have been right—the woman is the dark continent, and she’s very beautiful.

POSTSCRIPT

A special thanks to Sophia Sun and Valerie Bremm. Sophia is the most beautiful sounding board and quote-tress I could have ever asked for. Sophia, you’re having Pretty Time. And to Valerie, there is beauty in everything you do, from the way you spray perfume to the way you play the piano. You’re a stunner.