The gaze, personhood, and gender

Sanders felt that his wholeness as a person was diminished through understanding the effects of his objectifying gaze. The thesis is essentially that his gaze, of lust and desire, is inseparable from his learning and consideration as to what the gaze does.

Sanders misreads De Beauvoir and the existential roots of the gaze and subject/object reading of feminism. When he says, “complicty, oppressor, bad faith: such terms yank us into a mortal realm unknown to goats,” he’s misunderstanding that a concept like “bad faith” is absolutely fundamental for Sartre and de Beauvoir to understand how both men and women reduce women to objects through play acting taught societal roles.

“Caught in the vortex of desire, we have to struggle to recall the wholeness of persons, including ourselves.”