A while ago, I wrote about how the term “the male gaze” is frequently used incorrectly to describe anything that men find attractive, including individual heterosexual women attempting to attract a partner. The correct usage of the term is that media (including media not intended to be sexually arousing) is created with the assumption that heterosexual men and their desires are the default, and women (sex objects) must be beautiful to justify their existence, no matter the context.
This might sound like a wacky woke feminist conspiracy theory, until you see the way people (including, I should point out, women themselves, because they are not immune!) have been talking about the pop star, Audrey Hobert, who has committed the egregious sin of failing to be pretty enough (in their opinion, anyway) to justify being seen.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about pop musicians, or really any celebrities at all, but a few weeks ago I was introduced to Audrey Hobert via a clip of a music video for her song, “Bowling Alley,” on Twitter. The main reason I saw it at all was because someone was complaining about it sucking, about her being cringe, and most importantly, about her being too unattractive to have the audacity to appear on our feeds (like, cool it buddy, I saw a literal open anus on my feed the other day.) And, thanks to a clip of Hobert’s Tiny Desk performance, she has been the trending topic now for several days, specifically for being so unspeakably ugly that people cannot believe she is being “forced” on them, via the videos they keep clicking and engaging with.
In case you’re wondering, this is the woman who we are supposed to believe is our modern-day Quasimodo:
If you’re looking at her and thinking, “Uh…isn’t she just a normal, if not pretty cute, young woman?” you would be correct! But from the looks of Twitter—far beyond the usual suspects of groypers and open woman-haters, who are actually pretty absent from discussions of pop singers—you’d think she was the subject of a documentary about the bravery of living with an ass for a face:
The (fairly ridiculous) looks-based critiques about Audrey Hobert have been happening for ages now, but this particular round of discourse was kicked off by this tweet by an “anti-bullying advocate” which says bluntly what many others are saying less directly: female creatives, no matter what their art form, must look like Instagram models to earn the right to be seen.
