The female gaze

I am straight, more or less, but I love looking at other women's bodies -- and not in the spirit of competition.

By Eileen Kelly

I look at women’s asses — and tits, to use another word I never actually utter, at least not when my mother is listening. I look at women’s thighs, too. Their ankles, their upper arms. Now that it’s winter, I miss the biker shorts, the halter tops, the skin-licking swirl of summer’s sun dresses. Still, there is the great indoors. And on the subway, sometimes, the coats come off.

Women do eye women, no surprise there. What has struck me is that looking at other women’s bodies is, for me, a habit as ingrained as tucking my hair behind my ears. It’s a tune I can’t get out of my head. When teenage girls with their cigarettes out mob past me on the sidewalk; when the weary cashier hands me my change folded into the receipt; when a friend shifts her weight as together we push playground swings — I realize I am doing it. It’s my machinery buzzing, and I can’t turn it off.

I suppose that suburban women eye suburban women — in the Wal-Mart checkout line, from the high roosts of their minivans. But in New York City there is a glut, there is an embarrassment, of women. You can’t get away from us. We are all over the place. There are, like, millions of us here, and most of us are walking the streets.

I am straight. More or less. This looking at women that I do isn’t sexual. I’m willing to accept the premise that sex simmers under everything I do, including looking at other women’s bodies. But this looking doesn’t feel sexy. And no, dear pigs, I’m not sizing up the other girls in fits of spite or self-loathing. I don’t believe that, in constantly looking, I am constantly rating my body against the bodies I see.

So what am I up to? I don’t do this to men. Yes, I will eye that fine park jogger who has just sprinted past. And when my friend’s husband leans toward me over dinner, I’ll notice the span of shoulders that his woolly sweater hides. But looking at men feels straightforwardly sexy. Images logged for later meditation. They have no content.

A woman’s body — in everything shy of a burqa, I guess — has a table of contents. At least, to me. Form and fashion play a part: The female body is shapely, and cashmere clings. But women’s bodies are not only more sticking-out-ish, more visible, than men’s bodies — they are more informative. They speak — and I listen.

I meet a friend I haven’t seen in a while, and in a glance begin to learn the answer to my first question: “How are you?” She’s getting so dumpy — something going on between her and her husband? One mother introduces me to another as we sit on the sandbox wall. “Hi, how are you?” Depressed, I think. Skinny, and the skin is slack. But on the sandpit’s far side? There’s a happy woman, a true hourglass. What would it be like to stroll around the city carrying such big, delicious curves? She is nursing. She is not. She has one kid too many; gravity is claiming her awfully early. She is toned to bloodcurdling perfection and has time and money to burn.

On the subway a young woman catches my eye, and I indulge discreetly in one of my ruder habits, anorexic-spotting. The neck is ropy, the outfit ladylike and empty, the face humorless. Fascinated, I have nearly followed a woman out at her stop and out of the station, wanting to see where this sad sister’s mania is taking her.

I suppose the idea that I know anything about these women from scrutinizing their bodies is arrogant. Take that chunky Latina, slumped in a corner love seat on this uptown train, complacently tolerating the attentions of her skinny lover. I think, she is proof of a divine hand in creation. I think, if she were with any of the white guys I know, she would call herself ugly. But what do I know about her, really? Every body I see — on the subway, in the street — I read in a language I learned at home. This language is historical, demographically determined, and peppered as any language is with racist tropes; I use it according to the quirks of my own screwed-up mind. It may be no more than a flattering illusion of mine that I am seeing her, not me.

After all, richest in meaning for me are the bodies of my friends. Brooklyn mothers, middle-aged. Women with bodies like mine. In their jeans and cross-trainers, their fleece tops and underwire bras, they look mythic to me. Maybe it’s because they are not young bodies, not the slim young female bodies that are used to sell us products and services. I guess I am surprised to reach middle age and find that the bodies of women my age do not look young, but are sexy. Even to more or less straight me.

My friends’ bodies are strong, with the solid haunches and broad backs that come from lugging double strollers up brownstone stoops. Age and motherhood give these women, in the realm of my private romance, the authority that comes with size. The breasts of these women are full of milk or else well-worn from years of clamorous nursing, and this seems to me a sexier notion than the Barbie-pristine breasts of teenage girls. For me, with my underground worship of the feminine principle, even a little sylph I know carries beneath her schlumpy jeans and blue hoodie a whiff of the demigoddess.

Demigoddess, demon. Is curiosity anything akin to love? I think it is, because it is so tiring. Girls, nannies, dykes, matrons, hags — all those lovely creatures to worry about. By the end of a crowded day, my irritating tic of empathy has sapped me. Do my neighbors, consciously or not, also register the bodies of friends and passersby as too much humanity, too much news? Do other women do this? Do men? And who is looking at me? I no longer know what someone eyeing me would hear.

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Being alone is not enough. I have to be alone and running.

By Eileen Kelly

Before I was a mother, I was an ultrarunner. I ran marathons, then back-to-back marathons, then a 60-kilometer race, then a couple of 50-milers, then, at last, a 100K (61.2 miles). Before I had kids, I worried that my ultrarunning was a sign I was unfit to be a mother. The loneliness of the long-distance runner has nothing on the oddball misanthropy of the long-, long-distance runner. But I was married, and I wanted kids, so I had one, a daughter, and two years later, a son.

Before I gave birth, everyone, including my childbirth educator, told me that ultrarunning was good preparation for the trials of giving birth. That was crap. I’ve hurt during an ultra, but I never found myself screaming Jesus-fuck, just kill me. But if ultrarunning did not train me for childbirth — my labors were sprints — the sport did, perhaps, prepare me for motherhood.

Mothering is, after all, an extreme sport. And I’ve learned from ultrarunning how to tackle a sport when I don’t have a lick of talent or skill. I am that astonishing athlete who can’t throw a Frisbee, catch a fly ball, complete a layup or beat her 4-year-old in a sprint to the mailbox. My sole athletic gift is the capacity to not stop running. I can run when I’m hungry, when I’m blistering, when I’m chafing, when I’ve fallen on asphalt and I’m bleeding from the knees. Of course I can be a mother; I already know how to go on when I’m psycho-sleepy. I know how to go on and on no matter how badly I have to pee. Would any mother be surprised to hear that an ultrarunner is that rare athlete whose performance often improves in middle age?

I had to take a break from ultrarunning to get my body in shape for breeding. (It’s hard to ovulate on a training schedule of 70 miles a week.) But recently I made my comeback, in a 50-kilometer race through the New York borough of Queens, which I finished in midpack glory. (I was supposed to run a six-hour race a few weeks later, but at the last minute — surprise! — there was no one to watch the kids.) For a bone-weary, sleep-starved mom to rise extra-early for the hours of training that ultrarunning requires might strike some as perverse. Yet for me, postpartum, the sport has more allure than ever before.

There’s my body. I loved my pregnant body and my nursing body, that whole full-moon-and-high-tide thing. But running, and running, I return to a sense of my body that I misplaced when I started having kids. It’s not that training gives me back the abs I could spin quarters on. I don’t even want that body back. I like the little jiggle of belly that will forever remind me of the pouch in which my babies grew. But running, and running, returns me to the feeling of being a body that is light-footed and tireless and strong. Running, I seem to travel in a child’s body, a girl’s body. Sometimes, hours later, when I’m shoving uphill a double stroller loaded with two kids and more bags than the Joads lugged to California, I’ll feel that girl in me shiver with life.

There’s solitude. I am a stay-at-home mother; my husband travels frequently on business overseas. The kids have sleep issues. They are also at the stage where they toddle after me like ducklings as I travel from room to room. If I rise, bleary, in the middle of the night to pee, I’m apt to find I have an audience of two. What are you doing, Mommy? Can I get the toilet paper? Can I flush? No, me! Me! Waaaah! At times, my desire to have no one speaking to me, looking at me or touching me can get nearly crazy. At those moments, being alone is not enough. I have to be alone and running.

To be blunt, I have to be running away. The truth is, I love to rise while it’s dark and my husband and kids are sleeping, slip on my running shoes, stretch and leave. I love indecently that moment when I step out of my building, hit the street and start running. And running. I travel into the park and out of the park, into and out of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods. Midwood, Borough Park, Flatbush, Kensington, Fort Green, Williamsburg, Bay Ridge, Park Slope. I study the buildings I pass: brownstone, townhouse, high-rise, decaying mansion. I could have that life. That life. That life, instead. I put distance between me and home. I start to gather speed.

No wonder I often return to my just-waking family, two or three hours later, carrying a guilt offering of muffins and scones.

My kids seem to sense the undercurrents of my sport. When I snap the bolt to our front door, they come tumbling to greet me with frantic joy. Satisfied, my daughter grabs a hunk of cranberry scone and saunters off, scattering crumbs. I lie on the kitchen floor to stretch, and my little son throws himself across my belly. He sucks his thumb. When I lift his pajama top to tickle his skin, I feel as though I’m saying, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. You know I’ll always come back.