Hungry Eyes by Anonymous

Hungry Eyes

By Anonymous | Graphics by Geegee Abernethy

Behold the ruins of a millennial entombed! Clothing is strewn in collapsed heaps across her floor – invariably clean, because for what reason would she go outside to dirty them? – adding another layer of carpet to carpet. Blood can be found spattered across soiled bedsheets; the violent aftermath of open eczema wounds and illexecuted damage control over her menstruation.

Surveying this devastation are her keepers: three stuffed toy animals perched atop her dressing mirror, whose plush bodies are grotesquely squished together to circumvent toppling-down into dusty oblivion. Together, they are patchwork chimera. Their six eyes collectively watch her as she watches herself in the dirty glass. She squats, shrugging off ladylike propriety in the presupposed privacy of her own room, and examines the unflattering creases that line the sides of her belly. She can hardly make out her face through the grime – she leans in closer. The Big Three tower overhead, looking down upon her. She resists the urge to knock them off.

Her younger sister had placed them there as a comfort. They are relics of their shared girlhoods, unearthed from the cardboard boxes that had neatly packaged and transported their lives across the Tasman Sea a decade ago. Then, high-pitched voices were used to animate and anthropomorphise them into familiar companions. Now, they are silent. Their vantage point enables surveillance of everything within the room, vanquishing prospective nightmares when she is at her most vulnerable – with her eyes closed. In childhood, there is safety in being watched.

*

The pandemic has hurtled me across spacetime. The blank white walls of my bedroom – effaced from any temporal markers aside from the constant shifting of light outside, weakly streaming in through a glazed window – do nothing to moor me to the present. I am atemporal, tenseless. To rectify this, I subconsciously gravitate towards the past; safety can be found in regression and repetition. There’s a familiar antidote to stress in the 21st century – the compulsive consumption of ‘comfort’ media, preferably from the 90s and early 00s.

With a few clicks, it is May 28, 2004 again. Dylan Moran is onstage again. He’s performing his Monster stand-up comedy routine in Vicar Street, Dublin again. I delight, witnessing this living picture of ornate Irish shambles in his element; untucked baby-blue button-up, crazed black curls, lightly-slurred speech, cigarette lit and insouciantly woven around in dissent of local ordinances. He’s pissed and brilliant, defiant and unorthodox- -I’m half in love already.

In one of his bits, he gripes about technology, linking our modern fascination and dependence upon it with our attention-seeking behaviour as toddlers, when we begged our parents to look! as we did miracles with no hands! With age, this need to be seen was transferred to religion as we (mostly referring to the West) found comfort in the thought of an omniscient deity, especially against the sobering inevitability of death. But, with the death of religion sometime in the 20th century, we instead turned to technology and social media for voluntary surveillance, inviting that invisible gaze to confirm that yes, we are here and exist and, in turn, gaze back.

Because that’s the thing with the Internet. Tunnelling through hyperlinks and YouTube wormholes, you inevitably find yourself in virtual freefall – becoming a pair of hungry eyes, unbodied, with an all-encompassing gaze diffracted across any and all metaphysical temporal and spatial boundaries. Your corporeality is an afterthought, interrupted by external factors; your roommate barging in to remind you to take the trash out already, for fuck’s sake (holy shit, is it already past 6pm?); your grumbling stomach; your alarm clock buzzing, spiking your blood with the rush of impending deadlines. Insatiable for the new, you blankly absorb information, jumping from hyperfixation to hyperfixation – taking bits and pieces from everywhere until you’re some Frankensteinian assemblage of subcultures and trends.

As a millennial, my identity has been forged from the blasted ruins of consumerism, surviving past their obsolescence dates through me. Peering into the magic mirror of technology, I become a mirror myself, reflecting within myself the reflection of thousands.

Under the covers, the fingertips of my right hand drift from my forehead to my belly, and then to my left and right shoulders before clasping together in the centre of my chest. It’s silent with the coming of midnight, save for the cheery chorus of my parents’ voices, remembered in the still darkness from when I’d kissed them goodnight a few hours ago: don’t forget to pray!

In primary school, where I first learned to do it, I was plagued with anxiety. Dumbing down centuries of historical and theological complexity for a classroom of five-year olds, my Year One teacher simply told us that the sign of the cross, symbolically beginning and ending prayer, was a way to send secret messages to God. But, I privately worried, what if I neglected to cross myself a second time? Like a phone call I forgot to end, would God then be able to eavesdrop on everything I was thinking: the good, the bad … the dirty? With age, these childhood fears eased with the realisation that these hand-motions were merely that; ritualistic, formal, symbolic. God was watching regardless. The thought both terrified and comforted me.

In adulthood, I learn to use those same hands to worship my own body. Perhaps, if I were someone else, I could make this sexy; but, in truth, masturbation in lockdown has become as rote as nightly prayer. It harkened back to the blur of VCE, when I’d brought myself to orgasm nearly twice a day as a stress-coping mechanism. My mind, racing ahead, could only be halted by my body — orgasm was my failsafe biological off switch. Sometimes it was pleasurable, but most of the time, I sought release for what came afterward (not including myself): blissful sleep.

Tonight, as I slip my underwear down my legs and position my hands, my mind drifts. As my gaze turns to Moran … I hesitate. Almost out of courtesy, I pull the bed sheets to cover my face and redirect my mind’s-eye-turned video-player to Bernard Black (a character he played in a sitcom), and later, to disembodied appendages (lanky and pale) and a shock of black curls, attached to a face I was careful not to peer too closely at. My conservative Catholic upbringing has brought about an internalised reversal of dogma; alone in bed, I think of flesh made word, of earthly desire transmuted into the fictional, the abstract. Perhaps this was stupid. It was certainly at odds with what I’d heard from a British podcaster, who prided himself on being a ‘true’ man of the people. On the subject of OnlyFans, he’d declared that there was nothing stopping him from jacking off to pictures of hot girls on Instagram for free – it was a God-given right. The moral line here is blurry; after all, the women in question posted these sexy pics of their own volition, in exchange for currency. But at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that his commentary indicated an entitlement to women’s bodies that fed into rape culture and, more nefariously, manifested into revenge porn, or worse.

From my own point of view, I knew how startling and invasive the ‘male gaze’ felt when turned towards myself; did the same rules apply for women looking outward? Wasn’t consciously thinking of a person (a celeb, or worse, someone you actually knew) to bring yourself to orgasm an invasion of privacy? Objectification, as you thought of their face, their hands, their imagined body underneath their clothes? How did consent function here? Was it acceptable to fantasise about someone you knew if the sexual attraction was reciprocated? (But, at that point, why not then progress to actual fucking?) Or, did it simply not matter – was it foolish to ascribe real moral principles to the unreal world of fantasy? I’d only been able to pose these questions to my closest friends on nights out; otherwise, it was something I pondered privately over again and again. Half-lucid, I once asked myself: did Marx have a Masturbation Manifesto somewhere?

Consulting arts and culture where religion and education had failed me, I toyed with the thought of deliberately inviting the ‘gaze’ and redirecting my own feminised version outward as a form of empowerment. After all, this was the solution espoused in all the feminist novels and films I’d studied during my arts degree, ranging from the fin de siècle in Europe to the Sexual Revolution of the 60s. The titular character of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2013) is my most recent prospective role-model in the unapologetic, startlingly frank way she spoke about and broached the taboo of female masturbation. In particular, her conception of the thought of being masturbated to as thrilling, of someone desiring your body as an ultimately flattering end-point, transfixed me. It was, true to the expression, liberating.

I discovered some truth to what she said a few days after watching the stage play. Venturing outside the house for the first time in weeks, I was braless and garbed in baggy sweatpants under the sterile lights of the supermarket; my eyebrows messily drawn on as an afterthought. Perhaps it was my libido talking, but, despite being so ‘unpresentable’, I felt more eyes upon me and relished in it; checking out both my groceries and the people (mostly men) looking at me. It was a mutual recognition and in these shared glances, I saw a shared appreciation of the sight of actual human beings. Maybe it was for that reason that we all decided not to be too picky in our window shopping this time.

But even this had its limitations. Fleabag’s compulsion towards sex is inevitably revealed to be a distraction from her own personal grief, and the concept of sexual liberation, including the female gaze, seemed offlimits to me; an exclusively white feminist fantasy. Fleabag, after all, was white, middle-class, cisgendered and skinny — conventionally attractive and independent. While I didn’t think myself hideous, I was first and foremost aware of the imagined weight of hundreds of eyes, spider-like, on me as a consequence of my sheltered Asian upbringing: of my parents (who I lived with), my stuffed toys and the faces on the posters in my bedroom (my supposedly private space), the unblinking lens atop my laptop screen, and of God inside my head.

As Melbourne enters its sixth month of lockdown, the point to this pontification seems further and further away. I wonder how much longer I can hold out before I turn cannibal, violating my own principles due to a lack of sustenance in the face of my own unending hunger. The alternative looks more and more ridiculous under a growing cynicism and self-scrutiny: am I to wait, like some maiden in an ivory tower, for a partner to enact my fantasies in the flesh? I close my eyes. Maybe I’ll have an answer in the morning.