@Lance. The short version is never going to do a short version of the male gaze justice because I'm going to focus on my bits.
When a woman looks out of her eyes she sees a world constructed not-for-her. The constructed world tells her what she is allowed and it's very narrowly what-men-want. It's like looking into a padded cell. This is the world you have been given and there's a universe of controllers ready to control your behavior. As a man you have some strictures, but for women it's a vast minefield.
Much of that world is constructed visibly, but men can't see it because they are inside their male gaze and it looks normal to them, 'natural'. Many of the examples you would have encountered on my wall. Women are hairless. Women can be told what to wear. Women can be paid less for the same work. Jobs become 'women's work'. Women should smell like flowers. Women don't have maternity support in the workplace. These are constructions given weight by our deviation from the normal (men), and emphasized and accentuated, and highlighted, and enforced, and backlashed, and violenced, to protect how men see the world. The man with the money and power has the floor. For women, who have no money and no power that's an awful lot of men that have to be appeased.
My mother, as amazing as she was, tried her best to teach me appeasement methods, while every uncle and male friend was trying to get me to acquiesce. (They never succeeded because I had learned some very unladylike aggressive and tantrummy behaviour.) So I cherished my unladylike behaviour and eschewed what Mommy was teaching me. This made me very unpopular with the boys. It separated my gaze.
Women look through the eyes of men, women in India bound their children's feet for a hundred years after the British influenced FootBinding to be outlawed, because women know that without that broken foot or with that clitoris that girlchild has no currency in the world. My mother wanted me to find a husband and have children and she knew what price I had to pay. It's an economy that you have to buy into, and you have the least currency. Women are paid less and fat women are paid less at the workplace and at home. Here in the West our FootBinding is MindBinding.
And because we see with the male gaze many of us think it is normal to do so. And some don't. It's dated, but here is an illustrative witty piece called If Men Could Menstruate.
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