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Though I began reading Scott Doyle’s “Clapping Girl” when I was, like its narrator, “up late and fog-eyed, peering into my computer screen”, I soon found myself falling out of sympathy and identification with the main character, for he uses the computer primarily as an extension of his gaze. However realistic this might be, at the risk of stating the obvious, this all-powerful  male gaze is simply something I cannot play along with.

The narrator is not looking at or watching porn but, rather, a clip of a concert from the 70s, and he quickly finds an appropriately gendered object for his gaze: “There’s this girl. There was then, too.” We get more details about these “girls” as the story goes on, but note what’s important enough about them to mention in the first of just nine paragraph. All we learn from the denotation is their gender (and their existence); connotations are slim here, too, and all about the narrator’s rather ill-defined feelings for them. Their individual characteristics are clearly not primary in his mind.

Soon after this weak introduction to the “girls”, we are given reason to believe that this will be just another tale in which a man treats two women as interchangeable and uses one to inspire his terribly important reminiscences of another. Of course, his recollections of the “then girl”, Deb, tell us little about her beyond his metaphorically weaponized feelings for her and how he and she behaved, as a unit, as foolish youth who failed to kiss (and fuck) because they thought they knew better than to give into passion.

It’s harsh to criticize a person (or a character) for remembering another simply in terms of their own feelings for and relationship with them; while one might like to see some effort to go beyond that towards understanding, it is arguable that one never can get beyond those bounds. What we see here, however, is that this is done only on the impetus of exchanging one woman for another who has fallen into a male gaze with an Internet-expanded range.

In fact, however, “the blonde girl in the video” is not only transformed into a signifier empty of all content except “female” but is then refilled, through the medium of this gaze, with the narrator’s ideas of what her life must be. We are told that she worries about her children, that “[s]he and her husband have less to say to one another in a quiet house. She finds herself crying sometimes, wondering whether anything will ever thrill her again.” She is given a family and a life situation only in order to make her a mirror for the male creating her. The author does not even give us the distance of a modal– a might to underscore that the narrator is speculating, a must to show that he is deluding himself. No, in the simple present tense, what the narrator thinks this woman’s life has become is indistinguishable from what it really is.

After creating her, he takes out his frustrations with his life on her– or at least he wants to. He wants to shake her. He wants to tell her to live differently, but how can he? How can he tell someone not to be what he made them? He shouldn’t be able to, but people do it all the time. Though he expresses it as a wish, he does, too: by speaking this narrative, he sends a message to all “girls” who happen upon it as to what they should do.

Most tellingly, in the end, he asks the “the blonde girl in the video” why she is still in the video instead of following the sadness “tugging at” her. The sadness would seem to be merely his own self-pity and only reaches her at all through the medium of the gaze. It is the same thing that he tells her is “telling you where in the world you belong and to whom.”

I suppose all this is a realistic portrayal of the power a certain type of man believes he has or should have, yet I can’t help but wish that in the end the girl came out of the screen and told him about her wild, passionate life in which she belonged to no one and only with those whom she chose and who knew, at the very least, her name.

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