I just read a horribly misogynistic piece called something like “How To Tell if She’s a Slut” (no, I’m not linking. I don’t want to give him the clicks. I regret that I clicked myself) and in the comments (when will I learn to never read the comments?!) someone referenced the “thousand cock stare”. This is not the first time I have heard this phrase. The first time I heard it was in an XOJane piece about a woman whose OkCupid profile inspired a forum thread devoted to trashing her. Since then I’ve seen it pop up here and there (granted usually among MRA-y types who think women are intrinsically horrible, but still) and while it hasn’t caught on to the degree of, say, “He’s just not that into you” it seems to be turning into a thing.

The expression always makes me picture something like this- I know it’s not right.

I got to thinking about what it even means. Clearly a play on the “thousand yard stare” (“a phrase coined to describe the limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier”) which is a symptom of PTSD. (BTW, as of February the suicide rate among US vets and active duty military was 22 people a day – almost one every hour. I’m going to go ahead and say it: if you think that likening women who you disapprove of to traumatized soldiers is funny, you are a horrible human being ) The big question is, what does dealing with multiple cocks in a lifetime do to a woman’s face? I don’t know but according the internet, you can easily spot the thousand cock stare and it gets worse WITH EVERY COCK A WOMAN SEES!!! Zut Alors!¹

Suddenly I was inspired to write something- a spoof of The Picture of Dorian Gray wherein which a lovely young woman takes a picture of herself in all her glory (a selfie, if you will- let’s be modern about it) and then proceeds to do a lot of dating and have lots of sex- really tear some shit up. After each encounter her lovely face remains the same but the picture gets more and more (and, it is key to the spoof-y-ness that it always be described this way) cock-y. I’m not sure what that would look like, cocks protruding off the face? full-on mutation into a rooster? I don’t know

I was finding myself terribly amusing and went to tweet about this (like you do). Trying to get my tweet down to 140 characters I got very adamant about keeping my punchline – “the face would get more cock-y” I said it over and over again to myself. “The face would get more cock-y!” “The face would get more cock-y”

The face would get more cocky.

Then I figured out the thousand cock stare.

I’ll tell you what I figured out in a minute but first let’s talk about something else. The idea that women should be sexually conservative, if not completely innocent is fairly pervasive. Even as we have become liberated it has stuck around. Some of my go-to pop-culture examples are Samantha from Sex in the City who was repeatedly and openly shamed for being the one in the group of friends who had a lot of sex without looking for love, Peggy’s gyno visit in the first episode of Mad Men, this absurd (and thankfully not popular) film from a few years back that was entirely based on the premise of a woman becoming unmarriable if she hit a certain number of sexual partners and basically any time anyone discusses Taylor Swift’s love life ever.

Society has long valued a woman’s “purity” and, in many cultures virginity is still the expectation among unmarried women. Even as we have become more sexually liberated this idea held strong that there was a line one could cross, a point of no return. The message was clear- get around too much and you’ll be “ruined”. You’ll feel empty and sad and be riddled with disease.  In recent years we’ve gotten a bit clearer on the fact that that is simply not the case (Hate me if you must but I really do think SATC had a lot to do with that) and more and more “he’s a stud, she’s a slut” is falling by the wayside. You hear less and less about the “used up” woman who no one wants (unless you take an abstinence only sex-ed class, according to which our heroine’s selfie would slowly morph into a chewed piece of gum)  We live in a day and age where more and more women are owning their sexuality, pursuing their pleasure and as far as many people are concerned fucking “like men” Women are asserting themselves as sexually confident beings.

That’s what the alleged “thousand cock stare” is. Sexual confidence.²

It’s this confidence that these men are seeing. They are seeing women who know what they want. Women who do not suffer fools. Women who know how their bodies work and expect pleasure from their sexual experiences. Women who don’t need to be led, coaxed, cajoled or convinced into sex. Women who won’t let them have all the control.

They are seeing women who have enough experience to maybe compare them to others. They are seeing a situation where maybe they don’t measure up.

“She has that thousand cock stare” looks to me like short hand for “she scares me”

What’s fascinating though is that it has taken this fear and combined it with old-fashioned slut-shaming/purity valuing in a (ostensibly) quantifiable way. It says “We’re on board with this sexual liberation thing up to a point but pass that point and you will be ruined. No one wants a girl with the dreaded Thousand Cock Stare” In the end though it’s really just “I’m on board with this liberation thing as long as it means the things I want it to mean”

The Thousand Cock Stare is a (profoundly stupid) part of a grand tradition of stripping women of any newfound power or confidence with the time honored tools of shame and intimidation –  “No one will want you if you act like that“.  Be it by burning witches, calling suffragettes manly and unloveable³, referring to feminists as nazis, cracking “go make me a sammich” jokes when women in power speak, finding new and creative ways to call women with sexual agency (and often just women in general) sluts, whores, skanks, hussies, floozies and tramps or just announcing intangibles “She’s got that Thousand Cock Stare” it’s all the same game.

I keep thinking of that slogan that we’ve all seen:

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”

Then I think of something I saw recently on the Project Unbreakable tumblr- this photo– a rape survivor holding up a poster board with a quote from her attacker on it (Project Unbreakable is incredibly moving- check it out) that read:

“Stop pretending  that you are a human being”

What I’m realizing is that all of this, from the witches to the Thousand Cock Stare is rooted in the notion that women are inherently entitled to less. Less control, less agency, less success, less sex. And when they start finding their way to more something has gone wrong in the system and they must be told that they are becoming the “wrong” kind of woman. They need to be told to stop pretending like they are human beings.

“Look at her, all knowing what she wants from a sexual partner and feeling entitled to make her own decisions-  she thinks she’s people!!!”

It’s fascinating to me that this is still going on- cut off the head of one and another grows in its place. So, what do we do? This- what we’re doing right now. Know it when you see it. Identify it. Name it. Call it out as the bullshit it is and then go about your merry way. Because, honestly, we’ll probably never get rid of this crap but we can take away its power.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a parody story to write and several hundred cocks to see. Research, you know. 😉

¹Five years of french and I can say that, identify a dog and order a sandwich. That is all.

²Which does not have  specific look, by the way.

³They were not even remotely subtle about this with the suffragettes- they really said “no one loves you“