The Girl Watcher: Celebrating a Man's Right to Look in the Post-war USA

Abstract

From the 1950s to 1970s, the practice of ‘girl-watching’ swept the USA. First appearing in The Girl Watcher's Guide in 1954, the girl watcher was understood to be a middle-class, white, heterosexual man whose favourite ‘pastime’ was looking at women in public. While many Americans had denounced white men's ogling or leering as an insult in the early 1900s, mid-century representations of girl-watching depicted white men's furtive looking instead as a harmless pursuit. The girl-watching fad thus marked a shift in the way Americans thought about men's public glances: it granted white, middle-class men the right to look at women in public and normalised a form of sexualised looking that today is often classified as sexual harassment.