Nobody sat your grandfather down and taught him how to look at women.

The camera taught him. Then the war did, then the pageants, then the magazines, then the screen in his pocket. A hundred years of commercial decisions — none of them a conspiracy, all of them profitable — built a training system so complete that the men inside it can’t see it. It just looks like reality.

I’m a man. Which means I’m a product of that system. I’ve spent years reverse-engineering it — the film history, the wartime pin-up program, the pageant scoreboards, the advertising grammar, the algorithm that finishes the job — not to excuse what it produces, but to document how it was built. You can’t dismantle machinery you can’t see.

Every week, one essay traces one piece of the machine. Primary sources, real receipts, no lectures about how you should feel. You’ll recognize things. Some of them will be things you’ve done, or had done to you.

There’s also a novel coming — set in a small Minnesota town where a group of women decide to stop describing the machinery and start running it in reverse. More on that when it’s time.

— Dorian Hale