All Eyes on Me

It doesn't take knowing me very long to know that I have a thing for extremely beautiful men. I've never been shy about that fact, and indulging that part of myself is something I really enjoy. Female gaze is my pet feminist issue, partially because I think it's a small thing that is a good indicator of a number of much larger, more important matters of respect towards women. An acknowledgement of female gaze is the acknowledgement of women as sexual beings with preferences, agency, and desires of their own, and do not exist solely for the needs of men. It's an equalizing thing, an indicator that women aren't so different from men after all-- we're all visual, we all physically objectify each other sometimes.

But also it's important to me because I feel it so strongly. I get A LOT of joy out of looking at men I find physically attractive, probably more than the average person. It makes me feel good to exercise my ability to be the subject rather than the object; it makes me feel powerful, like my viewpoint and my desires matter. Generally, it's a fun thing for me. Sometimes, I want to just spend an evening parked in front of Tumblr or one of the Marvel films and do nothing all night except abandon myself to hard-core objectification mode and enjoy that warm, tight feeling it gives me in my chest.

I've also mentioned before, with no small degree of bemusement, how... stupid it can make me. Sometimes I have literally been so consumed with the beauty of a particular gentleman that I cannot think straight. It's like a cloud creeps into my brain, so slowly I don't notice it at first, but before I know it it's like my judgment has been fogged up. It sounds completely idiotic to say that, but I swear it sometimes happens and I feel like an absolute moron. It's like the worst stereotype of men, and here I am actually experiencing it. Most of the time it's not that big a deal-- I'm sure I've frustrated a friend or two with my occasional inability to hold a conversation after discovering a new screenshot of Captain America, but generally it hasn't really been a problem. I just sort of muddle through it and when it passes I move on.

But recently it's struck me just how much trouble this tendency in me can be. It's mostly been no problem because it usually only happens to people who aren't actually present, who I'm not interacting with in real life. But it can color my interactions with real person to an absurd degree. It makes me place a value on those people that they might not otherwise deserve-- what might otherwise not be appropriate. And when my judgment is already demonstrably less objective. That part of myself scares the hell out of me.

It takes me back to when I was obsessed with Alain. I just found him so attractive that I couldn't think straight around him. I mean, I was also eighteen and had never experienced feelings of romantic attachment to a real person before, so I had much worse sense of how to handle that situation. But because I found him so beautiful I made decisions as if he were a much better man that he was, as if it gave him a value he didn't really have. And this did not work out well for me.

I learned a ton from that awful experience and would never get into that mess ever again. But there's a small part of me that's really glad he's put on weight and doesn't have that raw beauty anymore. And I can feel that tendency in myself still. I have to watch myself really carefully to make sure it doesn't lead me to do things I'll regret. And I hate that shallowness in myself. I would do well to find the way to rip that part out of me. There's nothing wrong with enjoying the physical beauty of others, but it shouldn't have so much control over me.

It's always been hard for me to believe that it's okay for me to want things.

I'm not sure why. It's certainly not something caused by my upbringing; for the most part my family has been very supportive and understanding of the things I needed and always endeavored to give me all of it. But for some reason, I have always felt like asking people for things was weak, demanding, selfish, and wrong, and needing anything was dangerous, because you don't have the right to expect anything, so you probably weren't going to get it.

This wasn't such a big deal before I came to college. In high school I was a much colder, more detached person, and nothing had all that much power to hurt me. It's not that I was particularly zen or evolved; I didn't have much investment in anything outside of myself, people included, which meant nothing external meant all that much either way. Totally natural, totally incidental, of no personal effort whatsoever. But I held it up as a point of pride, and constructed a lot of my image on it-- I am beautiful and untouchable, and I don't need anybody or anything. And I know for a fact that many of the boys I dated so casually and detachedly thought it was awesome how low-maintenance I was.
 
But, to paraphrase Sean Connery in First Knight, he who needs nothing loves nothing, and that was true of me. Nothing mattered all that much, which meant there was nothing that would hurt me to lose, but also nothing, and very few other than my family, that I really loved or cared about.

Thankfully, I've become a lot more human since high school. It means that things matter to me now, people matter to me now. But it also means that now I need things from people, and the cost of that is that a lot more has the power to hurt me, not least of which is my guilt over it. Maybe it's because I spent so much time telling myself that it was a thing that made me stronger and better that I didn't need anything, but nowadays I feel bad about myself when I do. And I had evidence that my low-maintenance qualities were considered to be part of my appeal. Weak, needy people wanted things. Nobody likes to constantly have to do things for somebody else-- I was more desirable because they wouldn't have to do anything for me. To ask is selfish and demanding, petty and dependent, and what makes me think that anyone owes me anything? What right do I have to ask?

A huge example of this was my (non-)relationship with Alain. He was the first person I ever had strong feelings for-- certainly not love, but still, strong feelings. Which made him pretty much the first person ever I really strongly desired to have a connection with. So, in my desperation to make him want to have a connection with me, I wanted to make myself seem appealing, low-maintenance, completely free of undesirable qualities. So I never asked him for anything, never made any demands on him, no matter what I was feeling. If I wanted attention that he didn't seem inclined to give, I never asked for any. If something he did hurt my feelings and made me feel uncared for, I let it go. This was partially because I never wanted to seem like a chore, and partially because of how afraid I was that even if I did ask, he wouldn't want to give it to me. And because I asked for nothing from me, he gave me nothing, until even our relationship became nothing, and I ached for it.

I recognize how unhealthy this is. My behaving like that contributed in large part to how damaging that situation was to me. But it's always hard to get over, even now that I associate with people who are much better for me. I'm still kind of afraid that if I suddenly start needing things, I'll lose the appeal of being so low-maintenance and come to be seen as a burden. And I'm definately afraid of having my needs rejected. I don't know why I expect to never get what I want, even from the people I love, whom I know love me. Or more specifically, why I expect them to never want to do anything for me. It's even caused problems for Jared and I when I said "It's okay," so many times when it wasn't that he didn't know any better than to keep on doing things that caused me pain. I know in my head that people who love you will want to make sure you have the things you need. But I'm afraid of testing that love and finding that it wasn't enough to want to take care of me after all. And finally, I'm afraid that if I get used to someone giving me things and doing things for me and helping me, what will happen to me if suddenly they're not there anymore? To have it and then have it taken away I'm afraid would break me. And I guess I worry that i I know it isn't healthy; God knows I've suffered for it in the past. But it's so hard to escape that desire for freedom from desire. I use to repeat that to myself, in my mind, and in my journal, again and again during low periods. I want to want nothing. If you don't want anything, you never get hurt when you don't get it. If nobody has to take care of you, nobody can get tired of taking care of you.

I am still working through this. But at least I understand the trouble I have.

So I screwed up my hip at rehearsal pretty badly yesterday. There's a scene where I get killed, and then they carry off my body. And at some point something must have gone wrong, 'cause after they set me down and I got up and walked around a little, my hip started feeling funny. Like, it was being stretched too tight every time I moved it. And it only got worse as rehearsal went on, so much so that any flexation of it or pressure on it set it off like hell. I was late and slow for most of my cues at the last dress rehearsal, not to mention a big sucky baby that everybody was clucking over. I mean, I was really grateful for the sympathy, they were all so sweet, but I didn't want it to be like, "Oh, let's have some huge pity-party for Phoebe." I hope to God nobody thought I was a crybaby, but I sure felt like one.

Except the boy insisted on saw me back to my dorm. It was a long walk, and he let me lean on him the whole way to take the weight off my right side, and tried to get my mind off the pain by telling me stories of all the strange injuries he's ever gotten in his life (which were widely assorted and multitudinous, I might add). And when we got to my building, it suddenly occurred to me that because I live on the third floor, there were a hell of a lot of steps to go up. Steps I really couldn't handle on my own.

So you know what that boy did, completely umprompted? He carried me. Six flights of stairs, three floors up, and all the way to my door. It was the sweetest, kindest thing ever.

And that almost made everything worth it.