First we have Nat. Which I assume is short for Natalie, because she doesn’t really look like a Natasha. She makes pottery and sells it at the farmers market in Ojai. She wears overalls and bites her cuticles badly. I know this because she posts closeup videos of her fingers carving shapes into vases and coffee mugs. Does she know that the chicken she cares for in the coop is named after me? That I helped build the house she lives in, carefully stepping over piles of sawdust and tools and nodding in approval as measurements got taped out?
Then we have Amelia, the six foot tall model with thick hair and messy fringe bangs. She has a rare condition called Distichiasis that gives you two sets of eyelashes, so it always looks like she’s batting her eyes at you. I watch her morning routine videos, dancing around her SoHo loft making oats in boxers and a see-through tank top. I imagine she always gets eight hours of sleep and never eats if she’s not hungry. She rides horses at her family’s estate in Connecticut on the weekends.
There’s Emma. Emma is a creative director. She wears loose fitting clothing, which makes it hard for me to make out her shape. I zoom in, looking for lines of her body so I can compare it to mine. She has a small button nose and hides behind long, straight, shiny blonde hair. Emma went private. She doesn’t like to be seen.
These are the women who are loved by men that have once loved me.
I’m at a house party in Venice holding a beer I won’t drink and dancing alongside a guy whose apartment I took over. “It’s so random,” he shouts into my ear over the music. “My friend Emma said she knows you.”
“What?” I say. My body is dancing and eyes scanning the room. “Emma who?”
“Emma Wilson.”
Oh shit.
“She said something about how her boyfriend’s ex moved into my apartment.” he said. “You guys dated the same guy apparently? Small world, huh!”
“Oh,” I say. “ I don’t know who that is. I’m going to go get another beer.”
We don’t just know each other. We know where each other lives.
I imagine all the ways she could have learned where I live. Was she screenshotting clues from my instagram stories? Zooming and cropping and matching up evidence and landscape markers? Did she see me walking home one afternoon and slowly follow me from her car? Did she catch me taking out the trash one day, with my hair in a topknot and the backs of my shoes folded under my heels?
We know each other. We watch each other. Through peepholes and burner accounts and car windows.
In many ways, these women hold up a mirror to ourselves. If a man has loved me, and has also loved her, what does her existence tell me about my own? Naturally, we compare ourselves. (I am saying we but what I mean is I. If you’re a woman and don’t do this, I applaud you but I also don’t believe you.)
I compare our homes, our friends, our weekends. I compare the way we do our hair, and the things we value. I examine their bodies, their beauty, their clothes. I follow their careers, their life updates, their vacations. I watch their engagement announcements and quiet breakups. They represent all the things I could be. They are all the things I am not.
And in some twisted way, these women are a part of me. Tied together by the thread of a man’s desire.
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?
Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.
You are your own voyeur.
I came across this Margaret Atwood quote last week and it stopped me dead in my tracks. In all the ways I want to evolve as a woman, are any of them just for me? In the way I want start doing my hair in the mornings because it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more put together like Emma. In the way I want to build wealth and grow my career, so I can buy a home like Amelia’s. In the way that I want to laugh a little louder and smile a little bigger the way Nat does.
When I put the kettle on and carefully do my skincare routine, who am I doing it for? When I unload the dishwasher and check my bank account, who holds the approval? Is it the invisible man on the couch, comparing the way I poured my kettle to the woman before me? Is it, as Margaret Atwood suggests, the ever-present watcher that lives inside my body?
As a woman, is it possible to truly live for ourselves?
xoxo
Lily
Damn 🤝