by Tod Davies
I really hated being an Object of Desire. This is supposed to be such a strange thing for a woman of whatever age to say; you're practically not even a woman if you admit to it. However, I suspect I'm not alone in this.
Mind you, being an Object of Desire is not the same as being desired, or being loved, for that matter. The key word in there is not 'desire', but 'object'. The little con trick involved in getting women to agree to becoming Objects of Desire is that the woman involved is promised admiration and triumph over the competition (which translates, in a lot of cases, into actual economic benefit, if not outright survival)…and this in exchange for giving up her subjecthood. If you're going to be an Object, you better give up all hope of being a Subject, for sure.
I knew there was something wrong with the whole set up from the beginning, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. My mother, a far greater beauty than I ever was, would get annoyed at me when I would either ignore, or mildly complain, about the many teenage boys wasting my teenage time. She thought I was wasting a natural resource, one of the few available to me as a girl. I wasn't sure what exactly was going on, but I found myself uneasily submitting to the idea that being an Object of Desire was a good thing, a desirable thing.
It started early, too, that object thing. When I was five, it seemed clear to me that my chief job was to cheer up all the men in my family, which I did by being rather disgustingly winsome and endlessly interested in whatever was going on in their lives. This brought me admiration…and safety. I still remember being a little disappointed in myself, but I couldn't exactly put my chubby little finger on what disappointed me…exactly.
Then there was a brief period of relief when I was an extremely ugly and gawky adolescent. I grew six inches in three months, one summer vacation. I wore thick glasses with ungainly frames. My hair was cut badly, and so was my school uniform. The boys in the school next door to ours didn't exactly look past me — my personality was a little too large for anyone my own age to do that — but they certainly didn't add to those looks any additional warmth of approval.
Somehow, that was kind of a relief. A mixed relief, since when they did look at the other girls warmly, I felt a stir of a weird mix of emotions: vanity. fear. competitiveness. Very uneasy.
I must've been a sight, something I was only vaguely aware of: half a foot too tall for my school uniform, bumping into things as I got used to my new height, peering through my glasses through too long bangs. But there was this sense of relief. As if this particular look was buying me time.
But time for what? Everything pointed to my eventual Destiny, which was to charm as many men as possible, and then get onto a blameless and triumphant life with a Chosen One. Even when I was twelve, this concept of Destiny filled me with uneasiness. I read every biography I could of women who had somehow escaped it. Sarah Bernhardt's story, in particular, fascinated me. I wistfully envied Bernhardt's position as an unwanted little Jewish bastard, daughter of an abusive prostitute. It seemed to me that she didn't have anything to charm anyone with, and no one, anyway, to charm. More important, she didn't have any implied duties — no one cared about her, so she didn't have to care back. So in some unknown way, I felt she was free.
I knew I wasn't. And furthermore, I knew I trapped myself. This discouraged me about myself, but I couldn't think of any way out of it. And certainly, there was no one outside of a book who would have even understood the terms of the problem.
I had all these duties. Furthermore I had all these vanities. That was what caught me and held me in the end. Those vanities.
When the eighth grade boys in the school next door handed out awards to the girls in ours, I won "Funniest Girl," and, worse, "Best Posture." This annoyed me so much that I took action. Exactly the action I shouldn't have taken if I didn't want to walk into a trap.
For our graduation dance, I ditched the glasses. I combed my hair in a better style. I wore a very pretty dress that not only fit, but flowed. And I still remember the savage satisfaction I felt at watching the agreed upon dreamiest boy in the eighth grade, thought to be the sole property of the dreamiest girl in our class, come eagerly toward me, elbowing another boy out of the way to ask me to dance. He had always ignored me up till then, except, of course, for laughing at my jokes. And actually, he ignored me then, too — I mean, ignored me, not the little insinuating charmer I was pretending to be. He paid her a flattering amount of attention, for the entire world — or at least, the entire eighth grade — to see.
The whole thing gave me a thoroughly proud feeling of having completed a consciously willed task. Of course, it wasn't till much later that I realized it was at that moment that the iron gates between me and the rest of my life slammed noiselessly shut…or that I was going to have to spend a lot of wasted time trying to pry them back open.
There were the boys in my high school years. The one who saw me at a party and rang every doorbell on my street, next day, trying to find someone who knew where I lived. Very romantic. And boring. Not that I ever let on he was boring. I mean, he would run away from school, and hitchhike, and hang out in bars downtown, and I LONGED to be able to do these things, but only got to do them through him, in exchange for being his Object of Desire.
Same with the next one. He deserted the most beautiful girl our high school had ever seen for me, which astonished me — I'm quite sure she'd never noticed me before that, as elegant and gorgeous and exotic as she was. Well, what could I do for the giver of a coup like that but compose my features into permanent admiration for him. An expert bicyclist! A monitor at peace marches! A gatherer of wild mushrooms! Though, to tell the truth, except for his terrifically enthusiastic lovemaking, and his really unusual skills as a cook (don't get me wrong, those were enough to keep the young girl that I was entertained most of the time), he was extremely boring, too. And wearing. All that looking at me gooey eyed as his Object of Desire rather missed the point, if the point was that I was supposed to be in there, too. But I didn't expect to be in there, too. Being that Object was much cooler than anything I actually was. If I didn't consciously reason it out, that was still the motive that obviously underlay all my rather hypocritical actions. I obediently said I loved him, though I'm not sure, looking back, how much I believed it myself. I tried to get out of the relationship what I wanted, which was freedom to get on with my own life and my own concerns. But both of these things were invisible to everyone around me, it seemed. And most of the time, more frighteningly, they were invisible to me, too.
When I look back at this period, I start by accusing myself of cowardice. Of not wanting to live my life alone. But when I think about it more deeply, when I look at it more closely, I think, no, the fault was a subtler one. The fault was not an unwillingness to be alone — for I knew I WAS always alone, and cold out there, even while I was shoveling on the manure to keep someone else warm. No. It wasn't that. Somewhere, somehow, I thought it was my duty to assuage other people's needs. That was the point of me. Not that point of me that I acknowledged, secretly, in my heart of hearts, the point which no one else seemed to see. The point of me on which everyone else seemed agreed was that Me was to take care of everyone else: to satisfy their need to be seen, to be understood, to be admired. That this was the point of Girls in General was made plain to me — all I had to do was look at my own intermittently rebellious mother and the bowed down shoulders of my paternal aunts; all I had to do was look at the position of my father and his brother. When that uncle took to calling me — I was about thirteen years old at the time –, drunkenly sobbing on my (virtual) shoulder about his miserable life and marriage, I was told by my parents, in no uncertain terms, that it was my duty to be supportive of him, to be kind. To be a prop.
I felt myself to have no choice, really. Still, there was something in me that rebelled. The way I managed both was, I do think, the way of cowardice.
These were the years of double entry bookkeeping. Years spent notching up an empty unsatisfying score, as the only recompense I got for what seemed like an endless sacrifice of my self. This many romantic (and not too serious) suicide attempts for love of me. This many women left for me. This many love letters written to me. This many gifts, propositions, marriage proposals. In sheer self defense against the volume of need all of this indicated, I went in for serial monogamy in a big way, warily using it as a way to keep most of the guys off me.
When I think of those boys — and later, men — it's not with much gratitude. In fact, what I feel most, I'm embarrassed to say, is a kind of visceral fury, like that of a tantrum throwing kid. "And where was I in all of this?" the little girl howls.
Of course the adult me, listening to that child, clucking at her with some sympathy, SHE knows it wasn't all the fault of the boys and the men. There were other strategies the younger me could have chosen, other means: I could have known myself better, could have found a way not to be trapped by vanity and a lingering doubt that I had any real value other than what I bestowed on others at their urgent request. No, the sin I really accuse my younger self of is not a lack of courage, but an excess of pride. Not even pride, which at least implies some noble belief in something. Simple vanity.
Selling my birthright for a load of pottage.
This took me years to get over, though get over it, I inevitably did. In my early forties, I thought how weird it was going to be to walk down a street and get no response from the men I passed. I thought I wasn't going to like it. Then I moved to a strange Northern England city where it happened just like that, abruptly, for whatever reason — on the streets, in the pub, in business meetings — I was a sexless being. There was no response at all. I cautiously investigated the reason for this, and discovered it was the same in places very foreign to me: the rural south of Spain. Japan. I wasn't a woman in any of those places, not in the way those places themselves defined Objects of Desire. I was more like a ghost, or a circus animal, or an alien being. And this, to my surprise, suited me just fine. It was as if I could cautiously breathe freely again. I was on stage in another way, sometimes a quite trying one, but the part I was playing was not that of an Object of Desire. And this gave me a certain taste of freedom. I became more and more impatient with that Object of Desire crap as a result.
I remember two particular incidents from this period. A man following me into a park in Mexico City, and my absolutely automatic fury as I rounded on him. My Spanish is terrible, but my body language, apparently, can be plenty terrifying — at least, judging from his quick retreat….which made me exhilarated for the rest of the day and taught me how to reclaim my own space from that endless landscape of Desire.
Then there was the last guy — a very nice guy, too — who called me his 'soulmate'. My automatic and wholly uncontrollable fury at this almost shocked me — I shot him down before I even realized what I'd done. The young girl inside me acted first. She said, loud and clear, and with great firmness: "That's it. That's the end of it. It all stops here."
And it did.
There is one place I should mention, where I like being an Object of Desire. It's private, not public. It involves a playful shift between being the Subject and the Object, an agreed upon term of alternating worship and enslavement, a creative conspiracy between two people only. Mostly, it involves being Myself and being understood to be Myself even when I play at being the Object. But as it's private, I'll say no more about it than that. No more than what a pleasure it is to mutually negotiate the boundaries of Subject and Object with one other person. But that is another story altogether.