A Girl...

See Here

I want to confess something.

I am an attention whore.

A very persnickety attention whore, but an attention whore nonetheless. I feel absolutely no pangs of guilt or shame in plastering pictures of myself on the Internet, and I dare say there's a downright dearth of modesty around here sometimes, although please note that I refrained from posting a marvelous picture Simon took of my hipbones at the beach last weekend, so I'm not entirely out of control. Although, that was less a product of modesty than of not wanting to be web porn, so let's just say we break even on that one.

As for the persnickety see:

1. While at a party in honor of someone else, I like to make a minor spectacle of myself. Maybe I'm the one running the stereo, maybe I'm the one freshening drinks, maybe I'm the one making that witty or hillarious or brilliant comment that everyone just happened to overhear (maybe because she said it kind of loud for the express purpose of being overheard). However, when it's my birthday and everyone is standing around staring at me, my natural reaction is to scream STOP STARING AT ME and then hide under a table.

2. I do not like catcalling, lip-licking, whistling, winking, or any other skeevy body language that can carry over a distance farther than the closeness required to have an actual conversation. I'm not saying this sort of thing happens to me often, because the truth, thank god, is that I've never ever ever been picked up anywhere ever. This does not mean, though, that I can't hate this kind of behavior. Propositioning me with your eyebrow will get you nowhere, bub, unless you are Simon, in which case, giddyup because you had me at the wink and whistle. However, if I'm out in public and looking particularly fetching and yet going completely unnoticed, I am very likely to swing my hips sensually as I strut to the bathroom, letting just a little bit of skin peek "accidentally" from between my shirt and jeans because that never fails to turn heads. LOOK AT ME! STOP LOOKING AT ME! LOOK AT ME!

Something that's stuck with me from college was a close reading I did in a critical theory class for my favorite college professor, Mr. CutieHotpantsSwoopyHair. We were examining the character traits of Lily Bart, the magnificently flawed heroine from the late great Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, in particular applying the scholarship of modern film theorists, specifically Laura Mulvey.

We talked about "the gaze" and how women are constantly trapped in the visual crosshairs of men, both in real life and also, especially, in film. Movies have perfected the art of piecemealing women's bodies into a smooth thigh here, a tendril curling under a pink earlobe there, completely controlling whether a woman is seen as a three-dimensional person with actual thoughts in her pretty little head or just a beautiful body laid out like a buffet (of course, mostly the latter.) Blah blah blah, I'm not really up on my scholarship these days, so I'll just stop there with the collegespeak, but the point is that Lily Bart was only able to define herself in relation to how she was seen by others. She couldn't walk down a street without questioning whether her parasol was at quite the right flirty angle, and when she sat down to rest by the side of the road, she was completely consumed with making sure her hands were placed just so and the light was curving around her features at the most attractive angle. (Again, I'm doing this from memory, so don't stone me if I'm getting the details wrong.)

So there we have Lily Bart, waiting to be seen, waiting to be observed, waiting to be defined by someone else, and the whole thing is so monumentally sad I need to refuel my womanly empowerment by watching Oprah and kicking some guy in the crotch (of his self-defense-class protective gear, of course). Lily Bart, we see, is nothing without a man to look at her, and that is why she dies penniless and alone and the aliens come to harvest her organs for extraterrestrial science. (Spoiler!)

Here's the thing, though: While "the gaze" traditionally put women at the mercy of men, in the right hands it can easily flip the power structure on its head, and that's how we get strippers who say they are the ones in control. BUT! That's not my point. My mind is wandery on this Friday afternoon. Apologies. My point is that there's something to be said for being seen, especially if "the gaze" is from your lovah. Hence why I picked a little fight with Simon this afternoon about how he never takes pictures of me whereas I can't seem to stop taking pictures of him. Hence why I love Simon's mirrored aviator glasses so much--they allow me to look at myself when no one else will.

But before you drown your sorrows in Oprah or find the nearest man crotch to kick on my behalf, I'm not saying that I need Simon (or anyone else, man or woman) to define me and give my life substance and meaning. (Although I've talked about the need to be "witnessed" before.) I just think it's nice to be noticed every now and then, and even better than just being noticed is having someone make their notice permanent and pronounced by snapping a photo of "the gaze" as it's happening. We've all heard "Take a picture, it'll last longer," and that's just what I'd like to do--preserve the moment when someone turned to me and then said to himself, "Well, will you look at that." When it is welcome and warranted, being objectified--made the honored subject of focus--can be a validating in a surprisingly fulfilling and healthy way. But only if I get veto power on the Bleener Eye shots.

May your weekend have none of the Heavy and Serious of this post, which shall immediately be taken into evidence as proof I'm working too hard.