For years, boys at school called me “Boog.” When I asked what they meant, they said that it was a character from the movie Open Season: “A nine hundred-pound bear,” they would say. So, naturally, I thought I was fat.  I developed an intense anxiety about eating in front of men that persists to this day.

I know many other women with the same fear. Women are taught to shrink. Physically, emotionally, even ideologically. We are praised for smallness—delicate features, a light footprint, a soft voice. We are expected to consume little and demand even less so that men have more room to expand. 

In case you’re curious, it turned out the nickname was never about my weight—it was about the hair on my body. I’m not sure which is worse, but the fundamental problem was the same either way:  I was nauseatingly afraid of being unfeminine.

I have since learned that trying to prove your femininity will shrink you to death by design. For a long time, I thought that if I could control how I was perceived, I could win. I imagined that by conforming to the expectations they set for me, I would unlock some version of femininity that would feel like power. But when all of those boys who made fun of me slid into my DMs later on (true story), I didn’t feel the satisfaction I thought I was supposed to—I felt worse. Did I conform to their gaze? Should I be pleased with myself for that? 

I believe choice feminism—the idea that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, or progresses feminism in some capacity—is a myth. I think the male gaze permeates women’s actions more than we’re even conscious of, and I do, uncomfortably, believe that giving into it contributes to the oppression of other women. I realize this when the makeup that I claim to wear “for myself” goes untouched on days that I don’t leave my apartment. The act of adorning myself makes me feel good, yes, but not in a vacuum. It feels good because it makes me think that men will find me more attractive (and those standards of attractiveness by which I judge myself didn’t fall from a coconut tree). 

Still, there is no force on Earth that can separate me from my MAKEUP FOREVER Artist Colour Pencil Longwear Lip Liner in the shade “Wherever Walnut.”  I love femininity, and I don’t think we should be at war with it. But I believe that there’s some freedom in recognizing the male gaze, the “ever-present watcher.” Maybe that’s the first step to figuring out which parts of our femininity actually belong to us.

I don’t have a solution. Some believe that overcoming the male gaze means gazing back—judging back, objectifying back. Others argue that we should only care about our own self-perception. But I think it’s human nature to see ourselves through the eyes of others. The question is, whose eyes will I choose to see myself through? 

When I find myself fixated on this question and terrorized by the “ever-present watcher,” I think about Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian writer, doctor, and radical feminist.

In Woman at Point Zero, Saadawi tells the story of Firdaus, a woman who searches for the warmth of her late mother in every woman she meets. Her last memory of her mother is from when she was a baby. She recalls struggling to learn to walk, feeling as if something was always pushing her over. The only thing that held her up was her mother’s gaze.

 “They were eyes that watched me,” she writes. “Even if I disappeared from their view, they could see me, and follow me wherever I went, so that if I faltered […], they would hold me up.”

As she searches for her mother, she finds her, to some extent, in every woman around her. Herein might lie the solution, I think—to realize that the gaze that steadies us, the one that truly sees us, has always belonged to other women.