LOL, a monologue from an unfinished play based on the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, by Théophile Gautier, that I attempted to write in my early twenties as my imagined continuation of the eponymous heroine’s story. The prose is purple, as is my wont (sorry not sorry) and ensconced in my imagined awareness of a woman’s midlife. Now that I’m there myself, I don’t think it’s incorrect.

A Woman Mid-Sentence, Unapologetically Occupying Space

Oh, my love, my darling libertine. You, who see flesh as art, who delight in the unburdened gaze, who want to peel back the layers of shame and let the body stand, unguarded, unrepentant. I admire it, I do. But let’s talk about the body—my body, the body of women who have been burned by the fire of years, the body that has carried hunger and wisdom in equal measure.

By middle age, I would venture to guess—though guessing isn’t quite necessary, because I know—that most women, myself included, have had our fair share of taking up space in the arena of sexual allure and physical beauty. We have been appraised, devoured, sanctified, and dismissed. We have played the muse, the siren, the untouchable, the too-easily-touched. We have felt the heat of a hundred eyes singeing their hunger into us before we even knew what to do with such power.

Whether or not we ever truly felt empowered by it is another matter entirely. Because beauty, my love, is no anodyne adornment—it is a gauntlet to be weaponized, leveraged, feared, and controlled. It is an inheritance that is not always kind…indeed, often cursed.

And yet, paradoxically, I would argue that a woman only inhabits the full, staggering magnitude of her sexual allure when she has ripened beyond the simple currency of youth; when she has developed enough confidence and self-awareness to love herself not as an object but as a force of nature; when she no longer contorts herself into currencies of desirability, but stands in that in her which is undeniable and blooms through her skin.

So let me tell you what chafes, beloved provocateur. It is not the suggestion that I show up somewhere on your arm, scantily clad, irrepressibly almost-naked. It is not the invitation to be seen. It is the assumption that this particular sort of unveiling is the highest expression of a woman’s presence in the world. It is the idea that, past a certain point, the only way she can still be luminous is to be revealed.

But enough of us have already lived that story. We have already walked through a world that demanded visibility on narrow stilts—be beautiful but not vain, tantalizing but not vulgar, comely but not difficult, wanted but not wanton.

And so now, maybe what we are looking for—what we deem meaningful, what allows us to take space as we wish to—is a presence that requires no justification, invitation, or unveiling to be felt.

Oh, believe me, I understand you. Of course I do. You are a man unmoored from the puny, suffocating scripts of what should or should not be done. But the women of this world are not so free to simply shrug off the weight of cultural demands.

So I ask you, love—consider this. There are many ways to command the room. And not all of them require being seen.