Desiring to be desired
I always wanted the male gaze because I wanted men to idealize me the way that I idealized them.
The earliest aspiration I remember was to be beautiful and have a great romance with a great man that would prove what a beautiful, good girl I was. When I watched princess movies as a young child, I hardly noticed the prince. He wasn’t really a character. (Quick! What’s the name of Sleeping Beauty’s Prince?1) I wasn’t won over by his qualities or finding myself thinking about him. His purpose there was 100% to desire Sleeping Beauty.
I remember cultivating crush drama in my life at a young age. I was 6 when I decided I would crush on a boy named Joseph2 the way that Helga crushed on Hey Arnold. The point was to admire him from afar and hatch little schemes to see if he would notice me. I did it just for the fun of having a project, and to enjoy the fantasy of maybe, possibly being chosen.
I remember the moment I formed my first real crush. It was the first day of our 6th grade math class, when a boy gave an impressive answer to the hardest question in a series of problems of escalating difficulty. If he had cared to soak up my adoration, he would have seen a look on my face like I remember on the faces of my 4th grade classmates when I had found myself with answers they did not possess. Even then I had a sense that I could absorb his specialness as my own if I could make him love me.
I was addicted to the “chase,” but only the part that happened in my head. I even decided to keep the obsessive crush going in high school after I was definitively rejected, not because I was truly in love, but because I liked having something to strive for3.