A Night Out

Since the beginning of time, humans have moved their bodies to the rhythm of music. Dancing is freedom. But not all dancers are created equal.

On a Saturday night out somewhere in Brooklyn, I dragged my body through a dark, ominous pulsating crowd of shadows. The more eyes I felt like spotlights on my body, the less it felt like my own. Something else was controlling me, pressing my buttons, instructing me how to move my limbs. I was no longer a human, I was a puppet. 

Never fully immersed in the moment, always aware and hypervigilant, I caught myself thinking, what must it feel like to dance like no one is watching, judging, rating you out of 10? What must it feel like to take up space, to feel so safe in a public space you can truly let go? Looking around, I realized the men around me felt exactly that: high as kites, they were dancing free and completely out of control as their hearts desired. They took up space in the most random, intuitive, human ways – a painful, stark contrast to my calculated, controlled, conscious moves carefully curated to cater to their gaze. 

When the male gaze is inescapable and omnipresent, experience becomes performance.

If we as women are conditioned to exist not for our own internal pleasure, but to please, what differentiates me from a painting, from a decorative vase? The vase has no conscience, it is not aware of the vast emptiness of its existence while I, we as women, are.

As I watched my arms, legs and hips sway from side to side, I yearned to be a true object, without a conscience by definition, instead of the objectified human that I was.