In her feminist essay King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes writes: “men have no bodies.” This powerful sentence left a lasting impression on me: from that moment I could dream of a life where I did not have a body.
As a heterosexual woman in her 40s, I no longer desired to be the object of others’ gaze. I wanted to learn how to gaze. At the same time, I began to question my attraction to men: what did I desire from them, if not their bodies?