“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” -Margret Atwood, The Robber Bride

This quote has been floating around in my head ever since I read it a few months ago. It articulates quite a few feelings I’ve been living with every since I was formally introduced to feminism—or rather became radicalized by it— when I was a junior in high school. The idea that everything I’d been doing to fit in was for men, even when I wasn’t trying to consciously attract to them. Unable to separate how I see myself from the way I was expected to see myself.

The unnerving feelings of violation when, suddenly, I’m hyperaware that the days I feel the most confident and beautiful are days when I was simply just following the rules I’d be trained to obey. I’m in a full face of make up asking why it makes me feel so powerful? Why am I so excited when a dress accentuates my waist just right? By what standards am I adhering to so fervently? Who’s standards?

Throughout most of my work, I wrestle with body image, specifically my own. Much of it as a form of expressing the relationship and feelings I have about her. In this piece, I ask who’s feelings are those, truly? Are they really my own, or am I just another man peering through the keyhole? Is there a difference?