At first I liked how well he was getting along with my friends. He spoke to one of them for a long time about his relationship with his mum, then another one about English identity and a short film he was hoping to make. It’s at that point I realised he was talking to them much more than he was chatting to me, and – when he did talk to me – our conversation was much more shallow. He tried to guess my bra size, then we debated how old we would go when it came to sexual partners. When we left the pub, he asked me to spin around so he could see my ass.
“I just feel like he thinks I’m fit, and that’s it,” I complained to my friend the next day. I’d left the evening feeling flattened and objectified, which isn’t nice, but also a sign of personal growth, because – unfortunately – all I want in the world is for men to think I’m hot most of the time.
“You want him to admire your ass but only if he sees all the other wonderful things about you,” she said.
“Right!”
“Anyway, how was the book launch?” my friend asked, because that’s what we were meant to do together instead of just going to the pub. The question made me go quiet. I started thinking about how, when he’d asked me what the book was about, I’d just said, “It’s a poetry one,” raising my eyebrows and putting on a voice, as if I didn’t know anything about poetry, even though I actually love it. In fact, I love it so much that I went through an entire phase when every time I was drunk I’d insist on reading out a poem to whoever I was with. I even have a line from Sharon Old’s “Known To Be Left” on the back of my arm that reads, “I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.”
We all know some women do this: play “dumb”, hide their talents. There’s that sample of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the beginning of Beyoncé’s “Flawless” (“We teach women to shrink themselves…”), the famous Virginia Woolf line from A Room of One’s Own: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” I’d been trying, in that moment, to make space for that guy to tell me he likes poetry and recommend some I should read, or make fun of me for being dumb and wanting to go to the pub instead of the reading.
It came so easily to me, acting this way, because I’ve done it all my life. At a friend’s birthday a while ago, I bumped into my ex-boyfriend. Another friend of mine who didn’t know him told me afterwards that the way I behaved around him freaked her out. She said it was like peering back through a time warp at an 18-year-old version of me, that I looked at him all starry-eyed, like I didn’t know what I was talking about, as if he was the lecturer and I was the pupil. She even said that my voice was different, small and mousy.
I notice my friends shrinking themselves too, although not to the same extent. They say they’re not into films, that they just rewatch trash, even though I know they have Mubi subscriptions. They tell people who DM them about producing a music video that they don’t have enough experience yet, even though they work as production assistants, say they can’t show their book to anyone because it’s shit, decline to give talks because they think someone with an academic background would have more to say on the subject.
It’s not that guy’s fault for underestimating me, because I underestimated myself – or, at least, I gave him that impression, not just with the poetry thing, but a few times. How was he supposed to know that there’s more to me when I kept so many sides of myself hidden? For such a long time, men’s approval has felt more important than seeming clever, and I thought I’d win it by showing them a good time, making them feel at ease – but things don’t work that way. You just help them to feel good about themselves, not about you. And, in the end, why would I want to be with someone who only liked me because of how much bigger I made them feel?