I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

by Glynnis MacNicol

But lately when I encounter past versions of myself, all I feel is sympathy and admiration. Good job, kid, I want to say. You did your best. Keep going.

I feel like while all I had to do to get here was buy a plane ticket and walk to the corner, Aarti had to run ten marathons, carrying the weight of all the cultural and familial disappointment, to get to the same place. But here we are.

really irks this woman, I’ve come to realize, is that I appear to be enjoying myself. I have veered off the narrow path laid out for women to be successful in the world, and it turns out I’m fine.

How do I intend to enjoy myself? What does enjoyment mean? What does it mean for me?

Because so much of enjoyment, and so much of bearing the hardest things, relies on the ability to do so with others. Misery loves company, but so does joy.

Our culture promises us one direct path to that end. And it goes straight down an aisle and into a kitchen, where preferably, you are overseeing someone else doing the actual cooking.

But the truth is, I simply do not want to do anything that does not bring me enjoyment. And as there is no one to make me do otherwise, I succumb to myself and decide to heed the lyrics of that timeless tune, and give myself over to absolute pleasure. Whatever it looks like. However it arrives.

He has very blue eyes that seem to connect with mine like two magnets meeting. Oh that jolt. I haven’t had a jolt like that for a long time.

but even innocent crushes are so fun, and somehow reassuring. I am alive in the world.

But it is hard to think of another way to express the joy of finding a person who is made to feel the most alive by the very thing that makes you feel most alive. It is one of the great gifts. One that transcends even language. Or is its own language. The gift of not having to translate yourself.

Parisians use Paris the way serious hunters I knew in Wyoming used the entire carcass of the beast they’d just struck down; they do not leave the good parts for scavengers.

I got what I wanted, or allowed what I wanted to get me.

we are all existing under the Male Gaze. Even when we work to live outside of it. Even to define your life as being outside of it is, itself, a recognition of what and who is inside. Who is offered the sanctuary. This Male Gaze has so many names. Patriarchy. Women’s clothing sizes. Beauty products. Pay rates. Health care. It’s endless.

I feel as though I’m inside life again. No longer thinking about how to get there and wondering if I ever will.

What right do I have to enjoy myself in this moment? I automatically ask myself. And then, immediately: What right do I have not to? What right do I have not to take the joy that is available to me?

Maybe Paris feels so unknowable because it does not ask one to have a destination at all times. It’s fine just to be. To wander.

For the most part pleasure is a mood, not a narrative. It exists in the memory as a feeling you want to return to. The sun. The sound of water. The afternoons in the park that are so similar they blend together.

“This would make a good video,” he says. Will we ever again understand pleasure as an experience that doesn’t require an audience to be true? I wonder.

Time zones did not exist until 1883. Our entire modern understanding of time is, in fact, largely the result of the railroads. Towns needed to coordinate their timepieces so that they could coordinate arrivals and departures. Capitalism put us all on the same clock. The construct of time, as we collectively now experience it, is not yet two hundred years old.

Or perhaps rather than “our fascination,” I should say men’s fascination. Women are never allowed to unstick themselves from time

the reason women’s pornography is rarely successful is because the thing women fantasize about most is freedom.

I try to envision other women whose paths I am unknowingly retracing. Women of the resistance. Women racing home to slip in after curfew. Women escaping. Foraging. Working. How many were simply enjoying? How will we ever know? It’s so easy to feel as though you are the first at something when no one has declared themselves as such before you. There are, as far as I know, no plaques commemorating women simply being free.

Mona Lisa, this woman of mystery renowned for being still and impenetrable and silent. Three things I hope never to be.

How are we looking at these women? Who were they actually? What were the circumstances that led them into the frame, and what has been left out, either because the artist didn’t care, or didn’t know, or didn’t want to know? All necessary thinking to give three-dimensionality to people relegated to a two-dimensional existence.