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

by Glynnis MacNicol

What no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right. When you are a woman alone, this is never even suggested as a possibility.

The disconnect is so extreme at times, I find the result is I’ve come to distrust literally every story we’ve ever been told to expect as women, even when some of them have turned out to be true. To choose to enjoy things simply because they are enjoyable, even if no one quite believes you. To understand things are hard, even when you are constantly being told they are not as hard. This is true loneliness, I sometimes want to say. 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.

find that sometimes the easiest way to stick to your own experience of your life is, sadly, to stay quiet about it. Slide invisibly through the world doing exactly what you want. Don’t offer anything up for review.

A friend who was doing research into the history of pornography for women once told me the reason women’s pornography is rarely successful is because the thing women fantasize about most is freedom.

Movement is only enjoyable when it’s a choice. Bookended by places of respite and permanence.

So much past experience remains a present truth for so many of us, even when the present contradicts it at every turn. When the inciting incident in your life is having been left, by marriage, by family, by parents, by culture—by the person or place whose very role it is to hold you close—it is not something you overcome once and get on with afterward. It is something you are always overcoming. It is something you are always trying to get on afterward with. But maybe each time you overcome it more quickly. Maybe the wound does not pierce as deeply.