the lives we choose.

on All Fours, gender, aging, & desire

I am sitting at the coffee shop considering my potential intervention into the Miranda July-inspired discourse when I am overcome with the sensation of being watched. It’s a feeling most women have experienced, the drop in your stomach, a prickly wash on your skin while you bravely glance up to see if you’re right and catch the eyes of some man, staring. The man in the coffee shop is older, probably in his 60s, a white man in golf clothes a size too big, red nosed and leering. When I catch his eyes, he doesn’t avert them. That boldness so many of them possess to hold you in the discomfort they’re creating….It is unnerving every time. I look away, of course, and feel my heartbeat quicken, my cheeks flush. I can’t concentrate for the next few minutes, knowing—feeling—that he is still staring. When my skin settles a bit I know it’s because he’s tired of his game and is now looking elsewhere. The problem now is that I have to pee but of course I cannot get up to go to the bathroom while this man is facing me a table away; he will see me in my short shorts, he will think he has an excuse to say something to me if I walk right past him. So I sit in discomfort for nearly an hour until finally he leaves, until finally I am safe to stand.  

***

I am about five years younger than the unnamed protagonist in All Fours who is confronting perimenopause and stagnancy in her marriage, jostled by the bleak future that she is facing biologically (she discovers that her estrogen is about plummet) and culturally. The reality of her aging spirals her into recklessness (spending $20k to remodel a motel room, an affair), followed by more measured life changes (transparent marriage restructuring). I spent the past month devouring the book along with interviews with July, consumed with the questions and themes the story inspires, including what counts as a midlife crisis, relational forms, sex and desire, and the state of things for aging women. Is it true that in 2024 society still hates women who exist past 40; that when we lose our estrogen we lose our opportunities? That we lose our own impulse toward desire? Are we allowed to “blow up our lives” and if so, how do we manage on the other side?¹ 

I have been listening to and engaging with July the way I used to watch Friends in elementary school or Sex and the City in high school: for pleasure, but also for study. I wanted to know what it would be like to be in the Big City in my 20s, and then 30s, I wanted models for maneuvering friendship and romance and jobs as the adult I soon would be. It took me until my late 30s to start paying closer attention to the stories of women in their 40s and 50s—I needed new models. So recently, I’ve been filling my time with Gen X newsletters, Annie Erneaux library reserves, and (no matter how bad the script) an unwavering commitment to And Just Like That….How do I do this new iteration of womanhood? 

It is worth mentioning that in my early-to-mid-30s, I felt a lot more aligned with a nonbinary gender identity. I was a ‘she/they’ but really dug it when someone picked ‘they.’ I would sometimes physically cringe when someone called me a woman, though I was okay when someone called me a girl, and my favorite was (and is) when people knew to simply identify me as “femme.” Femme is still an in-my-bones truth for me, but as I pressed into my late 30s, ‘woman’ no longer felt so bad—it felt accurate. I am nervous to say any of this because a lot of it has to do with changes in my physical body and the way my uterus was treated by the medical system; I do not like even treading in the vicinity of talking points that TERFs use to deny trans women’s existence or deservingness. Trans women are women; that’s not up for debate in this space. Alongside that truth, I also felt an undeniable alignment with womanhood during my pregnancy, my miscarriage, and my year of “women’s health” issues. None of these issues are exclusive to women, and the medical industry is specifically misogynist, and it is specifically transphobic. What I experienced in my body was amplified by the cultural histories that surround the treatment of women. Regardless of our particular body parts, cis women and trans women will both experience versions of misogyny, and for all of us it will likely get worse as we age. Ultimately I think my story of shifting from rejecting to embracing ‘woman’ is a testimony in support of trans autonomy, and for the innocuous power of exploration; no one was harmed in my playing with ‘they’, no one is harmed now that I am back to mostly ‘she.’ What we lose when we constantly meet rightwing talking points on their rhetorical terrain—needing to insist on a ‘born this way’ or essentialized version of identity— is making the point that it’s actually okay that gender is fluid.

Another part of this gender journey involves my relationship to sexual objectification and my intense identification as a submissive. I’ve written a handful of times about the healing power of kink, so I won’t belabor it here, but I haven’t quite articulated how affirming it was in my she/they era: I liked that ‘they’ reiterated my okayness with being thing-like. This is a very unique-to-me sentiment and not true for all (not true for most, I would guess) nonbinary people. For me though, it felt like a tacit assertion of my side of the sex wars (with the radical queer, pro-sex ‘deviants’), it felt like a secret eyeroll to mainstream feminism’s 101 analysis of the male gaze. …Then I became a sex worker. And posting half-nude photos on Instagram was no longer for me,² but for work. And although I still contend that SW is absolutely one of the better jobs I’ve had, it was still a job, and it took some of the joy out of the slutty pics. Consensual objectification for money alienated me, at least a bit, from the pleasure of it. And so ‘they’ felt less…fitting. 

Ironically, the same years I was doing SW (and receiving financial validation of sexual desirability), I felt my growing invisibility in public space. My body was changing as my fibroid symptoms grew, so I was, more and more, prioritizing comfort in my clothes and shoes. I was often at the coffee shop before my workout and shower, no makeup, sneakers; most of the people around town know me most in athletic clothes, not high femme ones. In these moments especially, I almost never got ‘checked out.’ It’s not like I’ve had a life of turning every head, but in my 20s and early 30s, if I was out and about, I’d get looked at or catcalled….consistently. Most young women do, and it varies on a spectrum of harmless to exciting³ to horrifically violent. The absence of it the past year or so has been stark, noticeable, and if I’m honest, unsettling. 

See, along with every uncomfortable-to-terrifying spectrum of experiences I’ve had, it’s also been extremely clear to me that, long before venturing into formal sex work, I’ve gotten special treatment from men with power that sometimes translated into material opportunity. (Adjunct opportunities, podcast interviews, random Venmos, to name a few.)  I’m not saying this is a fair trade-off. Women (disproportionately transwomen and women of color) are victims of extreme violence, with a root that is often linked (though not exclusive) to a toxic form of patriarchal desire (for sex, for power). Providing favors, “ins”, networking, and so on, can also stem from toxic patriarchal desire (as much as it can stem from a harmless desire to help, which I’ve also experienced). That I was able to wield that in my favor is something I’m pretty unapologetic about though, especially considering how the vast majority of people in my social circle have access to generational wealth (I do not), and we are all working with what we have.⁴ And the pearl-clutching around these sorts of exchanges occurring seems to me both naive and low-key SWERFy.⁵ 

What I’m trying to say is that regardless of where it comes from or how im/moral it may be to gain access to resources through youth and desirability, I am afraid of no longer having it. Separate from sexual desirability, I am even more worried about professional desirability as I move into the millennial era of irrelevance, or what Ann Helen Petersen describes as “no longer being the Main Character in the generational story.”⁶  In the first few pages, the protagonist of All Fours bemoans that the only man checking her out is in his 80s. She is also stuck around her next creative project. “The femininity we were instructed in was actually youth,” July writes as her character susses through a period of despair.

All that said, I am here writing to you now as a woman facing 40, and Miranda July is making me think about it, and the man at the coffee shop is making me think about it. Like July’s protagonist, I am afraid of the consequences of invisibility, but it’s not lost on me that I wrote the first page of this with a full bladder because being noticed can also be a certain kind of hell. This isn’t profound, but I like that so many of us (writers, thinkers, my friends with whom I discuss the deeper things) are landing on ambivalence. In a society in which so much of the stuff of our lives is demanded of us without our consent, what else is there to feel about anything besides contradiction? We are anti-work but also try to find work we love, we are not supported enough to have children but crave them anyway, we are drawn to sharing our life with one other person even though it has a high probability of turning out badly. We don’t know what we mean by “happiness” but strive through conflicting prescriptions anyway — we meditate or discover raves, take pills responsibly from a doctor or ayahuasca spiritually from a guru, imbibe with joy or get sober with superiority, drink green juice or delight in pastry, devote ourselves to therapy or decide we are above it, quit our 9-5 to focus on art or find a 9-5 so we can afford to make our art. Of course we are confused, of course we are holding complexity. I am thrilled to be aging, and I fucking hate it. All at once. 

The other side of the narrator’s despair is not that she discovers the science is wrong necessarily, but rather that it doesn’t matter—she abandons norms for risk and, usually, great reward. The terror she feels in the face of perimenopause’s physical side effects (loss of libido, loss of natural lube, most specifically) are sort of forgotten when she gets a new girlfriend (and has sufficiently slick sex), when she takes space from her home life, when she writes her next book. Regardless of biology and cultural pressures, she is desiring, she is desired, and she is living. 

Getting from her crisis to her reckoning was one of the best parts of the book because it was a testament to female friendship; like my own studying of the women in the generation above me, July’s narrator (and July herself, she’s revealed in interviews) studied her friends’ relationships. Is marriage working for anyone? (Yes, said many.) Do some people have successful open marriages, and if so, how? (Yes, from cucking to only threesomes, she learned. Sometimes no, sometimes it’s absolutely not worth it, others stated.) And so on. When the narrator ultimately opens her marriage, she expects all of her monogamous friends to be jealous and want to follow suit, but the reactions are much more mixed. Good for you, not for me, many say. 

“Our lives, and our feelings about our lives, don’t have to be arguments against each other so much as in conversation, so much as in relation,” Cameron Steele wrote recently. Exactly this. 

But the All Fours protagonist admits at one point in her new-found freedom, that it can be lonely to do the unpopular thing, even if it’s the most aligned thing. I cried a number of times throughout the book, but this admission of loneliness pummeled me. I’ve had a life of making a number of aligned and lonely choices—too often I am hit with a phantom punch in the gut by the reality that in one of my group chats/close friend circles I am the only person who does not own a home, in another I am the only one unmarried and without children. Some of this (the home owning) is mostly a result of capitalism, but they are all also, in part, because of my choices. Despite (or because of) all my trauma around scarcity, I have left stable jobs and stable relationships for bigger passion, for love, for whatever truer version of myself I felt needed rescuing. I have read and re-read the Cheryl Strayed essay where she gives permission: “Wanting to leave is enough.” Is it?, I have wondered on second thought, curled in a ball, dripping snot on tile floor with no one to call but a friend with a spouse and a 401k. 

It is, ultimately, it has been, but I also would have made staying (at the job, or in the relationship, or in the city) enough too. “There is no right answer,” my friend T and I say back and forth to each other. We make do with the lives we choose. We make meaning. 

What I like about All Fours is that there isn’t a tidy before and after. The protagonist leaves her stifling but loving marriage and gets a butch girlfriend who ends up treating her like crap.⁷ Leaving her marriage was right for her, and her husband was better to her than her new lover. Ambivalence, both/and. Unlike some of the recent buzzy divorce memoirs, July is not prescriptive here. The book is not an endorsement for blowing up one's life, it’s a portrait of navigating the pain that goes along with either staying or going. No right answer, just choices and what we do in the aftermath. 

I am living on the other side of my mid-30s life crisis. Some of you know the story of it. I loved my old life and I love my new life, and I was also miserable before sometimes and am still sometimes miserable now. Wherever you go, there you are, they say, and I think what’s most different about this reckoning compared to the ones I had before it is that, ironically, I’m somewhat less afraid. Even if I will be met with fewer options in careers and relationships, I have the quiet evidence of my ability to survive, built up now like muscle memory. Even if the job doesn’t work out (I’ll always have writing), or the relationship (I really hope this one does), or whether I’m noticed or not in public (eventually I will not be), I am feeling closer to trusting the solidity of my own two feet. 

Without giving too much away, All Fours ends with a raucous confrontation of pain, with an acceptance of uncertainty, and with some hope. I think I’ll keep moving forward that way, too. 

1.  There are other questions to ask about this book, particularly around how different the answers would be for people who are not as wealthy or white as the main character. Also, questions about drastic life changes feel necessary to juxtapose to drastic environmental changes, but these are “beyond the scope of this essay” as we say in the biz (academia).

2.  This is, admittedly, a simplistic and incomplete explanation of agency.

3.  Usually the noticing came from older men, but sometimes I’d get “seen” by a butch, and if you want to know what that’s like, I invite you to read this Patrick Califia piece. And regardless of gender, obviously sometimes people check each other out and it’s just simply fun and okay! It also affirms my own desire when those exchanges are pleasurable and enjoyable.

4. I don’t think I’m describing “pretty privilege,” a concept that is too often discussed in a deeply anti-intersectional way. I am not a normatively attractive person and certain choices I’ve made (linked to my class background and subculture affiliations — like nails and tattoos) make me aesthetically undesirable in a number of contexts (especially elite, wealthy ones). But human attraction is so much messier than the hegemonic appeal of models or influencers, so much bigger than those supposed ideals could ever contain. And so despite being fairly opposite (other than whiteness) to supermodel or Hollywood beauty norms, I’ve been desired. On the other hand, a normatively gorgeous Black woman will still experience racism despite being pretty. Given all this, “pretty privilege” feels like a fairly useless concept to me when what we’re actually talking about is a much more complex desire economy that exists within a landscape of white supremacy, ageism, sexual repression, patriarchy, and capitalism. That, though, is an essay for another time!

5. I want to reiterate that I’m not talking about harassment or coercion. I regularly think about Amber Hollibaugh’s writing on similar themes, and she points out how she would basically use men (by having sex with them) to get closer to their radical political books/knowledge. That she was also a sex worker I think made her generally less alarmed about transactional relationality.

6. The percentage of pop culture references my students make that I ‘get’ gets smaller and smaller every year. 

7. If I may, I really appreciated this storyline for the way it complicates heteropessimism, which is a concept I am sympathetic to but also extremely annoyed by. The idea that cis straight men are the problem in relationships is so boring and essentialist/and also so many cis straight men are shitty and terrible. BUT! The hot/cold vibe of this butch in All Fours is sooooooo similar to a couple of hot/cold butches I’ve been with in my day, and man that shit is just as toxic and painful (if not worse) as it is with straight guys.