I was 23 when I tried to hook up with a woman for the first time.
It was May 2018. Annette* and I had been friends for about three years. We had developed a deep intellectual intimacy and, over time, a crackling sexual chemistry. Sparks would fly every time we accidentally touched. Our hugs occasionally lingered for too long. There were times when minutes would pass before we realised we had been ignoring everyone else and holding each other’s gaze.
I constantly fantasised about Annette’s breasts back then. In my mind, they were perfect. They looked amazing in whatever outfit she chose to wear and had definitely fuelled my infatuation.
Eventually, we acknowledged our painfully obvious attraction to each other. But when we finally got physically intimate that night in 2018, my desire for her suddenly diminished. As she lay beneath me with her clothes off, I saw that without the support of a bra, her breasts were actually quite ordinary; gravity had made them saggy. I recoiled, horrified by my unkind judgment of her body. I turned away and told her that I didn’t want to go any further.
Clearly confused by the abrupt shift, she kept asking me what had happened. I evaded her until she gave up. We didn’t go any further. In fact, we never hooked up again. Neither of us talked about why.
After that night, I began reflecting on how I perceived women’s bodies—including my own. I noticed there was a constant undercurrent of harsh, critical evaluation baked into my gaze.
In August that year, when the woman who would go on to become my long-term girlfriend first took off her top in front of me, I immediately clocked that she did not have a flat tummy. I was taken aback by my own thoughts; it’s not like I had ever had a flat tummy, either.
So where were these standards coming from?
“You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur,” wrote Margaret Atwood in her 1993 book The Robber Bride, articulating how women internalise the male gaze.
Another writer, from a different time and perspective, put it more bluntly still. John Berger, in his seminal book Ways of Seeing (1972), wrote, “… men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Both Margaret and John illustrate the ways in which the internalised male gaze affects how women relate to men, and even themselves. What I hadn’t reckoned with earlier was how this gaze affected the way I perceived the women around me. The patriarchy had trained me to look at women’s bodies in a manner that was evaluative, extractive, and often unkind. I was carrying this gaze into my queer relationships.
This realisation ultimately led me to a resolve: if I wanted to develop a better relationship with myself and with other women, I would have to unlearn this gaze.
Investigating the man inside me
Armed with the kernel of truth that explained my actions, I began to trace their roots obsessively.
I was 16 when I realised I was into women. I had entered the world of online adult entertainment through lesbian porn, and it remained my go-to for a long time. Watching the lithe, hairless bodies, perky breasts, and flat stomachs in these videos conditioned me into loving and being sexually attracted to a cookie-cutter version of the female body.
Even when I watched cis-het porn, I found my eyes drawn to the woman’s body—to what was being done to her. At first, I thought this was perfectly normal. As a pansexual woman, I believed I was either appreciating the woman or indulging my attraction to men by picturing myself in her place.
After a few years of being sexually active with men, I realised that I didn’t actually enjoy the kind of sex that porn depicted (penetrative sex and nothing else, for example). Neither did most women I knew. But I still found myself drawn to the same kind of porn. Eventually, it hit me: when I watched those videos, I imagined myself as the man.
My experience wasn’t unique. On Reddit, I found numerous posts discussing the same pattern. Many friends—cis women of varying sexual orientations—told me they’d all been casting themselves as the man while watching or imagining sex. These revelations made me realise that the forces that had been shaping my desires warranted closer scrutiny.
A straight friend in her thirties once told me how she loved watching penetrative sex on screen even though she didn’t enjoy it at all in real life. “I don’t know why that image is so sexy in porn when it feels underwhelming in real life,” she said.
Another friend, a bisexual woman, also in her thirties, told me that while her attraction to women was purely physical, her attraction to men was both physical and romantic. “I knew I was objectifying [women],” she said, “but I did not know how to stop.”
She said she wanted to hook up with women but could not perceive them as serious romantic partners. “I felt that everything I was taught about love and relationships was from the perspective of having an opposite-sex partner. So in my head, I had unconsciously legitimised my relationships with men while categorising those with women as ‘just for fun,’” she said. She added that the male gaze had shaped the contours of not only her physical desire but also her emotional availability.
The work of American author Nancy Friday, who wrote extensively about female sexuality, helped me put all of these reflections into perspective. In her 1973 book My Secret Garden, she argues that when women fantasise about sex, they often slip into the male body, imagining sex in which they are the “doer” rather than the “receiver.”
The notion that men are active participants in intimacy while women are passive may seem outdated—these roles are not so cleanly defined in cis-het relationships, much less in queer ones. But Nancy’s analysis identifies a certain quality of dominance that I could relate to my own perceptions of my female sexual partners. Nancy argues that women often see themselves as passive receivers in sex because cultural erotic scripts give men agency and desire, making women’s bodies the primary visual object.
The result is that many women, including those who are queer, learn to desire women through imagery built for male pleasure. In a previous story, for instance, queerbeat reported on how desi lesbian porn perpetuates patriarchal power structures and, unfortunately, seems to pander to the male gaze.
Learning all this helped me arrive at the conclusion that I was wearing glasses tainted by the male gaze. Through them, I was seeing women as pop culture- and porn-addled caricatures of desire. And I was viewing myself through the same lens. If I wanted to love women in a wholesome way, these glasses would have to go.
Queering my gaze
Unlearning the male gaze did not happen all at once. It did not arrive as a grand ideological shift, but as a series of small, deliberate interruptions—moments so quiet they were almost easy to miss.
I started by teaching myself to pause, notice, and question the exact moment when my desire turned into an assessment, to catch my mind before it began cataloguing—too soft, not flat, too many wrinkles. Finally, I learnt to ask, gently but firmly: who is this for? Who taught me to watch like this?
Desire, I realised, does not naturally speak in the language of criticism. That language is taught, rehearsed, and repeated until it feels like instinct.
Slowly, this process of observing and questioning began to shift what I was paying attention to. I began to care less about what someone’s body looked like, and more about what the person felt like to be with. What did it feel like to hold her, to have her laugh against my shoulder? To feel her body relax, unguarded, in my presence? I began to understand that intimacy is not just visual. It is sensory, relational, and alive. It lives in warmth, in breath, in the subtle ways our bodies respond to each other when we feel safe.
The male gaze had trained me to look at women as images, as things to be evaluated and consumed. But desire, when I allowed it to be honest, was immersive.
These unlearnings dovetailed perfectly with another journey I had embarked on—that of learning to embrace my own body with all its imperfections.
In 2018, I almost entirely stopped wearing bras. At first, it was simply about comfort. I was a medical intern and had to sleep on uncomfortable duty-room beds without air conditioning in the scorching Vellore summer. I needed to be able to move through the day without that constant, low-level irritation of something tight against my skin. When I made the shift, the relief was immediate. The headaches brought on by the overwhelming sensations of heat and constriction reduced drastically.
Over time, my rejection of the bra became something more—a refusal to hold my body in a shape that made it more acceptable or “attractive” to look at. Seeing my slightly sagging breasts in the mirror became normal to me much sooner than I thought.
By 2022, I had stopped shaving my body hair, waxing, or threading. This resolve, too, arrived after considerable effort to unlearn my tendency to notice body hair on other women. My effort to normalise it on them allowed me to normalise it on myself.
Around the same time, I made a promise to myself that felt both small and radical: I would not undergo any procedure for beauty if it hurt. I would not punish my body in order to make it more palatable.
By 2023, I found myself wearing crop tops without the familiar ritual of turning sideways, sucking in my belly, adjusting my waistband, asking, Is my stomach flat enough to be seen?
Learning to see my own body in a softer, kinder light helped me see other women differently, too. Another step that helped me recondition my gaze was a paid subscription to OMGYES, a women-focused, evidence-based website that bills itself as a “map of pleasure & intimacy.” It helped me access and understand real women and the very real ways in which pleasure plays out in their bodies. Over time, it helped realign my notions of sex, centring acts that women—including me—actually find pleasurable.
None of these actions felt like declarations at the time. There was no single moment of transformation, no clean break from who I had been. They were small decisions— practical, even. Looking back, I can see that they were part of the same unlearning, because the hyper-critical gaze I had fixed on other women was the same one I had turned on myself. In allowing other women’s bodies to be soft, to be textured, to be real—and still be desirable—I was, without quite realising it, granting myself that same permission.
Sometimes, I think back to that night with Annette when I pulled away from what could’ve been my first sexual encounter with a woman. I wonder what might have happened if I had stayed—if I had allowed myself to move past the shock of seeing a real body, unposed and unsupported. If I had let my desire expand instead of allowing it to collapse under the weight of my expectation. If I had known then what I know now: that the moment desire falters under the pressure of perfection, it is not desire that has failed—it is the gaze.
Recently, I came across a meme on Instagram that shows two adjacent images of a woman.In the first, her breasts are held up by a bra, rounded, lifted, “perfect”; in the second, the same woman’s breasts are without support, softer, lower, and shaped by gravity. The caption is simple, almost obvious in its implication that both are normal and beautiful. There are several positive comments beneath the post, with one woman saying she felt better about herself after seeing it. Many commented that something had shifted, even if slightly, in how they saw their own bodies.
I also commented: that I had judged somebody’s body unfairly, that I had had to go through a journey of unlearning, even as a queer woman. I’m not sure exactly why I posted it. Perhaps the 32-year-old version of me was confessing the sins of her younger days, seeking absolution.
I am now married to a man, and we intend to remain monogamous forever. This means that I will never know what kind of girlfriend the current version of me could have been to another woman. I would like to think that she would have been very loving and capable of accepting her partner in all her flawed glory.
When I look back, I feel sadness for the woman I had been, for the years I had spent looking at myself as something to be corrected. For that evening with Annette, when I looked at someone I desired and reduced her, almost instantly, to an image that did not match up to my ideal.
Desiring women, I am learning, is not just about who you are attracted to. It is also about how you have been taught to look—and whether you are willing to loosen that gaze, soften it, and let it become something more generous, more curious, and more kind.
To desire women is to stop watching them—and, ultimately, to stop watching myself.
*Name changed to protect identity.