“Not sure how I feel about this one,” I say after reading the last sentence. “It feels a bit male-gazey.”

The male gaze. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently—and about how men see me.

“What do you mean?” my friend asks with a genuine tone. “It’s well written and very descriptive.”

I didn’t expect him to read between the lines the same way I did. I was never really sure how to myself until recently.

“Well, in this paragraph,” I reply, bringing the cursor to the second one, “the author describes the person he is attracted to in five sentences, and all five of them are about their looks and the smell of their shampoo. Clearly, the person is non-binary, but the author describes them the way he would describe an object he finds beautiful.”

This seems so obvious to me now, but I may not have noticed the subtleties in the descriptions if I had read the piece a week ago. My friend is right, the writing is strong, and the descriptions are vivid, but after the date I had yesterday, I can’t seem to shake off the feeling that the male gaze is everywhere.

My friend rereads the story and ponders what I said for a few moments. While he is silent, I think about what irked me the most in this CNF. Was it the way the author was so casual when admitting he wanted to fuck the person in his English class? Or was it rather the way he so casually boasted about how he didn’t make a move on them after learning they were already engaged to someone else? Maybe it was the way he only spoke about their looks, and the reader never learns anything about their personality.

“Okay, I kinda see what you mean,” my friend says slowly. “But at the same time, when you’re attracted to someone, you tend to fixate on what makes them special.”

I side-eye him, unconvinced.

“Maybe, in this case, the smell of her—I mean their—shampoo is more memorable than their sense of humour,” he adds, almost reading my mind and smiling ever so slightly.

I look at him, trying to understand how his brain works. I don’t believe in gendered brains, but the minds of straight men are truly a mystery to me.

“Look,” he says with the I’ve-figured-it-out tone men have when they’re about to mansplain to you. “Maybe you don’t understand because you’re asexual.”

Ouch. Yeah, that’s probably why. I will never understand why men objectify non-men because I don’t experience sexual attraction. I’m so close to giving up on men entirely.

Sophie studies psychology and creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal. They developed a passion for poetry after reading "Hope" by Emily Dickinson in sixth grade. They are an editor at their student newspaper and have been published by Milk Carton Press, Oddball Magazine, Brain Mill Press, JAKE and _voidspace, among other publications. You can find them on twitter @i_m_sope.