The platform is four feet off the ground. I am up there for three to four hours on a good night. I have done this hundreds of times in this city, in these rooms, for these crowds. I know every kind of look a person can give a body on a platform. I know the difference between someone who is watching and someone who is taking. That difference is not subtle. It is the clearest thing I have ever learned to read.
People have opinions about what I do. They always have. The opinions come in two flavors and both of them miss the point. The first flavor is that what I do is degrading — that a woman on a platform being watched is a woman being objectified, that I must not know better or must need the money or must be performing some version of someone else's idea of myself. The second flavor is that I am empowered — that I am reclaiming something, owning my body, making a statement. Both of these opinions are about the person having them. Neither of them is about me.
"I am not a symbol. I am not a statement. I am not evidence for your argument about what women should or shouldn't do with their bodies in public. I am a person who chose this with full information and would choose it again."
Here is what I actually am. I am someone who is very good at taking up space with a body in a way that makes a room feel different. That is a skill. A real one. It took years to develop. It requires physical conditioning, spatial awareness, crowd reading, the ability to hold energy for hours without it becoming performance — because the moment it becomes performance it stops working. What I do only functions when it is genuinely inhabited. When I am actually there, not watching myself be there.
The audience question is the one everyone wants to ask. They want to know if it bothers me. Being watched. Being the object of attention for a room full of people who did not come here specifically for me but who are, for this stretch of hours, orienting themselves toward me. The answer is no. Not because I have transcended discomfort or because I am performing comfort I don't feel. Because I invited it. There is no such thing as unwanted attention when you are the one who stepped onto the platform. The attention is the agreement. I made the agreement. I stand in it.
The difference between an audience and a predator is not about desire. Desire is neutral. Desire is just energy looking for somewhere to go. The difference is about sovereignty. An audience understands that what they are watching belongs to the person performing it. A predator believes that watching confers ownership. I have never once confused the two. I can feel the difference from across a room. I have been feeling it for years. And I have never, not once, allowed the second kind to make me feel like the first kind was not worth having.
"My body on that platform is not an invitation to touch. It is not an invitation to approach. It is not an invitation to anything except exactly what it is — watching. That is the whole offer. The whole offer is enough."
I chose this. Not because I had no other options — I have other options, have always had them, have chosen this anyway on every occasion when the choice presented itself. I chose it because there is something that happens in a room when a body is fully present in it without apology and without explanation — something that shifts the energy of everyone watching in the direction of their own bodies, their own presence, their own permission to take up space.
That is what I am actually doing up there. Not performing. Not enduring. Not surviving. Demonstrating, with my body, that presence is a choice and that choosing it completely changes what a room is capable of feeling.
Every night. That's the point.