A Face Earned, not Deserved

Sometimes I write to exorcise unpleasant emotions, and this is one of those times. What I will write about is an experience that neither Oprah nor Dr. Phil have created a catchy piece of jargon to identify. It is about the feeling of judgment in the beauty pageant of life most women participate in without ever having signed up for.Except it isn’t really a pageant. A pageant is staged. It is lit, posed, entered, rehearsed. A contestant chooses her angle. What happened to me was none of those things. It was an unplanned ambush, and an ambush is worse than a pageant, because there is no entry form, no consent, no control over the frame.Here is what happened.I have sat in the same Zoom meeting, with the same group of men, for years, camera off. I am a voice among them, a name in a small window, a set of ideas spoken into a room I never had to physically enter. That arrangement suited me. It was not hiding, exactly — it was simply the terms under which I had agreed to be present. And then…