I have a fantasy for every single woman in my life over the age of 50. My fantasy is that these women take a solo trip to Paris, or London, or Venice, or Mexico, or Prague, wherever it is they want to go. And once they get there, my fantasy is that they have a genuinely nice time. Reading books at cafes, going on bike rides, doing wine tours, and not thinking for a single moment about how it’s supposed to be depressing to go places alone, do things alone.
As someone who does almost everything alone (and likes it that way,) I’ve been able to escape the stigma of the solo outing simply by being male. The privilege of going out into the world and minding your own goddamn business is not afforded to more than half the human population. To be a woman alone, outside, in public, is to invite controversy and possibly even violence. But even worse is the feelings society forces us to feel when it comes to women alone: pity, confusion, fear, disgust. We all remember that one episode of Sex and the City where Carrie realizes that you can just take yourself out to a restaurant and read a book, or even just people-watch. But it takes her the whole episode to get there: she doesn’t want to be that woman. You know—the pathetic woman, the lonely woman, the single woman. There is no romance attached to the female bachelor, only a kind of social horror left over from the days when the worst possible thing to be in pop culture was a spinster: over 30, unmarried, no kids to speak of, and probably wearing some kind of Victorian lace netting and spectacles.
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