When the foreign gaze lives inside us
We grow up surrounded by images that tell us what a body must look like to be desirable.
These images don’t just look at us — they look through us.
They linger in dressing rooms, front cameras, and quiet thoughts before sleep.
This is the internalized gaze: the moment we start seeing ourselves as someone else might.
For writers of erotic fiction, this gaze is both a trap and a source.
When you describe a body, you are never just describing flesh — you are revealing the way culture has taught that body to be seen.
To write against the internalized gaze is to reclaim that body, to make perception personal again
Writing as reclamation
Erotic writing can undo the gaze — but only if it refuses to serve it.
That begins with a shift in language:
from how something looks to how it feels.
Not the shape of the breast, but the weight of a hand against it.
Not the color of skin, but the heat it carries.
That change of focus is self-empowerment in its purest form.
The narrator chooses what becomes visible.
She decides which sensations deserve words — and which remain hers alone.
In doing so, the body ceases to be spectacle. It becomes presence.
The trap of self-objectification
Many female characters begin their stories through an external lens.
They think in reflections:
“I knew my dress was too short.”
“I felt my stomach wasn’t flat enough.”
These sentences don’t express shame — they express surveillance.
The character has learned to look at herself from the outside.
Real transformation begins when she recognizes that voice as foreign.
Example:
A woman undresses for someone she loves.
At first she wonders how she appears — whether the light flatters, whether she’s being judged.
Then she notices he isn’t evaluating, only seeing.
Her breathing shifts. She moves differently.
The act turns from performance into presence.
That moment — when self-consciousness turns into self-perception — is the true erotic awakening.
Self-staging vs. self-determination
Self-staging is not the same as freedom.
As long as the inner gaze seeks approval, the character remains captive to the imagined viewer.
True empowerment begins when the writing no longer performs the body for others, but through itself.
When pleasure isn’t displayed, but experienced.
When a text doesn’t ask, Does it please? but Is it true?
Eroticism, then, becomes not adornment, but declaration.
Writing beyond the mirror
The internalized gaze is a mirror that doesn’t reflect your face — it reflects an expectation.
Erotic writing can shatter that mirror.
Not to erase the image, but to see anew.
A woman who learns to feel herself rather than watch herself changes the reader too.
She invites empathy instead of observation.
That is the radical power of erotic self-empowerment:
to be not object, nor fantasy — but origin.
For your writing
When you write about desire, ask yourself:
– Who owns the gaze in this scene?
– Are you describing what she looks like, or what she feels?
– Does she need to be seen to exist?
Eroticism as self-empowerment means writing the body from the inside out — not polished, not corrected, simply inhabited.
Writing Prompt
Write a scene in which your protagonist looks at herself — in a mirror, in water, in another’s eyes.
Let her sense the moment when the gaze shifts from foreign to her own.
Then let her decide that her perception is enough.