The Game of Selling Absence

Women sell their absence. Absence made tantalizingly present. Because actual presence—real, flesh-and-blood, no-kidding-around erotic presence—isn’t just inconvenient or awkward, it’s fundamentally disruptive. It unsettles invisible but very real contracts, implicit deals we’ve all collectively bought into, deals built precisely around her absence. The fact is, the full presence of her erotic power would pull back the curtain on illusions everyone had invested in maintaining.

And so she withholds. She becomes remarkably fluent in a kind of intricate performance: presence-that-isn’t-quite-presence, presence-minus-voltage, presence-minus-real-heat. She learns to signal without igniting, offering the language of desire without its substance, the iconography of turn-on without the spark itself. She competes to become the most coveted property, the most skillfully choreographed absence-as-presence—the best-behaved object rather than a fully realized subject.

The consequence of this withholding—this carefully curated absence—is hunger. Everywhere she goes, the result isn’t nourishment but a particular starvation dressed up as satisfaction, a superiority built on emptiness, wisdom replaced by a hollow inflation of ego. This starvation is subtle, widespread, and quietly corrosive; it’s an epidemic of insufficiency that masquerades as normality, a collective malnutrition the world mistakes for desire.

To reverse this—to reorient the world toward something approaching natural alignment, toward something authentically nourishing—would require an entirely different choice. A woman would have to do precisely what she’s been trained to avoid: she’d have to turn toward herself, directly, unequivocally, and confront the enormity of the erotic power she’s spent a lifetime evading. She would need to stay exactly when every conditioned impulse urges her to disappear, to perform, to maintain absence as the easy, frictionless status quo.

She would, in short, have to become the very nourishment she’s withheld. She would have to embody power rather than merely suggest it. Not just hinting at heat but becoming it—becoming the source itself, the actual thing, the real product rather than its slick, symbolic representation. In doing so, she’d rewire every interaction, recalibrate the entire circuitry. Her body would become not a symbol but an active site of restoration. And this shift would happen not because she demanded power—power isn’t something to demand—but because she remembered, finally and undeniably, that she is power itself.