He texts me a photo

A friend texts me a photo of his teenage son that he’s just taken at a beach. They are holidaying in a tropical place, and in the photo the son is lounging on a wooden bench, next to another young man about the same age. Two youths on a surfing holiday, tanned and bare-chested and bare-legged, all fresh muscle and latent energy. You can almost feel the heat coming off them, smell their sweat. They’re smiling at the camera.

I can’t look at the photo for long. Something coils and uncoils in me, a snake shifting in its hiding place, and I have to put down the phone.

The next day the photo re-surfaces in my mind, and now I’m curious. Why did I look away? Was it something about sex? A decade or so ago, I might have looked at those nineteen-year-olds and felt desire, closely followed by shame, because back then I was already a middle-aged woman. I would have risked being labelled a cougar. Faintly ridiculous. Definitely inappropriate.

But there was nothing sexual in my gaze. I’m in my sixties now and although desire hasn’t retreated, it is rarely provoked by youth. Hair filigreed with silver, that’s what I like. Skin that has been lived in, through decades good and bad. Eyes that have seen all the things, not unlined eyes, hungering for all the new things. So no, I did not fancy the man-child, nor his young friend.

Was it envy? The father has a son, and I do not. For seven years I was on a mission to become a mother. I wanted a daughter, but I would have been more than grateful for a boy-child. But at forty, after multiple miscarriages and failed IVF treatment, I had to admit defeat. It took another two decades to grind through that grief, but the grinding is mostly done now. I can watch parents and their children with a detachment that feels precious, hard-won. Any discomfort is more like a memory of pain than pain itself.

Envy is in there somewhere, but it’s not about parenthood. And my unease about those semi-naked bodies is not about wanting to touch them or be touched by them. It’s about their ease in front of the camera. They way they seem to take up space in the world with such confidence, such a lack of shame or self-consciousness, even when they are nearly naked, because their bodies are safe. There is no barrier between what those young men want to do with their bodies in this world, and what they are allowed to do. Or none that they feel yet, as they lean back against that warm wood, knees splayed, shoulders relaxed, eyes unwary, smiling at the machine that is capturing their young torsos for posterity.

And there is a sliver of resentment, because I rarely felt that ease when I was young and out in the world - that lack of self-consciousness, that safety inside my own skin - especially not when I was semi-naked. Or perhaps I never allowed it for myself, because that would have required letting go of the instinct for self-preservation.

And now the moments are unspooling in my memory, all those times my body was shamed, frightened, disciplined and self-disciplined into submission.

The man who opened the door of the shower cubicle in a French caravan park and stared and stared at my unprotected flesh, ignoring my breathless protests. I had just turned fifteen.

The teenage boys at the local pool who pointed and laughed at the hair on my unshaven legs and armpits, calling me a ‘furry’. I was eighteen, but my fresh feminism was no match for their ancient disgust.

The man who blocked my way in a narrow alley, pulled out his cock and began tugging, a dreamy smile on his face, because he had no fear. I was the one who felt the fear, not knowing whether there was anybody nearby who would help me if he came any closer. Not knowing if anyone who came along might be more dangerous than this tugging man. I was twenty-one.

The man twice my age – a work colleague and mentor - who came up behind me in the office and hugged me, pressing himself hard against my back as he told me what a great job I was doing. My body froze, waiting for it to end, so I could get myself safe behind a desk. I was twenty-five.

The Portuguese man who introduced himself to me in a thatched dining hut on an island off the coast of East Timor and followed me into the sea, then surfaced too close to me, smiling and groaning, so I swam away as fast as I could. The same man who later spoke so aggressively to me that I retreated to my room and locked the door. I was forty.

And every time, at every age, it seemed that somehow it must have been my fault, because I had not kept my body safe, or kept those men safe from my body. Always there was shame about my careless, dangerous, fleshly self.

Is it different now for younger women? One of the consequences of missing out on the daughter I wanted is my nebulous ignorance about her generation. There is so much I don’t know about how most girls – and those who identify as girls – now feel in their bodies. At the beach I see them striding in and out of the water with loose graceful arms, looking so confident in their bare unblemished skin. At the tram stops I see them tightly clad and high-heeled, heading out to clubs with their friends (I asked Urban Dictionary for a definition of ‘clubbing’ and got ‘when women go out to dance in circles and men go out to hunt them’). They seem so fearless, even though the official statistics about sexual violence experienced by Australian women (one in five) could make them feel afraid. Maybe those young women at the beach and on their way to the clubs are working just as hard at the performance of self-assurance as I used to.

Harassment and assaults are still commonplace, but I tell myself that at least now they must know it’s not their fault. The #metoo movement, the consent education, the workplace harassment policies, the drink spiking warnings, the emergency numbers posted on toilet doors in pubs and clubs, have all delivered the same message – the shame does not belong to you.

I’m now sixty-one, and most of my shame has been washed away by the passing decades. But there is still grief, about the lost moments and hours and years during which I could have enjoyed the feel of warm wood against my bare back, the freedom of splayed knees, the sun beating down on my semi-naked flesh, the sweat seeping from my unshaven underarms as I smiled into a camera, posing carelessly for posterity.

(This essay was first published in The Saturday Paper in June 2026)