What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast

shared guide book on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing,

because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice.

What is up and welcome back to Working Hard? I'm very glad you're here for this episode because

this is a topic I've been wanting to unpack for such a long time, not from a place of

blame at all, but from a place of realism, an agency and like how we can be authentic people to ourselves.

Today we're talking all about decentering men and asking the question, how do you truly

live for yourself in a world that still quietly rewards women for being palatable,

attractive and easy to approve of? Because the reality is we're all growing up and moving through a patriarchal

system and even when we intellectually reject it, it is incredibly hard not to internalize it,

not least because you're usually rewarded when you do. The male gaze isn't just about who you're

attracted to or who you're dating. It's about the invisible audience that many of us learn to imagine when we

make decisions, consciously or subconsciously. So how will this look? How will I come across? Will this

make me less likable? I think the tricky thing is, once you start noticing this lens that you

like see your life through or see yourself through. It's really hard to unsee it.

So instead of just kind of spiraling about the state of the world, I really wanted to do a video

about what you do with that awareness and like how can you take this understanding that you are being

perceived in a certain way in a very specific society that has been built in a very specific way

and still know that and then re-senter yourself within your own life, which is something that I think I really had to learn in my late-teens, early 20s, probably, I mean, I'm still unlearning parts of that today. If I'm honest, I've personally found it easier to decenter external validation since entering a long-term relationship and getting married, which feels very

icky to say, but it is true. And I think that I don't want to sit here doing this video and be like,

oh, you need to desenter men, you need to not look at these things, all of that, because there is a very

real reality when it comes to heterosexual relationships in general that is like the female

...