This solo dance work explores ways in which the male gaze inhibits women's lived sexual expression and identity. As a choreographer and dancer, I will be utilizing creative and embodied research to physically interrogate the portrayal of female bodies as visual and sexual objects. I draw stylistically on the work of modern choreographer Pina Bausch, specifically exploring the way her work displays societally-recognizable misogynistic gender roles and objectified female bodies on stage, then contrasting that with powerful and deeply emotional movement expression from the female dancer, showing that she is much more than the images society places on her, and these images stifle her identity, her freedom, and her truth. I also draw on the work of writer and art critic John Berger, primarily in his examination of the culture of voyeurism and exploitation of female bodies in classical nude paintings. I incorporate bodily shapes from these "nudes'' and also from contemporary advertisements, in both of which women's bodies are often sculpted and twisted out of realistic proportion in order to better suit the male viewer's fantasy, ultimately born of a male fear of rejection from the sexually empowered and autonomous woman. My embodiment of these images exposes the effort and exhaustion behind them. The visceral emotionality in this work comes from my desire to physically challenge these ideas within my own body, as I explore the ways in which I've internalized and performed these harmful notions of desirability and femininity in my daily life.