The Dupe Trap

(This Isn't LITERALLY About A Bag...But Also Yes, It's About A Bag)

It is always so small at the start that it feels almost childish to admit. A handbag, maybe. Something that exists not because you need it but because you want to feel a certain way in your own life. Like a person who is not perpetually arriving late to herself.

And because it is small, it becomes a perfect site for punishment.

The moment the wanting appears, the courtroom convenes. Not a dramatic courtroom, just the familiar panel of internal voices. Do you need it. Is it sensible. Wouldn’t something cheaper do. The questions carry the same rhythm as your well-meaning elders, which is why they get to wear the costume of virtue.

This internal jury is rarely about the money. It’s about the permission.

A woman’s shopping cart can feel like a confessional box. Not because she’s buying anything scandalous, but because wanting itself still feels like something that requires explanation. You add the item. You stare at it. You perform the ritual pause that pretends to be prudence, though it is often closer to fear. And then you do what modern prudence looks like: you open another tab.

The original sits there with the infuriating calm of a thing that knows exactly what it is. The dupe appears with eager helpfulness: same look, same vibe, half the price, no guilt. It is framed as intelligence. As maturity.

But what it is really offering is innocence. A way to exit the moment without being indicted by your own desire.

You can have something nice, it whispers, as long as you don’t look like someone who expects nice things.

The dupe is not simply cheaper. The dupe is simpler. It arrives with an alibi pre-attached. It lets you want without fully owning the wanting, lets you participate in pleasure while still performing restraint. It lets you keep your self-image intact: sensible, grounded, not that kind of woman.

When you choose it, you feel relief. You have solved the problem. You have been good.

Later, you will discover the particular cruelty of “fine.” Fine is functional. Fine is defensible. Fine is not what you wanted. The strap doesn’t sit right, the hardware looks too shiny, the colour pulls slightly wrong in daylight. Nothing is technically broken, which means you can’t even be righteously angry. You can only feel, in small recurring pulses, that dull recognition: this isn’t it. This isn’t the feeling I came here for.

But you keep using it. Because the most humiliating thing about settling is admitting you settled.

The Alibi

“It’s basically the same.”

You hear it in dressing rooms and Sephora aisles and group chats, in the small pause before someone hits “place order.” It sounds like a shrug. But it turns desire into a decision you can defend.

Because “basically the same” is not a claim about material. It is a claim about character. It means: I’m not the kind of woman who needs the real thing. I’m not dramatic, I’m not wasteful, I’m not trying too hard. Don’t audit me.

The audit is always implied. This is why women pre-emptively narrate their purchases even when nobody has asked. The story is rarely “I wanted it.” The story comes dressed in justification. “It was on sale.” “I’ll use it constantly.” “I’ve been thinking about it for months.” The point is not the argument itself. The point is to signal that you are responsible enough to be left alone.

Listen to the way women talk after buying something nice. The voice changes. Drops, or laughs, or adds “don’t judge me” so reflexively it functions as punctuation. There is a particular laugh women use when they are about to confess something they expect to be punished for. They will deploy it even among friends who adore them, even in rooms where no one is keeping score, because the habit is no longer about whether anyone is actually judging. The habit is about the possibility of judgment, and possibility is enough to shape a life.

Men do not do this. Men buy expensive things and call them hobbies.

Sometimes the alibi is external. It’s not “I bought it” but “my husband got it for me.” “It was a gift.” “I had credit card points.” The object remains the same, but the math shifts when you can attach the purchase to a system outside yourself. You did not choose yourself; someone else sanctioned it. Someone else can be held responsible if anyone decides to make a fuss.

In India, there is a specific performance attached to any comfort that is not shared. We are permitted to be generous, dutiful, sacrificial. We are not permitted to be self-indulgent, which is often just another word for self-directed. The difference between spending on a mother’s health checkup and spending on your own massage. One earns applause. The other invites questions. Same money, different verdict.

So the dupe becomes the safest way to keep the comfort while keeping the halo.

Even the language around dupes is moral. “Smart buy.” “Steal.” “Worth it.” It’s framed as rebellion against an expensive, greedy world, but for women it is more often submission. The compromise you make with the invisible presence standing behind you, ready to comment on your taste, your priorities, your seriousness.

And “basically the same” is a survival tactic. It is how you acquire something and still remain the kind of woman people leave alone.

But alibis do not feel like joy. They feel like relief.

Relief is the feeling of getting away with something. Relief is not satisfaction. It is the sensation of staying within bounds, of not being scolded. This is why the dupe begins disappointing you almost immediately. Not because it is always bad (some dupes are excellent), but because the purchase was never really about the object. It was about the performance: I am sensible. I am good. I am not too much.

When you buy something as a defence, you end up living with a defence. And a defence makes a life smaller.

The Economy of Guilt

Who profits when women feel guilty about wanting things?

The dupe industry is not an accident. It is a market that has learned to arbitrage female shame. Scroll through Instagram and you will find an entire ecosystem devoted to “affordable alternatives”. Accounts with millions of followers whose entire value proposition is helping women avoid the psychic cost of buying what they actually want. The language is cheerful and sisterly. Why spend ₹50,000 when you can get the same look for ₹3,000? The implication is that wanting the original was foolish, a little embarrassing, a mark of poor financial hygiene.

The influencer who shows you the dupe is not saving you money. She is saving you from judgment and monetizing the rescue. Affiliate links, brand partnerships, sponsored posts; there is real revenue in helping women feel virtuous about settling. The guilt is the product. The dupe is just the delivery mechanism.

Brands understand this too. The mid-market is now designed with dupes in mind. A luxury house releases a silhouette; within weeks, the fast-fashion supply chain produces a version close enough to satisfy the want but cheap enough to evade the guilt. The original sells to women who have made peace with their desires; the copy sells to everyone still negotiating.

And so a woman finds herself standing between two nearly identical objects, one of which costs ten times more than the other, and the market has arranged things so that choosing the cheaper one feels like intelligence rather than loss. She is being congratulated for her practicality when what has actually happened is that an industry has found a way to convert her self-doubt into margin.

The economy of guilt extends beyond products. Consider the financial services marketed specifically to women: the savings apps with pink interfaces, the investment platforms that emphasize “safety” over growth, the retirement calculators that frame ambition as risk. The pitch is always the same. We understand that you’re nervous, that money feels complicated, that you need hand-holding. The underlying assumption is that female financial anxiety is natural rather than cultivated. That women are constitutionally more risk-averse, rather than systematically taught to be.

There is money in keeping women uncertain. Uncertain women buy dupes. Uncertain women accept the first salary offered. Uncertain women stay in jobs and relationships that are “fine.” Certainty is expensive, not because it requires wealth, but because it requires you to stop being profitable to the people who benefit from your hesitation.

The machinery is visible once you know where to look. A woman searches “best leather bag under 10,000” and the algorithm takes note. Now she will be shown dupes for months. Her feed will fill with “look for less” content, with “dupe alerts,” with cheerful women holding two objects side by side and asking can you even tell the difference? The question is rhetorical. The answer is supposed to be no. But the real answer, that one of those objects was chosen and the other was settled for, is never part of this dialouge.

What interests me is the tone. Dupe culture is never pitched as compromise. It is pitched as cleverness, as a way of beating the system, of being too smart to be fooled by branding. The woman who buys the original is implicitly positioned as a sucker, someone who fell for marketing, who lacks the critical thinking to see through the scam of luxury. The dupe buyer, by contrast, is savvy. She is a researcher. She has done the work.

But this framing serves the market, not the woman. It turns a limitation into an identity. It makes settling feel like winning. And it ensures that the next time she wants something, the same internal negotiation will begin, because she has now built a self-concept around not wanting the real thing.

The guilt has been converted into pride.

The Class Question

The dupe trap, as I am articulating it, is not primarily a story about economic constraint. It is a story about psychological constraint, the kind that operates even when, perhaps especially when, a woman could afford the original.

This distinction matters because collapsing them is dishonest. For a woman genuinely stretched between rent and groceries, choosing the cheaper version is not a failure of self-permission. It is math. The dupe, in that context, is not a trap but a tool. A way of participating in the aesthetics of a life you cannot yet afford, without derailing the life you are trying to build. There is dignity in that. There is even pleasure in it: the resourcefulness of making do, the creativity of finding alternatives, the satisfaction of not being excluded from beauty simply because beauty is expensive.

The trap I am describing is different. It is what happens when a woman can afford the thing she wants, and still cannot let herself have it.

This is a middle-class affliction, in the specific sense that the Indian middle class has a tortured relationship with comfort. We are close enough to scarcity to remember it, close enough to wealth to see it, and caught in a strange purgatory where spending on yourself still feels like tempting fate. The money might be there, but the permission is not, because permission was never granted by the previous generation, and so it does not feel yours to grant yourself.

I have watched women with robust salaries and healthy savings agonize over a ₹5,000 purchase as though it would bankrupt them. The agony is not about the five thousand rupees. It is about what spending it means, that you have become someone who expects things, that you have drifted from your origins, that you are no longer the kind of person your family raised you to be. The money is there. The story will not allow it to be spent.

And so middle-class women develop a particular virtuosity: spending freely on others while starving themselves. The generous daughter, the dutiful wife, the thoughtful friend, always able to find budget for someone else’s comfort, always hesitating at her own.

There is a version of the dupe trap that has nothing to do with what you can afford and everything to do with what you believe you deserve. And that belief was installed long before you ever had a salary.

The confusion between these two situations, genuine constraint and psychological constraint, is part of what makes the trap so effective. A woman who could afford the original will tell herself she is being “practical,” borrowing the language of necessity to disguise what is actually happening: a failure of permission. She will say “it’s not worth it” when what she means is “I’m not worth it.” She will say “I don’t need it” when what she means is “I don’t trust my own wanting enough to act on it.”

And because the dupe exists, she never has to confront this directly. The dupe lets her have something without having to decide she deserves it. The dupe lets her participate in wanting without fully committing to the want. It is a hedge against her own desire, a way of saying yes and no at the same time.

This is why more money does not automatically solve the problem. I have seen women’s salaries double and their spending guilt remain perfectly intact. The money changes; the story does not. The internal committee still convenes. The same questions still arise: Who do you think you are? Why do you need this? Wouldn’t something simpler do?

Fine as Inheritance

Watch a mother take a daughter shopping and you will see the curriculum. Not in what is said but in what is modeled. The way the mother handles price tags, the small shake of the head, the redirection toward something “more practical.” The daughter learns that wanting is a negotiation. That the technically-true statement we can’t afford it often means something closer to we don’t do that.

This is how “fine” becomes hereditary.

A mother who has spent decades adjusting to in-laws, to scarcity, to a husband’s moods, to her own deferred ambitions, teaches adjustment as survival. She does not mean to limit her daughter. She means to protect her from being seen as demanding, from wanting things the world will not give easily. The lesson is delivered as love. It is received as permission denied.

And so women learn to appraise their own desires the way customs officers appraise luggage: what are you carrying, where did you get it, do you have documentation? By adulthood, most women do not even notice they are doing it. They simply experience their own wanting as already-filtered, already-reduced, pre-approved for passage.

The Indian daughter inherits a specific version of this. She inherits the notion that comfort must be earned through suffering. That you cannot want ease until you have paid sufficient dues. She inherits the idea that her parents did without, and therefore she should feel guilty about having. She inherits the mathematics of scarcity even when scarcity no longer applies: we saved so you could have, which curdles into how dare you have without saving.

The guilt is the inheritance. The dupe is just where it shows up at checkout.

Women also police each other. The friend who raises an eyebrow at a purchase. The sister who asks “how much?” in a tone that is already a verdict. The colleague who praises you for being “so low-maintenance,” which is a compliment that functions as a fence. These are women who have made their own peace with deprivation and cannot watch someone else exit the contract without feeling betrayed.

This is the inability to witness another woman’s freedom without experiencing it as a judgment on your own captivity. And so women keep each other small, not out of cruelty but out of a shared wound that has never been named clearly enough to heal.

The only way out is to recognize the inheritance for what it is, as someone else’s scarcity, someone else’s rules, and to decide, deliberately, that you are not obligated to carry it forward. This is harder than it sounds. It can feel like arrogance. It can feel like you are abandoning the women who came before you.

But continuing their deprivation is not loyalty. It is just more deprivation.

The most insidious part is that the inheritance often skips a generation before revealing itself. A woman whose mother sacrificed everything will sometimes rebel. Will spend freely, will refuse the old guilt, will declare herself free. But then she has a daughter. The old programming resurfaces, not as a conscious philosophy but as a flinch. She finds herself saying the same things her mother said. Do you really need that? We have things at home. Maybe for your birthday.

And so the inheritance continues, not through explicit teaching but through a thousand small moments. A raised eyebrow. A redirected hand. A “let’s look at the sale section first.” A tone of voice that signals you are asking for too much without ever using those words. The daughter may not remember any single incident, but she will carry the sum of them into every store, every negotiation, every moment of wanting for the rest of her life.

What Men Get to Call It

Consider, for contrast, what happens when a man wants something expensive.

He wants a watch. The want is not filtered through a jury; it is simply declared. He researches. He compares. He discusses it with other men who also want watches, and these conversations are not confessional; they are hobbyist. The watch is an interest. The interest is a personality trait. The purchase, when it comes, is an investment: in quality, in craftsmanship, in something that will last, possibly appreciate. No one asks him to justify the wanting. The wanting is already justified by the fact of his wanting it.

Or he wants a bike, or a gaming rig, or a single malt collection, or a cricket subscription that costs more per year than most women spend on skincare. These are hobbies. They are passions. They are the things that make life worth living. The language available to men for their discretionary spending is expansive and unapologetic. It assumes that a man’s pleasure is a legitimate expense.

Now watch what happens when a woman wants something equivalent.

She wants a bag.A bag is not an investment; it is a vanity. It is not a hobby; it is a shopping habit. It is not a passion; it is a weakness. The same amount of money that would make a man a connoisseur makes a woman a spendthrift. The same research that would make him discerning makes her obsessive. The same pleasure that would make him interesting makes her shallow.

This is not about the objects. It is about whose desire is allowed to be expensive.

Boys are socialized early into the legitimacy of their wants. A boy wants a video game and the household adjusts; the purchase happens or it doesn’t, but the wanting itself is not pathologized. A girl wants something and she is already being taught to broker: maybe for your birthday, maybe if you do well in exams, maybe a cheaper version. The boy learns that wanting is natural. The girl learns that wanting is conditional.

By adulthood, these lessons have calcified. Men spend and call it investment. Women spend and call it guilt. Men buy and display. Women buy and hide the price tag, or cut it off and bury it in the trash so no one sees the evidence.

I am not arguing that men are free from financial anxiety, or that male spending is always healthy. I am arguing that the frame is different. A man’s expensive purchase is presumed rational until proven otherwise. A woman’s expensive purchase is presumed frivolous until she successfully defends it.

And so women become very good at defence. They become lawyers for their own desires, preparing briefs, anticipating cross-examination. They learn to want in ways that come pre-argued. They learn that the wanting itself is not enough. There must also be a case.

The dupe is what happens when you get tired of making the case. It is a plea bargain. You plead guilty to wanting, and in exchange, you get a reduced sentence.

There is something else worth noting: the way male spending is narrated after the fact. A man buys an expensive watch and the story is about the watch. Its movement, its history, its craftsmanship. The object is allowed to be interesting in itself. A woman buys an expensive bag and the story is about her. Her values, her priorities, whether she is “that kind of person.” The object becomes evidence in a character trial.

This is why women over-explain their purchases and men simply have them. A man’s want does not need to be translated into reason; it is accepted as reason enough. A woman’s want must be processed through a kind of moral customs before it is allowed to exist in peace.

The effect, over time, is that men develop a fluent relationship with their own desires while women develop a suspicious one. Men learn to want. Women learn to want with asterisks.

The Audience

The most intimate form of surveillance is the kind you cannot see.

It is not a person. It is a presence. The composite of every comment ever made about women and money, women and vanity, women and their priorities. It assembles itself from relatives and strangers and advertisements and that one colleague who once said “must be nice” in a tone you still remember. It does not need to be in the room because it has taken up residence in your head.

This is the audience women perform for when they shop.

You can be entirely alone, ten minutes into an online scroll, and still feel watched. Still hear the possible remarks. Still perform the small preventative theatre of clicking away from the thing you want toward the thing you can explain. The audience does not need to speak because you have learned to speak for it. You have internalized its voice so thoroughly that its judgments feel like your own thoughts.

Social media has democratized the comment section. Now every woman with any visibility at all understands what it feels like to have her choices dissected by strangers who believe female pleasure is a public resource, subject to public approval. Post a photo and wait for the audit: where is that from, how much did it cost, is that real, must be nice, some of us have real problems. The comments are never really about the object. They are about the woman’s right to have it without apology.

Even women with no public profile absorb this. You do not need to be an influencer to understand that the world has opinions about women who look satisfied. You learn it from observing what happens to other women. The backlash, the scrutiny, the strange resentment that attaches to female contentment. And you adjust. You make yourself less visible. Less satisfied. Less.

A woman who is visibly pleased with herself is treated as a provocation. This is why the dupe becomes a form of camouflage. It is the purchase that does not provoke. It does not invite envy or scrutiny or the weird aggression that satisfied women attract. It lets you have something nice while still looking like you know your place.

Because satisfied women are dangerous. A woman who has what she wants might stop performing. She might stop apologizing. She might stop making herself smaller to make others comfortable. She might expect things. She might start to believe that her wants are legitimate, that her pleasure matters, that she does not need to justify her existence through endless sacrifice and endless settling.

The dupe keeps you safe from becoming that woman. It keeps you deniable. It keeps you in the category of women who are still humble, still striving, still safe to be around.

And the cost of that safety is that you never quite get what you came for.

This audience is harshest precisely when you are alone. In public, around actual people, you can sometimes forget it. You can be distracted by conversation, by the social texture of a moment. But alone, scrolling, considering, the audience returns at full volume. This is when the negotiation happens. This is when you talk yourself out of things, or into lesser things, or away from the whole question of wanting.

The audience is most powerful when it cannot be argued with, when it is not a real person making a real objection but a composite of possible objections, assembled from memory and fear. A real person can be persuaded, reasoned with, ignored. The imagined audience cannot. It is always right, always watching, always ready to find you guilty of the crime of wanting your own life.

And so you perform for it. You perform modesty. You perform practicality. You perform the kind of woman who doesn’t make waves, doesn’t expect too much, doesn’t take up more than her allotted space. You perform until the performance becomes indistinguishable from personality, until you can no longer tell if you genuinely prefer the simpler option or have simply been trained to believe you do.

Living with a Defence

Once you learn to negotiate yourself downward in one domain, the skill generalizes. You start recognizing the same sensation in places that have nothing to do with shopping.

There is a version of a job you accept the way you accept a dupe: not because it matches what you want, but because it is defensible. The brand name that silences relatives. The salary that looks responsible. The role that is “stable,” a word used like a sedative. You say yes because the other thing, the riskier thing, the more alive thing, feels like it would require too much explanation.

And then you do what you have always done. You adapt. You learn to make it work. You file down the parts of yourself that do not fit. You call your boredom “learning” and your shrinking “professionalism.” You stop asking whether you like it because the question has become expensive.

One day you look at your calendar and realize you are living inside the professional equivalent of a bag whose strap never sits right. Nothing is technically wrong. Your title is fine. Your parents are proud. The only problem is that you are somewhere you never meant to be, and the part of you that wanted something else has gone silent.

There is a kind of relationship women enter the way they buy dupes: because it is easier to justify than to want. He is decent. He is stable. Your mother can sleep. The relationship functions. It does not, importantly, invite drama. And women are taught from girlhood that drama is the worst possible sin. Worse than boredom, worse than loneliness, worse than vague sadness, worse than the slow suffocation of being unseen.

So you accept the stable man the way you accept the stable job, with relief that pretends to be happiness. You tell yourself passion is for teenagers. You tell yourself you are lucky to have someone “good,” because women are trained to feel greedy when they want both goodness and aliveness in the same person.

You become the woman who makes it work. Who explains him to others. Who shrinks her needs into something he can handle. Who praises herself for being low-maintenance.

And one day you catch yourself swallowing disappointment before it becomes visible, and you realize you are living with a dupe. Not a fake person, a real person. But a relationship that is “basically the same” as love while never delivering the feeling you came for.

The dupe trap teaches you to accept “fine” so thoroughly that you mistake it for your own preference. You start believing you are genuinely low-maintenance. You start confusing self-denial with being easy-going. You start feeling superior for not wanting much, when what has actually happened is that you have learned to distrust your own appetite.

And then someone says, “but it’s just a bag,” in the tone of a person who has never had to defend their pleasure.

Yes. It is just a bag.

That’s why it matters.

Because if you cannot let yourself want a small thing without building a case against yourself, what happens when the stakes are higher? When you want to ask for a raise, and the same internal tribunal convenes? When you want to set a boundary, and the same fear of being “too much” kicks in? When you want to leave something, and the same voice whispers who do you think you are?

I think about the women I know who have done this with their entire lives. Women who had ambitions they edited before speaking. Women who wanted to move cities but talked themselves into staying because staying was easier to explain. Women who wanted to leave but convinced themselves that “fine” was enough, that asking for more was greedy, that the ache they felt every morning was simply what adulthood felt like.

They are not weak. They are not stupid. They are women who learned, through a thousand repetitions, that the safest way to want something is to want something smaller instead. Who learned that the punishment for visible desire is worse than the pain of invisible deprivation. Who learned to build lives out of “close enough” because “close enough” could be defended and the real thing could not.

The dupe trap is not about shopping. It is about what happens when self-denial becomes so automatic that you can no longer feel it happening. When the defence becomes the desire. When you lose access to your own preferences because they have been filtered so many times they no longer register as yours.

The Politeness Tax

There is a unique discomfort women feel in rooms where money is discussed by people who are paid to discuss it.

A bank. A dealership. A financial advisor’s office. The discomfort is not about the money itself, it is about the performance required to appear competent while simultaneously being treated as though you are not. Someone turns a screen toward you, highlights a single number (the EMI, always the EMI), and speaks in that brisk tone that pretends to be helpful while rushing you past the parts that matter.It feels like everyone does this. It feels like you are wasting their time if you insist on understanding.

The industry just needs you to be polite.

Women sign things they do not fully understand because they do not want to seem difficult. They do not want to look ignorant, or slow, or demanding. They do not want the person across the desk to sigh, or repeat themselves, or make that small face that suggests you are being a problem. So you nod. You smile. You trade comprehension for smoothness, and tell yourself you will figure it out later.

This is the politeness tax. The fee extracted from women for prioritizing likability over information.

The alternative is not to avoid financial instruments entirely, though many women do that too. They decide that debt is “bad,” EMIs are “traps,” credit cards are “dangerous,” and they build an identity around never touching them. Avoidance couched as discipline. It keeps you dependent on other people’s fluency. It keeps you from using tools that, properly understood, can make life easier.

Financial literacy for women is fundamentally about becoming un-rushable.

It means asking for the interest rate and whether it is flat or reducing. It means asking for the total repayment amount, not just the monthly figure. It means asking about processing fees, prepayment penalties, late charges. It means asking for the document and reading it outside the room, where no one is watching you. If the person across the table becomes impatient, notice that impatience for what it is: a business model that depends on your discomfort.

Women are trained to treat questions as imposition. That training is expensive.

It connects to the dupe trap because the mechanism is the same. In shopping, the dupe lets you avoid being the woman who wants too much. In finance, silence lets you avoid being the woman who asks too much. Both keep you pleasant. Both keep you smaller than you need to be.

What Unlearning Feels Like

The first time you buy something without justifying it, you will feel a lurch.

You wait for the internal tribunal to convene, and it does not. Or it does, and you let it talk, and then you buy the thing anyway. The gavel does not fall. No one appears to punish you. The world continues.

This is disorienting, if you have spent years believing that unjustified wanting would somehow be detected and penalized.

You bring the thing home. You do not hide the bag it came in. You do not cut out the price tag and bury it in the trash. You do not prepare a speech for anyone who might ask. You just... have it.

The pleasure, when it comes, is not euphoric. It’s a kind of settling, like a bone going back into socket. Oh, you think. This is what it feels like to just have something.

But then comes the second part. The guilt that arrives anyway.

The machinery takes time to dismantle. You have spent years associating purchase with defence, and the neural pathways do not disappear just because you have decided they should. So you feel guilty, and then you feel guilty about feeling guilty, and the whole thing becomes a small jumble of guilts that seem ridiculous to describe out loud.

This is normal. This is what unlearning feels like. It is a slow, irritating process of catching yourself mid-flinch and choosing differently anyway.

Some days you will backslide. You will buy the dupe when you meant to wait for the original. You will accept “fine” when you know you wanted more. You will hear yourself performing the old alibis and feel the familiar undertow of a habit that is not yet broken.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is recognition. To notice, each time, what is actually happening: not a financial decision but an identity negotiation. Not prudence but fear. Not maturity but the old inherited constriction, still running its program.

And then, noticing, to choose again.

There is something I want to say about what happens in the body when you finally buy the thing you wanted and let yourself have it without apology.

The first few times, it feels illicit. You keep waiting to be caught. You wear the thing and feel a strange self-consciousness, as though everyone can see that you wanted it, that you chose yourself, that you committed the crime of desire. But if you do it enough times, the vigilance fades. The pleasure clarifies. You start to understand what it feels like to simply have a thing, to use it, to enjoy it, without the purchase being a story about your character.

This is what unlearning actually produces: not a permanent state of freedom, but moments of it. Gaps in the old pattern. A growing familiarity with the texture of wanting without justification. What it feels like in the body, how it differs from the defended version. You start to recognize the difference between I don’t want that and I’m not allowing myself to want that. The two have different weights, different temperatures.

And slowly, you begin to trust your own appetite again.

Owning Wanting

It returns, always, to the same small scene.

You, alone, with your phone or your laptop or your thoughts. A tab open with the thing you want. Another tab open with the thing you can justify. And a third presence, invisible but heavy, that is not on the screen at all: the imagined audience, waiting to see what you will do.

For years, that audience has run the courtroom. It speaks in the voice of prudence. It tells you to be sensible, humble, low-maintenance. It reminds you where you came from. It warns you against becoming the kind of woman people talk about.

And the worst part is how reasonable it sounds. I It sits inside you and speaks calmly, and because you want to be a good person, you listen.

So you click the dupe. You feel relief. You tell yourself the matter is closed.

But wanting does not disappear because you refused it. It reroutes. It becomes low-grade restlessness, resentment. It becomes the second purchase, and the third, none of which satisfy, because none of them were the thing. It becomes a habit of “close enough” that eventually attaches to everything: work, love, ambition, the whole architecture of a life.

One day, if you are paying attention, you realize the question was never about the bag. It was about whether you are allowed to be a woman who chooses herself without apology. Whether you are permitted to spend money on your own ease without converting it first into virtue.

So many women are not trying to spend. They are trying to remain unpunishable.

They are trying to stay likable. Respectable. Good. They are trying to avoid the old accusations that circle female pleasure. Vanity, frivolity, shallowness. They are trying not to become a story.

So they purchase innocence. They purchase modesty. They purchase deniability. They purchase a life in which they can always say, if challenged, I didn’t really want it that much anyway.

But you cannot build a satisfying life out of deniability.

A satisfying life requires you to admit you want. To be specific about it. To let the wanting be visible, even when you cannot perfectly justify it to people whose approval you do not need.

This does not mean buying everything. It does not mean ignoring money, or pretending consequences do not exist. It means building the muscle of wanting. Assessing honestly: Do I want this? Can I afford it? Is it worth it to me? And then choosing.

The world will still have opinions. The audience does not retire. But something shifts when you stop letting the audience write your receipts. Your life gets calmer. Not smaller. Calmer. The constant background negotiation dims. You stop paying for innocence. You start paying for what you actually came for.

Which, most of the time, is not the object. It is the feeling of being allowed to inhabit your own life.

And that should not require tricks or loopholes or dupes. It should not need to be smuggled past an internal customs office. It should be the most ordinary thing in the world: a woman, looking at what she wants, and letting herself have it.

Not as proof of anything.

Just as a form of being alive.

This is not an essay against dupes. Some dupes are excellent. Some preferences are genuinely modest. Some women truly do not care about the bag and are not performing indifference, they simply have other things they want more.

This is an essay against the habit of settling before you have even asked yourself what you want. Against the reflex that converts desire into apology. Against the way women are taught to treat their own pleasure as a debt that must be justified before it can be incurred.

The next time you have two tabs open, try asking a different question. Not can I justify this but what am I actually trying to justify? Not is this sensible but whose definition of sensible am I using? Not what will people think but why am I still performing for people who are not in the room?

The answers may not change what you buy. But they will change why you buy it. And that is where freedom lives, in the quality of the choosing. In the difference between selecting and settling.

You are allowed to want things. You are allowed to want specific things. You are allowed to want the actual thing you want, not the safer version, not the more explainable version, not the version that will draw less attention.

The world will not end. The audience will not descend. You will simply be a woman who chose herself, once, in a small way.

And then perhaps again. And again.

Until it stops feeling like rebellion and starts feeling like what it always should have been:

Ordinary. Unremarkable. Yours.