I’m writing this standing up in an Apple store in New York, here in the city for 24 hours without a charger. Nobody has said a word to me, as I furtively steal their power while carefully keeping my face in neutral. The shop is busy with teenagers upgrading their iPhones and aggressively friendly staff, and the only still points are me and a man wearing three coats and broken flip-flops playing Candy Crush on an iPad. It is a quite lovely feeling to be, if not invisible, then at least translucent.

A book called An Unexplained Death came out last month, and I reread it on my journey – it appears to be a true crime thriller about a man’s final days, but quickly and sneakily reveals itself to be a memoir of the writer, Mikita Brottman. Years before starting it, Brottman went to see a psychoanalyst because she’d started to feel invisible. “I appeared to be completely forgettable,” she writes. To be “invisible”, she elaborates, “feels a little like being a ghost – people don’t seem to notice or acknowledge my presence, or look right through me. This has its advantages, though. I often feel as though I can learn people’s secrets, and get away with anything.”

Moix complained, 'I would like 50-year-old women to stop sending me photos of their bottoms and breasts'

I have been wallowing in this idea. Walking in the night alone, I feel a frantic kind of freedom, the eyes of strangers fall off me – I’m anti-climb paint. I can travel around peacefully, eat by myself, stand for as long as I want in front of a painting – and be ignored. I’ve never been pretty, but I have been young and thin, and I’ve always been female, and in that pie chart the central shape inevitably invites interest when seated alone. Walking near Central Park I remembered being on this street as a teenager, when a stranger pointed at my jeans and whispered: “Nice pussy.” No more.

Which is why I basked in 50-year-old French author Yann Moix’s comments about how women stop being attractive after the age of 25. Questioned after his initial Marie Claire interview came out, where he said it wasn’t possible to love a woman over the age of 50 – “Too, too old. The body of a 25-year-old woman is extraordinary. The body of a woman of 50 is not extraordinary at all” – he decided to double down, further explaining he was only attracted to Asian women, because they offer an “extraordinary link with another cosmos”. Outraged, thousands shared photos of Halle Berry and Jennifer Aniston, as well as their own pert bodies, leading him to plead to the Times: “I would like 50-year-old women to stop sending me photos of their bottoms and breasts.” Which seems fair. Because why should anybody attempt to change his mind? Not only should we laugh at the arrogance of his bumptious racist sexism, but we should celebrate his point – that a moment comes in woman’s lives when they no longer have to engage with men like Moix.

Until you are invisible to men like this, your body is theirs. You only get it back when they no longer find you sexy – and that is a relief like no other. How wonderful to walk down the street, whether in tight dress or muumuu (recently I have been wearing a lot of corduroy boiler suits) and not be constantly reassuring yourself, stiff-backed, not turning yourself into a human shield against strange men’s judgments, a running director’s commentary on how not to be a woman.

A version of this can be seen in the New York press in its nutty attempts to shame congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a confused scrabbling for conflict that exposes the single way it is possible to be a woman in public. Up to 25, you are looked at – after that, you must not be too loud or too quiet, or smile too much or too little, or be too thin or too fat, or be good at dancing or be bad at dancing. It’s no wonder so many women are put off jobs in power; it’s some wonder so many of us continue to internalise the sour taste we get of such exposure simply from walking down the street.

I look at my body differently now that it is no longer being looked at. There is a dehumanising effect to being seen by men like Moix, as you stand outside yourself, considering their view. And while I understand the shock of women being ignored upon turning 50, 60, having lost the sexual capital they’d leaned into for years, surely there is a great deal of comfort for them in becoming invisible, too. Especially on hearing the limits of the alternative spelled out in French, an author saying books should be judged by their covers.

Such dense bliss, this realisation that I can be invisible in a crowd, whether in this shop, where my face will be blurred in the background of two girls’ selfies, or in the street, where it should be possible to journey forward without the suspicion you’re trespassing in a stranger’s playground. Such relief to be the one looking, the one walking unseen, the person in the body that is no longer 25. It’s mine again.

And another thing…

I have spent some time watching the video of the 64m fatberg discovered beneath the Esplanade in Sidmouth, Devon. It is grey and tripe-like with ominous holes as if it’s been burrowed into by a fellow monster. If you look closely, I swear you see eyes.

Fellow Lindsay Lohan consumers will be excited to hear her explanation for the fascinating accent she’s been using for the past few years. It’s tha of a person for whom English is a second language. She revealed this week that she’s been speaking ‘Lilohan’.

I saw The Favourite this week, a beautiful and hilarious film – the natural lighting of which made me understand pearls for the first time. Lines from it keep returning to me like bubbles of joy. ‘I’ve sent for some lobsters. I thought we could race them and eat them.’ And: ‘Your carriage awaits, and my maid is on her way up with something called a pineapple.’

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman