Looking back

This started out as a comment on Just A Girl‘s post, but got huge and unwieldy and I didn’t want to vomit on her blog. Just A Girl used to be a nude model, and has recently quit. I liked her when she was a nude model (both the blogging and, well, I’ll admit I found her via a tube search for teh nudez), and I’m a little sad she quit (I am a fan of teh nudez), but I’m intensely interested in what she’s doing now, and her mental journey out of the business. I think she’s doing some awesome, intelligent processing on what being nude and being a feminist and making the switch to a non-nude feminist means.

Plugging done. Here’s her post:

Here’s my comment that turned into a blog. Maybe I should rename my blog TL;DR and have done with it:

I went through a nasty divorce recently, with an abusive partner. Putting my life back together meant spending a lot of time thinking about what from my old life was part of me, what was something I’d developed to cope, what was something that was part of me but I didn’t want anymore, and all these perplexing shades in between.

I used to be very very focused on being skinny and fit and immaculate looking. Spent time at the gym every day, constant battle to wear the clothes I thought would make me look best, instead of the clothes I liked. Perfect hair, hours in front of the mirror pinching this thigh or that. There was a lot going into that, but a very significant portion of it was due to the abuse, to being called fat, to being called ugly. My husband also had an overboiling need to have other people consider him special and unique and kingly — which meant he had to have a beautiful wife, the kind that anybody would want to have, the kind that could have anybody she wanted; it was very important that I could have anybody, but he was the one who owned me.

After the divorce, I was sussing out who among our mutual friends was worth keeping and started doing a lot of heavy thinking about what friendship meant to me, what I wanted, what I had. And all of a sudden I realized: I hardly have any relationships in my life that aren’t based, to some significant extent, on my sexual attractiveness. Not to say that a lot or even the majority of relationships a woman might have will have some degree of sex in there. But you can tell the difference between a genuine friendship with somebody who also finds you attractive, and a friendship that is built on and/or maintained by unstoppable eye-fucking.

I sensed very strongly that if I stopped putting on a show, if I started wearing make-up the way I liked it, if I stopped working out and wearing fancy clothes, if I stopped flirting and making loud and raucous conversation about sex, the bottom was going to fall out of a lot of my friendships. Partly because I would no longer be “desirable,” and partly because of the new kind of independence and autonomy that was indicated by a decision to remove myself from somebody else’s desires. I had built myself up as somebody to be valued by my looks, by how much you might want to fuck me, and so no surprise, it turned out that the people who surrounded me were the ones who liked that shit. People who had friendships based on significantly more palatable interpersonal qualities were, well, not in a 100 foot radius of me, Ms. Giggle And Shake a Tit.

(I should mention at some point that when I’m saying “people,” I’m mostly saying “men.” I’m bisexual, and I’ve had a few unhealthy and inappropriate female relationships based on the same principle, which is why I’ve stayed generally gender neutral throughout this. That being said, don’t be fooled — you weren’t, were you — mostly I am talking about men. When women have inappropriately sapphic friendships with each other, it’s kind of a rare exception, something you have to look for. It’s not hard to find a guy who will have an inappropriately sexual relationship with a woman, whether she wants it or no.)

I remember, back then, being insecure about my body and my looks — they were such a focus of my time and energy, and so much rode on them, I couldn’t help but be insecure. But that’s nothing compared to how I feel about my body now. I have gained some weight since then, and gone through some struggle figuring out how to get it off and keep it off without the benefit of that overwhelming drive to be attractive no matter what. When I walk down the street and no longer expect, as a given, to turn every head, I feel deflated and worthless. And that opens up this new world to me, new questions, a new self. Before, I never would have asked, is it really important that somebody wants to fuck me? I never would have had the follow-up questions, like, how much do I enjoy it when other people are attracted to me? Do I get any sexual pleasure out of that? Do I even want any of these people to fuck me? Do I want to think about them wanting to fuck me? Do I enjoy that?

What does my body want that has nothing to do with what somebody else thinks of it?

And I discovered, my god, I have no idea. There’s just this large empty hole where the answers should be.

I’ve been learning a lot of new things about myself, going deeper than I would have thought to go, because this insecurity drives me there. Because I’m so aware of my body, and so aware of how others are not, I have noticed that when I feel ugly, when I feel fat, when I feel gross, I am less likely to masturbate, less likely to even think anything sexual at all. Conversely, I am more likely to want my partner to have sex with me. Not because I want sex or think I will enjoy it, but because I feel like his enjoyment of my body will make it an acceptable piece of meat. And then I think back to those years when I was fit and perfect and knew it, and I realize I didn’t feel any differently then. I knew, in an objective sense, that I looked good, but I didn’t enjoy my body then anymore than I do now. And all I wanted was for somebody else to fuck me or want to fuck me, to validate that my body was okay.

I have had sex problems most of my life. I have also had abuse problems most of my life, and I pretty well think the latter is the cause of the former. But it’s been hard to pick apart, process, understand, accept. Sex is such a basic part of life and adulthood, to be unable to understand my own desires makes me feel pretty fucking stupid. Like not knowing how to pick up a fork, or open a window, or put on my clothes. It helps to make some of the connections I’ve been making while writing this. I can perhaps count on one hand the number of times I have met/seen somebody that caused me to feel sexual desire. Or, I should say, recognize sexual desire. I’m sure it’s been there and I haven’t quite accessed it. But when I hear people say things like, “I saw this guy, and man, I’d love to fuck him,” that’s like moon-talk to me. I can’t even imagine what that feels like, what kind of thoughts go through somebody’s head when they are fantasizing about a person, or when they just feel aroused by another person’s body. “Erotic” is a word that’s never meant anything to me at all.

I’ve always felt like I must just be missing some cylinder that’s supposed to be firing, like somebody amputated the place where my desire to fuck should be. Not that I don’t desire to fuck, but I’m realizing more and more how delineated that desire is. I was re-reading Wasted, and Hornbacher was talking about it being a misconception that anoretics don’t eat. They eat, but they only eat safe foods. They may have some exotic and nonsensical ritual to determine what is safe and how one can eat it, but as long as it meets their criteria, it can be eaten without guilt. I think I have developed the same feeling about sex. When my partner is aroused, I can be, too. When my partner enjoys having sex, so can I. What my partner wants to do is okay for me to want to do. If my partner thinks my body is attractive, it can feel attractive. If my partner wants me to be aroused, I can be aroused. But I am very very bad at doing any of these things for myself.

Having written about all that, I look back and wonder if those incredibly sexually intense subtextual friendships I had were my equivalent of seeing a guy on the street and wanting to fuck him. I was close enough to these people to tell they wanted to have sex with me, and the more open that validation got, the better and more attractive I felt. The more my body felt like it had a right to exist, that it made me an okay person, and that I could desire to be in intimate contact with another person. In those friendships, it was okay for me to feel sexual desire, all the time pretending it was their sexual desire I was experiencing and responding to. And because, to my husband, the more other men wanted to have sex with me the better he felt about owning me, it was okay for me to maintain those friendships in front of him. If nothing else, I think the fact that I still reluctantly went home with him was the hard-on he got out of it — we certainly weren’t doing it for each other.

I considered saying something here about Mr. Flint and his lack of desire, lack of sex, lack of… stuff… but I don’t want to be persnickety, and it’s probably a post for another time. Suffice to say, Mr. Flint did not like my body, Mr. Flint did not seem to want to have much to do with any female body, or his own, and the most Mr. Flint ever enjoyed sex was when he knew I didn’t like it — he did not get a whole lot out of reciprocated guilt-free pleasure. So, what a mindfuck there — you can only enjoy sex if somebody else is enjoying it, and the person you have sex with only likes it if it’s painful or degrading to you. What I learned from that, I guess, is a whole lot of “shut up and take it, it’s the best you’re going to get,” which, now that I think about it, is pretty similar to the things I say in my head when I get in a bad place.

I don’t think I ever would have chosen to feel this way about my new body, if I had understood a choice in advance. I’m sure I would have chosen to go on being an object of desire for people I don’t know, like, or want to fuck. But I’m glad this massive change in my life forced me to this new place. I never would have started considering how the ways I feel about my body mirror the ways I feel about sex, how neither is okay, neither is something I can enjoy on its own merits unless somebody else has told me I can. I never would have realized there was this massive hole in me that needs approval to exist, that needs outside validation to identify and exonerate my most basic desires: the desire to feel wanted, to fuck, to have orgasms, to be touched, to touch, to be looked at and to look back. The looking back — I think that’s what I’m missing most of all.