quizzical pussy

I’d love to be confident enough and secure enough with myself to be naked in front of a camera, and not burst into tears, and not feel horrible about the resulting photos.

Body acceptance is hard for anyone, I think. We all have things that we hate about our bodies, things that we feel severely limit our worth as sexual objects and maybe even as people. If you don’t feel this way, maybe I’m just projecting my own self-loathing onto you and assuming I’m more normal than I really am. That’s entirely possible. But I hear the way people tend to talk about their bodies, sometimes with a nervous half-laugh, maintaining a facade of plausible deniability in case some one figures out that they occasionally, maybe often, all of them, feel like trolls. Because NO ONE MUST KNOW.

We’re told that confidence is sexy. And it’s true. Some of the most romantically and sexually successful people I’ve ever met didn’t necessarily look better than the people around them; they just believed they were hot stuff, and everyone sort of went along for the ride. Cleopatra would be the classic(al) example of this phenomenon: she wasn’t ugly, but she was never considered visually beautiful. Yet her voice was enchanting, she was past mistress in spectacle and fantasy, and she carried herself like, well, a queen. And today we’re all pretty sure she was exquisite (see: Sophia Loren, Vivien Leigh, Claudette Colbert, Elizabeth Taylor, possibly Angelina Jolie). That is confidence doing its job well.

But still, it’s hard to be confident just because confidence pays off. You can’t manufacture confidence out of whole cloth and wishful thinking. You have to nurture it over time until it gets to be a habit. And until then, what? I guess we fake it. I think that most of us fake it most of the time.

A while back, I was talking with some friends and this one guy came up. Everyone agreed that he was shady by virtue of consistently trying to weasel his way into the life of any insecure female he could find. I’d never really met the guy, but had seen him around at cons. I had to agree, though, that it was a creepy M.O. “Don’t worry, though,” my friend Penelope said. “You’re way too confident for him to bother with. He’d never even pay you any attention.”* Too confident! HA! The masquerade continues…

I didn’t contradict her because I want to be too confident to be the victim of some shady guy who preys on self-loathing and vulnerability. In my heart of hearts I believe that I’m not, but I try to maintain that image when I can.

But I dream of the day when I can feel pretty and strong and worthwhile and sexy. When I can look at myself in the mirror and think “Hey, not bad” without the reflexive response of “Actually…” I want to like myself naked. I want to like myself in general. And I’d like to one day, many years from now, look at some nude pics of myself from back now and think, “Man, I was hot.” Frivolous, yes, but fundamental.

(image source)

*Yes, it occurred to me she might have just told me that because I’m too ugly for him to bother with and she wanted to paint that in the best light possible, but I have rejected that possibility on the grounds that there are limits to how ugly I’m prepared to feel.