Feeling extremely down about body image

[tastypasta123]

Hey Scarleteen,

I thought I posted, but for some reason I am not finding it anywhere. Maybe something went wrong with my computer so I'm putting it here.

These few days I've just been feeling really down about how my body looks. Every night last week I'd look in the mirror, inspect, and cry for about half an hour before going to sleep. During the day I constantly feel shattered because almost every woman I see has a more conventionally beautiful body than mine.

Yesterday night was when it snapped for me. Although I have a boyfriend (we're long distance), I still like to go to parties now and then to gauge how much attention I'll get. It was so apparent every single guy either thought I was ugly or just worth avoiding. Any time I would make eye contact with them they would turn their eyes and their head away immediately. At some points I'd be dancing pretty close to them and they would just look at their phone as if I didn't exist. I'd see them minutes later dancing enthusiastically with other more beautiful girls, so it's not how they conduct themselves at parties, it's a me issue.

My boyfriend will be coming over soon and he likes to be intimate with me, and although I don't think I'm extremely bizarre or "ugly" looking I definitely feel pretty mediocre. I feel like I embarrass him, or that he has low standards for women, or that his other friends feel sorry that he's stuck with me. He keeps saying he loves how my butt is "juicy" but I genuinely cannot comprehend how he could think that when there are women with butts twice as large as mine and a stomach smaller than mine at the same time. And he's been exposed to that in media--so he's probably lying to me.
Anyways, I just can't be intimate if I don't feel like a sexual temptress with the evidence to prove that I am conventionally attractive. When we're doing anything I'll have to glance in the mirror to see how I look. From movies or literature or anything, I just have this belief that any woman who enjoys passionate sex has to be this confident femme fatale with a gorgeous figure. I just can't picture girls like me ever being the object of someone's desire or enjoying sex, it's in a way cringeworthy and very literally ugly. It's not my place.

Personally I think everyone is beautiful in their own way, but from my experience men always prefer a very narrow standard of beauty. That conflicts for me because while I want to promote positivity and acceptance for all body types I'm also a social being that enjoys pleasing others/being validated by them, and I sometimes find myself becoming complicit in the status quo by trying to fit in. This issue of reconciling my need to feel validated with my belief in feminism can be a whole other essay, though.

[Sam W]

Hi Tastypasta,

It sounds like you're going through some really tough body image stuff right now, and that can suck in a big way. The first thing I want to say is that it's okay to be someone who holds feminist beliefs about bodies but still struggles with applying those concepts to their own body. Cultural messages about how women are supposed to look come at us from an early age and they burrow pretty deep into our brains without us wanting them to. So as much as you can try not to beat yourself up about feeling that way.

Since it seems like you've interacted some with the concepts of body positivity, can you give me a sense if how much of the information you've encountered has been about ways you can apply those concepts to yourself? Even if you embrace the basic ideas of body positivity, it can be tricky to apply them to yourself if you haven't been given concrete things to try.

My other big piece of advice to you is to take your boyfriend at his word, even if the unkind voices in your head keep telling you not to. Human attraction is incredibly varied, even if media messages define what a "desirable" body is narrowly (we actually have a whole article about this: http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/sam_w/20 ... _and_types ). So if he says he's attracted to you and likes your butt, there's no reason to believe he's lying. And that's before we even get to the fact that people choose their partners based on a variety of factors, not just looks, and that things like personality, humor, wit, etc, can all add to a person's attractiveness in the eyes of a partner. There are also plenty of large women or otherwise not conventionally attractive women who have happy, satisfying sex lives with partners who think they are the hottest thing in the world. Have you ever had the chance to read any writing by larger women who've had those experiences?

As an aside, I found your other post about this. I would have deleted the duplicate but someone had already responded, so I just locked it so we can focus on continuing the conversation here.

[Heather]

I'm on board with everything Sam has said here, but I wanted to just add on something else, in case it's helpful.

I don't know what your exposure to men and what they find attractive or desire is like. Like, I don't know what your sample size is, what the relationships you have are like in terms of how candidly men are sharing these things with you, how diverse the men you know and observe in this way are, and so forth.

But I do know for myself that both in my own getting-long-in-the-tooth personal life (I'm almost 50, and I have been busy, to put it gently), which has had an awful lot of men in it of many stripes who have talked an awful lot to me about sex -- who I am and what I do tends to lend itself to that --and, even more so, via my work in sexuality over the last 20+ years, that what I observe are men having very, very diverse tastes, and often experiencing attraction and desire that doesn't match up with whatever the beauty standard du jour of the day/month/decade is. Broad studies back this up too, if you're interested in something more than my own anecdotal experiences, however broad they themselves have been. I have also observed a lot of women having the view you do, where they simply don't or won't believe that, even when the men in their lives who are wildly attracted to them are telling them so.

Long story short, I think your own hard feelings and insecurities are creating bias in your perception around this, something any of our most difficult or worst feelings about ourselves can often do.