Scarleteen

Hey Scarleteen,

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.

Imma be straight up, I have never met a woman with a body that i didnt consider pretty or hot. The only people I have seen as "ugly" (which is extremely subjective) are people that arent nice people. I would rather have sex with someone with an "ugly" body type with a beautiful heart, than someone with a "hot" body type that is mean.And that goes for a lot of other people. When I'm in public, it's really hard to spot a woman who is phisically unattractive. And thats because most of the body types out there are pretty. Unless you are medically under or over weight, you are probably very attractive.But this is all my opinion. As for loving yourself, thats a really hard thing to do. Im still struggling myself. But what I started doing is whenever I'm out in public, i look at someone and find something to compliment them on. Whether you say it to them, or just in your head, it helps. This is because you can start looking the the mirror and finding something to compliment yourself on. The more I do it, the easier it is to fing things I ,love about myself. I hope this horribly worded paragraph helped you. <3