Category: All Stories

“Woman’s body has been territorialised and yet we are held accountable for the violence carried out on our bodies.”

*Trigger warning for sexual assault/rape/anorexia/bulimia/alcohol abuse*

I was a thin child, undistinguishable from the other lads: a tomboy. The only girl out of a group of 13 who lived in each other’s pockets. We did everything together. I was accepted. Until that is, in the words of Jarvis Cocker: I became “the first girl at school to get breasts”, to menstruate. At the age of ten my life changed completely. Three of these boys stripped me naked in our local park: they grabbed my genitalia and breasts; they pointed at me; they laughed at me. In short, they colonised my body. Their gaze followed me throughout high school. They owned my body in the most negative sense: I became anorexic; I became a compulsive eater; I became bulimic. When I left school I also left the country. Still, I could not escape their mockery.

In my twenties I was raped after passing out at a party. I woke up to find a relative stranger stabbing my body with his penis. I told my mother. She blamed me: “this would not have happened if you had not been so drunk. Had you been leading him on?”, she asked. I did not speak to my Mother for a year. I was disgusted with her. I learned to deal with my obsession with food by turning to alcohol instead. Alcohol provided obliteration and a (very) short term confidence boost. It was a means by which I could have sex with partners who refused to believe I could not have sex with them due to triggering affects such encounters had on my mind. Obviously being raped should not be traumatic enough to dull the desire for a sensitive lover such as you! Such is the mind of man under patriarchy.

After getting lucky with a great therapist and much hard work and facing up to reality on my part I am now learning to befriend my body. I no longer abuse alcohol. This has been the greatest step in being able to realise my self-worth. I do not need to obliterate my feelings any more because they are largely positive. I desire lucidity because I want to remember all my experiences to the full. Occasionally, I still find myself obsessing over food but, fuck it! Who doesn’t! If I want to eat Nutella from the jar I will and I won’t feel guilty about it. I do, however, make sure that I exercise and have plenty of fruit and veg in my diet. Not because I want to become a rake but because I want to be healthy (both mentally and physically) and live for a very long time.

I have forgiven my mum, I have forgiven those boys, I have forgiven my rapist. I know why the world is a mess. Capitalism and patriarchy endorse the commodification of women. Woman’s body has been territorialised and yet we are held accountable for the violence carried out on our bodies. I know this and my empowerment comes from taking steps with other amazing. analytical-minded people to change this. When I do think on these people it is with pity and the knowledge that I am strong, that nothing can defeat me. I would not have this without the community of women I hold so dear. As I cry writing this it is with pride and happiness.

– by rouge

Posted on by taithannah 0

“Some days I think I’m skinny, some days I think I’m fat – but importantly, most days, I don’t care.”

Throughout my teenage years I had all the usual hangups, worrying that I was fat or oddly shaped. I wasn’t, I was a size 12-14 with great proportions – I look back at photos and think my body looked amazing, and that I was foolish for not appreciating how little trouble my body gave me then, but hindsight is 20:20. Four unhappy years at university down the line and I’m somewhere between size 14 and 18 depending where I shop, and the shape of my body has changed, probably forever. This is a story with a somewhat happy ending (although it’s not really over of course – instead of an ending we’ll call it an ongoing), but first I’m going to take a tour of the main issues I’ve had with my body over the years.

Stretch marks

When I first put on weight I was distraught, not particularly at being bigger, but at the irreparable changes my body had gone through – the long, red, angry looking stretch marks that snaked their way up my belly, right at the front, making me embarrassed to be naked even around long term partners and saddened that I’d probably never wear a bikini or certain types of clothes again. Aged 14 I developed long horizontal stretch marks across my back, it looked like I had been whipped, but they’re faded now except in certain lights and I never really cared that much about something I couldn’t see anyway. While the stretch marks elsewhere on my body felt like a natural part of growing, these stomach scars felt like some kind of awful punishment – for being greedy, for being lazy, for being unhappy, for being stupid enough to let them grow in the first place – every kind of self critical thought you can imagine. Weight can be lost and gained and lost again, but stretch marks are forever.

I felt like I’d blown my only chance to have a good body while I was young, before life and age and babies. I felt I could accept those processes of life as normal, but my body felt abnormal. No matter what size and shape my body is in the future, those marks will be there. They aren’t forever in the way that I convinced myself they were though – over time I’ve continued to put on weight and they have continued to spread, but the marks that bothered me so much before are now silver or white, and the new ones are slowly losing their redness too. I find, for some bizarre magical reason that I’ll never understand, that they seem a whole lot less visible and less prominent when I’m aroused – I don’t question it, I just allow it to boost my confidence. And the way I feel about them is that I am just not as bothered by them as I used to be. I’m not totally okay with them, I still sometimes cover them up when I’m otherwise naked and I’m lightyears off being comfortable enough to wear a bikini, but instead of feeling like my life is over because of them, I’m confident that they will change, concern me less, and that I can cope with them in a way I couldn’t before.

Boobs

My boobs are big, round, sensitive, squishy, they slightly sag but are easily pushed front and centre. They can get uncomfortable and sore from lugging them around all day, the skin on my nipples breaks easily, and I have chronic lower back problems that I doubt will go away, but nevertheless I like them as they are. The size of my chest has resulted in a lot of attention, mostly negative and unwanted. People make comments in the street, stare, talk endlessly about it as though it’s a topic I should find interesting, act like I couldn’t possibly know my own bra size, make presumptions about me. The one that bothers me the most is that people presume there’s something ‘obvious’ about you if you have big boobs. Like the size of a body part that you’ve never chosen or determined means you’re easy, stupid, not worth the bother, not very interesting. Sometimes people refer to me as “Boobs”, like there’s no other noteworthy qualities about me. Often my family imply that I should cover them up more, I don’t see the point. Aside from the fact that I pick clothes based on liking them and not how much of my boobs they cover, I don’t get any less comments about the size of them if I wear something high necked, and I’m not going to wear clothes I don’t like just to please other people.

Contraception

I started taking the pill when I was 16, put on weight and had stressful mood swings, so I stopped taking it. When I was 20 I got the contraceptive implant, which coincided with a bad relationship (more on that later), but it also increased my weight, I bled every single day, and the impact it had on my mood was huge, so I had it taken out after three months. I think it’s awful that we expect women to bear the burden of contraception – especially because in the process we have to make our bodies a test site for a bunch of different hormones and their various side effects that can affect our mental and physical wellbeing. I stopped using hormonal contraception because it was upsetting me, and condoms are great anyway. However, I’ve recently decided to go back on the pill, trying a different kind, because my periods are so bad. Testing the pill is a horrible, trying process of weighing up side effects and benefits – at the moment, the benefits for me outweigh the worries. I wish I didn’t have to make those choices, but I do, so hopefully I can find the right thing for me. At the moment, this uncertainty about what unpredictable changes my body might go through is my biggest source of body worries.

Self-esteem

I want to talk about how I’m more accepting of my body now than ever before, but first I’ll need to explain how I reached the peak of hating my body last year.

I’d been in a relationship with a guy for nearly a year when I found porn on his computer. It wasn’t the kind of porn where people have sex, it was the kind of porn where very large women eat food while naked or semi-naked on camera, for men to masturbate over. After finding videos on his desktop, I looked at his internet history and found that not only did he watch videos, he joined pay-to-view porn sites, wrote on forums for ‘bbws’ and ‘feeders’, joined dating sites for men to meet large women where he pretended to be single, and even met up with one woman for drinks. It wasn’t just a sexual preference, it was a fetish. Any confidence I had flew straight out the window, for my body and my mental health.

Both of us identified as feminists and I couldn’t believe he would do something like that – to me, and to the women he was objectifying. I explained how upset I was, and told him my feminist objections to porn, to the fetishisation of types of female bodies for the sake of male gratification, and to the culture of ‘feeders’ – I don’t see much difference between a man encouraging a woman to diet because he finds it sexy, and a man encouraging a woman to eat lots of food because he finds it sexy. It’s controlling and manipulative and dangerous. Whatever size a woman is should be determined by her alone, not male fantasies. He apologised, said he understood and would stop.

I didn’t have the strength or the will to leave him despite how horrified I was, because it made me ill. I felt alone, confused, trapped, anxious, depressed, incredibly paranoid, and thinking about or looking at my body felt traumatic. I double questioned every thought I had. I thought, am I fat, and is that why he finds me attractive? Or am I not fat enough for him and he wishes I was more like the women in the porn? Both options were unpleasant, and made my body repulsive to me. I found going to the shops and being seen in public a struggle, I stopped wearing tight clothes, I became paranoid about what my friends were saying about me, I hardly masturbated and when I did it was joyless, I hated myself and felt alienated from everyone else. I can’t fully describe the levels on which it played with my perception of myself and other people, it’s not something it’s possible to entirely understand and explain, I just know that it scarred deep. When months down the line I found he hadn’t stopped doing it, I knew it was a losing battle and I left him. It took a while, but I came to realise it had never been about me or my body, but about his problems and his issues with control. I was able to finally recognise the way he treated me and the things he said to me as emotionally manipulative and abusive, and I’ve never looked back.

The first couple of times I had sex after that, I covered my body, but I don’t do that any more. I was still in poor health mentally, but the sense of relief and freedom was tangible and it really lifted a lot of the pressure I felt in my head about my shape. I’m sometimes still shocked at how easily I began to be able to look in the mirror, see my body as it is and not want to cry, previously an alien concept to me. It’s not that I wouldn’t like it to be different, I’d like to be slimmer, I’d like my belly not to hang the way it does, I’d like it if I could stop crying in changing rooms when I have to get the bigger sizes and the lights are so unflattering, I’d like a lot of things. But I feel able now to look in the mirror, see what I see, and get on with my day because there’s nothing immediate I can do to change it and it is what it is. There’s nothing wrong with what it is, and anyone who wanted me to change it wouldn’t be worth my time. When I’m focusing on improving my mental health, worrying about my body feels like a waste of energy.

Sometimes, things can pop up which trigger me and put me back in that headspace where nothing made sense anymore and my body felt like a cruel joke. When I see ‘real life’ magazines with stories about feeders on the cover, when I see the TV guide and it says they’re showing “Fat Girls and Feeders”, and sometimes when I see fatpositive blogs and images of large women’s bodies on sites like tumblr, I crumble. I don’t feel that way because of the women’s bodies – I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them and it pleases me when women of all sizes take ownership of their bodies and are positive about how they look – but because it reminds me of the men who abuse and fetishise large women for their own sexual pleasure, and how much damage one such man did to me.

But, time (and talking about it) heals some wounds, and I’ve come a long way from last summer when I hid in a tent and cried for hours after seeing a magazine article about feeders at a campsite. When the issue comes up, I can explain my experiences to people without wanting to melt into a puddle. And I have the wisdom of experience to know that I’m stronger than I gave myself credit for, and that what my body looks like is the least of my worries so long as I’m emotionally supported by the right kind of people, including myself. And since I’ve rediscovered masturbation, and the ability to appreciate how my own body looks and feels during it, I’ve had the best orgasms of my life. Some days I think I’m skinny, some days I think I’m fat – but importantly, most days, I don’t care. My body doesn’t haunt me the way it used to. I’ve experienced enough body changes now to know that things are never as permanent as they seem, and worries are never as important as they seem either. Of course there are times when I still berate myself for not looking a certain way, for not exercising or for what I eat, but I find those days are fewer and further between the better my mental health gets and the more accepting I am of my own feelings and experiences. A good counsellor, good friends and good sex mean the world to me right now.

Friends

Recently my best friends and I sent each other photos of our vaginas. It wasn’t sexual, we’re just generally nosy like that and like to compliment each other – we all have great fannies of course. It was a sincerely nice and funny bonding experience. Some people (particularly men) who have heard about it react fairly oddly, as if it’s the last thing in the world they would expect close friends to do. It makes me sad that most men, and a lot of women, are more likely to learn about genitals and sex through porn, with all its distortions, than through honest discussion and learning from friends. No one has helped me to appreciate and understand my body sexually more than my friends – from the friend who gave me my first orgasm, to the friends that tell me their experiences of types of sex I’ve yet to try, to the friends in primary 7 who taught me the function of the clitoris when we experimented with masturbation and reported our findings to each other. There’s no better way to learn about sex, about your body and about yourself, than to have friends that you trust and talk to and share experiences and thoughts with.

Posted on by taithannah 0

“I think we need to let go of this control.”

I think for a lot of woman we feel we need to take control of our bodies, that in order to be happy with how we look and feel we need to reign in each part of it and mould it into something we feel comfortable with. This is just insane because we are trying to mould ourselves into the same woman, the same figment of the media’s imagination and obviously it’s an impossible task. This attempt to control our bodies is destroying us, I don’t know one woman who honestly doesn’t wish in her heart of hearts she could just be thinner, or taller, or have that perfect hair. I think we need to let go of this control, just let go in general, but it’s so difficult when we have been coerced into feeling this way all our lives. I can’t see anything changing in the media, or in the population at large; let’s be honest, someone is making a lot of money out of our self-loathing. But, if just some women can change how they feel about their bodies then they can pass it down to their daughters and there will be some girls saved from this quagmire.

I can say that right now I am almost happy with my body, most of the time, well, some of the time. I have scars and hairs, all the things that make women hate themselves (and men feel proud). But I feel happy being naked, I’m comfortable changing in front of my friends – although sometimes their horror at glimpsing my naked body makes me wonder. I will sunbathe topless if I can when abroad, though sometimes I am a little uncomfortable around other naked people. I haven’t always been happy with myself, I remember lying in bed horrified by the realisation that I would probably have to diet for the rest of my life to be a normal size. I was completely wrong, and I learned that dieting didn’t make me thinner, just more miserable and inevitably led to comfort eating and yo-yoing weight. I don’t diet at all anymore, but I know so so many women whose lives revolve around it. I still look at pictures of gorgeous women and feel a twang of regret, why wasn’t I born looking like that? I still walk behind tall, statuesque women and hate them a little, and hate myself for feeling that way. But, I have come such a long way from looking in the mirror and hating what I saw, willing myself to be different, from clutching at towels to cover every inch of my naked body so no one would see even a bit of me. I feel freed from it, it is an amazing feeling to just let go of all that bitter pain and just be exactly who and what I am. I would love for the women around me to let go of it too, because they are beautiful and healthy and perfect.

Posted on by pinkapplejuice 0

“Being tall, thin and toned gave me no solace when I was cowering in the corner of my bedroom hearing things and no drive when I couldn’t get up for sadness.”

My words, unfortunately, take a different line to the inspiring messages I have read from other women here. This blog initiated my first ever exploration of my thoughts on my body and I am uneasy about what I found.

I am an outgoing and vibrant, confident woman and the way I feel about my body matches. I have the fortune of being able to eat what I want. I enjoyed a toffee popcorn doughnut today, recommended by the way, without a moment’s thought. I am frequently (classily) scantily clad and I feel great when I’m naked with men. Deeper than that however, this exploration has lead me to realise is a web of vanity and praise-seeking. Here lies a cautionary tale…

In fact, a dangerously self critical mess of insecurities and neuroticism lurks behind this veneer. I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager and have had two breakdowns including a terrifying period of psychosis. My happiness about my body never waned during these times and it gave me no reassurance. Being tall, thin and toned gave me no solace when I was cowering in the corner of my bedroom hearing things and no drive when I couldn’t get up for sadness. My love for my body comes from laudatory friends, ogling strangers and society’s skinny fetish. I like the looks, the comments and the compliments. It gives me a high and a warm feeling inside.
This is a false and dangerous way to build confidence; like an unsteady Jenga tower. My dependence on what other people think of me is a not a desirable personality trait.

With my friends I joke about my mental instability and they know me as a bright and slightly vain social butterfly. I doubt this post will come as much of a surprise to them. But sometimes I worry that the difference in my mind and my veneer is off putting to people getting to know me.

I’m proud of my confident veneer of course – I built it from a scared and bullied little girl – but my story can be a harsh reminder to others that appearances aren’t everything. On reflecting for this blog I now wonder if I didn’t have this body to fall back on would I have learnt to build confidence from the inside?

Posted on by taithannah 0

“I feel proud of my naked body because I can see my mother’s knees, curves and breasts in it … There are so many strong and beautiful women in my family and I am proud to be one of them.”

For me, how I feel about my own nakedness really depends on my mental health and personal wellness. It can vary from time to time. I picture it on a continuum with one side being – extremely.hideous.monster – and the other being something like – foxy.supreme.being -. I don’t ever reach one extreme or the other (thankgoodness!), but I believe having good mental health and balance in life is so crucially important to how we view ourselves, and our place within the wider world. When I’m feeling stressed out and anxious, I look at my body and I see something that’s tired, used-up and in need of repair. I feel heavy, grey and lumpy. I feel fragile and brittle. I see no vibrancy in my skin and no life in my eyes. However, when I’m feeling well-balanced and healthy mentally, I know that I eat better and exercise more often (even without making a conscious effort to do so). So, during those times I feel proud of my body. I feel sexy and strong. I feel soft and alluring. I feel confident.

As I look back on my (nearly) 30 years of life, I remember spending summer days of my early childhood naked, sitting in the grass, playing in my backyard, or skinny dipping in our pool before bedtime — they are all pure, warm and comforting memories. Adolescence for nearly everyone, brings change, insecurity and self-doubt. When I was an adolescent I felt awkward, and for years I hid myself in massive hoodies and XL jeans. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had lumps on my chest, or curves underneath the layers of fabric. I didn’t know how to dress my rapidly morphing figure or have the confidence to try.  I felt safe when I was hidden. I realize now that one of the reasons that I hid myself was because, as a tomboy, it took me a long time to come to terms with what femininity meant, and to find what femininity meant to me. I will never be stereotypically ‘girly’.. and I feel 110% ok with that these days.

When I see myself naked now, for the most part — I feel lucky and proud. I feel lucky because I have come to embrace myself and my body. I have become completely comfortable with myself (most of the time anyway!). I feel lucky because I’ve never hated my body. It works hard for me and I often don’t treat it as well as I should. I’ve abused/mistreated it countless numbers of times and yet, it hasn’t given up on me. I feel lucky because I can see beauty in my body, and I know there are an unimaginable number of women that can’t see beauty in theirs. I’m no longer embarrassed or ashamed of my body – I don’t try to hide it anymore. : ) I feel proud of my naked body because I can see my mother’s knees, curves and breasts in it. I can feel that my skin now reminds me of how hers felt. There are so many strong and beautiful women in my family and I am proud to be one of them.

Two women that have heavily contributed to how positively I feel about my own nakedness are my Mum, and one of my life-long friends, KP.  I am forever grateful to both of them for helping me achieve the level of love and comfort that I feel when I see myself stripped down.

by intheflesh

Posted on by taithannah 0

“…I fucking love the human body and I guess that includes mine.”

*Trigger warning for mention of sexual abuse and discussion of abortion*

When I was 11, other girls liked my body because I was thin and I had started growing breasts.

Someone else liked my body and coerced me into sharing it with them when I didn’t want to.

All I wanted was to get my period and be a real woman.

When I was 12, I bled for the first time and every month from then on, I hated my body because it caused me pain. Once I started menstruating, I wasn’t thin anymore, either.

When I was 23, I had the worst period I had ever had. It was summer and it was hot. I was pacing and crying and moaning in agony.

That was the last period I had for a while.

When I took the pregnancy test and it was positive, I just laughed. I had taken the morning after pill. It had made my breasts hurt. I knew then that it wasn’t working and that I was pregnant, but I ignored it. Finally a friend forced me to take a test.

There was never any question of continuing the pregnancy. I was single, homeless, on the dole and mentally ill. It was the first and only time I had ever had unprotected sex. It had happened on the most fertile day of my cycle. And my body did something amazing and started to grow a baby.

I started the process of being referred for an abortion the day I found out. I secretly delighted in the life inside me. I relished in every symptom of pregnancy that I had. I worked out my due date. I followed the progress of the embryo.

I was pregnant and single, and maybe it was hormones, but as I waited the ridiculous delays and jumped through the ridiculous hoops that would allow me to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, I had the most and the best sex of my life. I had a lot of orgasms of my own, and I gave a lot to other people.

I’m not pregnant anymore.

Sometimes I’m sad about that. But it taught me a lot about my body.  I learned that my body was capable of miracles.

I know I can create and carry life. I intend to again one day.

I know I can endure incredible pain. Never let an anti-abortionist tell you lies about women getting abortions on a whim, for a laugh, and using it as contraception. I have never experienced such pain and physical trauma. Pacing and crying and moaning in agony a thousandfold.

I know I am capable of experiencing and giving incredible pleasure.

I didn’t know these things before.

My body is hairy and wobbly and a lot of the time I feel ashamed of those things. But my body is warm and strong and life-giving and pleasure-giving and when I’m naked with a lover, all I do is laugh because I fucking love the human body and I guess that includes mine.

Posted on by taithannah 0

“Since I stopped reading any women’s magazines about 6 months ago my self esteem and confidence has shot through the roof … Stop reading them for your own sake!”

I’ve learned to like every little and every big bit of my body by making my body look mad. I have bright pink hair, I’m pierced, I’m tattooed, I draw my eyebrows on so that they’re huge, and I make myself laugh. I’m an art student, so I use my body in my art, whether it’s dot-to-dotting all of my freckles or photographing myself, it’s always done with naked humour.

I really fervently disliked my body and my self from the age of about 11 to pretty much a couple of months ago. I was tall and gangly yet somehow wobbly and pudgey which translated into FAT. My “pudge” was actually skin, some puppy fat, and then some normal fat. Going from a size 8 when I was 12 to a size 12-14 when I was 16 was actually just growing and being a healthy size for a woman of 6ft. My “blotchy skin” was actually just a collection of freckles which are now a collection of summer days out with my mum. It took me a long time to realise that though.

I think things changed when I started laughing at the way I look, and started having fun. Ridiculous, ugly, charity shop clothes ahoy! This was at the same time as having hair of every colour in the rainbow. For me, it’s a relief to look different to the women in Cosmo, it takes the pressure off, and it allows ME.

Another big change was not filling my head with magazine gumf. Since I stopped reading any women’s magazines about 6 months ago my self esteem and confidence has shot through the roof. They’re legitimately bad for us! They pedal us lies and make us feel bad! Stop reading them for your own sake!

Another big change was when I started seeing my body as art. I life modelled for the first time when I was 17, was so nervous that I threw up, but then when it was done and I saw people’s drawings of me, I was elated. Some beautiful things had been made- out of MY BODY! My body was fine art! And that was so empowering. Because, I didn’t look like Rose in Titanic, I looked my wobbly, not big enough to be curvy but there’s still slight curves there self. And that was great.

Since then, I’ve become an intermedia student rather than a painter, and this has opened so many doors for me. My last three projects have used my naked body. And I always get great responses, not for how my body looks, but what my body is saying. And that to me is the best thing-

My body works (for the most part), it doesn’t matter all that much in the end if it looks nice, because for me, it’s a vessel for my voice. What I’m saying, what I’m shouting, what I’m singing, what I’m signing, what I’m making art on, what I’m writing, what the way I look is saying, the list goes on and on- none of this would be possible if it weren’t for my body.

Using my body as a support and as a canvas, for hair dye and ink and metal, for shouting and protests and growing my pit hair- that’s why I love it.

by reclaimthecunt

Posted on by taithannah 0

“When you’re a girl, every body is similar. When you’re a woman, every body is completely unique.”

Quite recently, I realised something very important. This realisation changed not only how I felt about my body, but also how I thought about my personality and my future. It gave me both contentment and drive, and has made for an altogether happier me. That realisation is this: at the age of twenty four, I am a woman and not a girl. Yeah, so maybe that does sound a bit daft, but let me explain.

When I was a girl, I was an acrobat and a diver. I was required to train daily at home, and every day at either the pool or in the gym, or both. I was very flexible and strong, and thin too. But even then I would pull out bits of skin on my stomach thinking it was fat. I would cover my thighs in shorts when the others would be comfortable in leotards, and I would wrap a towel around myself the moment I got out of the pool.

Because of all the training, I saw the girls at school begin to change shape long before I did. Where they had breasts and hips, I had the straight-up-and-down body I had always had, and I was fine with that. When my breasts eventually did develop, I was embarrassed by them and was glad that they were small. The body that I wore until I was around eighteen was slim, almost entirely curveless, and small-chested – a girl’s body.

Of course, once all the training stopped, that quickly changed. It was like my body breathed a great big sigh of relief and just got comfy. My weight began to fluctuate, my boobs grew, I began to develop a more feminine figure, and I lost muscle tone. I wasn’t happy and I damn sure wasn’t going to accept it, so I locked the fact of the matter away into a box and set myself into a weird form of denial. Somewhere in my subconscious I decided my body was just bizarre and nothing would look good on it anyway. I dressed masculine and had a masculine haircut, unwilling to match my outward appearance to this body I had been lumped with.

My first big wake-up call came when being measured for a bra when I was twenty two. My B-cups, it turned out, were actually a very squashed pair of Ds. It felt like the end of the world! No more hiding these bloody things, I thought. But that day of shopping with my mum really opened my eyes to the nonsense in my head; all that had changed was my perceived bra size, and only in my mind. The bra lady had hit me with what I was shutting my eyes to. My boobs were not going to change, I realised, but my mindset sure could.

The first time someone calls you a ‘lady’, as in “Mind you don’t bump into that lady”, is pretty weird. And for me the first time I called myself a woman was pretty weird too. But the word fits me now. I am an adult woman, and it’s high time I got used to it.

I like my body. It works the way I want it to. There are some achy bits and little nicks and scars, and always a bruise or five, but they are all there because of something that I did with it. I can do some cool little party tricks with it, and I absolutely adore its tastebuds. I could live without the spots, but I can also live with them, and I’d hate it if I didn’t have cracky knuckles and toes. I would like to lose a little weight and tone up, but I won’t suffer for it – I’m working on it in a way that I really enjoy. There’s nothing better than drying off naturally and nakedly in bed when you get out of the shower, and when I look in the mirror, I’m happy with what I see.

As for comparing myself to others, we all do it, and again it is something I’ve come to accept as fact. In a way, it is comforting to know that while I might wish I had her long legs, she might wish she had my eyes. We’ve all got best bits, and we’re all our own worst critics.
I love to be naked with my boyfriend. I enjoy the closeness and intimacy of it, it makes me feel sexy and free. But I have no desire to spend any length of time naked in a group. I admit I would probably feel quite uncomfortable in such a situation, but I don’t foresee group nudity in my future, so that discomfort is unlikely to hold me back. As yet, none of my platonic relationships have been sullied by a lack of nudity, and though I bet it is an amazing feeling to overcome that fear, it simply isn’t something I’ve ever really felt an urge to do. Maybe one day I will, or maybe it takes guts that I just haven’t got. Either way, I’m cool with it.

When you’re a girl, every body is similar. When you’re a woman, every body is completely unique. Embracing that has made the world of difference to me. I will never be so confident with what I’m rocking that I go shouting it from the rooftops, but that isn’t what I need. All I need is to feel good in myself, and I do.

by an anonymous woman, aged 24

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“I love my body but your entries made me cry because I am so far from feeling comfortable in my skin.”

I love my body but your entries made me cry because I am so far from feeling comfortable in my skin. I’m strong and fast. I have perfect eye-sight and good balance. I have a high sex-drive and a good pair of lungs and no matter how much I poison my body, it keeps healing. It’s true what you say about the scars. When I look at them, I think of healing, not pain.

But then there’s other people. There’s the men in my life. And the women. And there’s being a queer feminist, which is a very different experience to that of most self-empowered women. All around me I see women embracing their curves and their femininity, having fun with fashion, displaying their sexuality and learning to love their bodies and feel attractive.

I feel like I can’t travel this road with my female comrades. I can’t embrace my femininity because it repulses me. I don’t mean that I want to be male. I’m proud (insofar as you can be) to be a woman. I wish I could dance and be naked and feel free but I don’t feel that I can in this gendered environment. I think a large part of anyone’s self-esteem is constituted by sexual confidence, maybe more for women than for men. But I can’t see how this confidence can exist independently of how others see me. The problem is that, rather than change my own way of thinking, I’m waiting for society to break down so that I can be free of prescribed roles and this will never happen.

The key is not to care what others think. Easier said than done. But what about the other thing? What about feeling attractive with a partner? How can you be attractive without becoming a ”woman”?

I hope this makes some sense…

by an anonymous woman

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“This is the story of how I came to love being naked, and how I came to love my body.”

This is the story of how I came to love being naked, and how I came to love my body.

I didn’t always love my body, and there have been plenty of times when I’ve hated it. When I was a teenager I would see all the things I hated about it when I looked in the mirror. I compared myself to the lithe girls in my ballet class whose stomachs were flatter and whose thighs were more slender than mine. I compared myself to the girls at school who were more popular than me. But these were the bodies I saw clothed – and naked I could only compare myself to the toned, polished, photoshopped bodies of the media. And that body – for really, it is only one body that we see in the media – didn’t look anything like mine.

I am a woman of average healthy weight, neither thin nor very voluptuous, and average height, but my body was nowhere to be seen. My breasts, like many women’s, are neither perfectly round nor exactly the same size. My tummy isn’t flat, and it pudges out when I sit down. My bum is big and it isn’t firm like the bums in underwear adverts; it wobbles when I bounce up and down, or run, or dance, or fuck. My thighs are squishy and I have a touch of cellulite. I don’t go to the gym and I love to eat cake, but I try to eat a decent meal or two and I use walking as my main means of transport. My body is normal, but I didn’t know that and so I hated it.

Sometimes I hated it enough to cut its skin in anger at its imperfection. In time, watching scars heal would come to be the first small step towards realising my body’s strength and function. It could make itself new; it could grow new flesh to fill the gaps that I had made. My body wasn’t the perfect body I thought it should be, but it worked.

A little older, a little wiser, and perhaps as a result a lot happier, I left home to go to university in Glasgow when I was eighteen. In the five years that followed, I had myriad wonderful experiences that brought me to loving my body. My degree was in theatre studies, and I became very involved with the theatre society. I hung out with people who were comfortable with their bodies and found myself at parties where people would end up naked in a totally non-sexual way, just hanging out and chatting, drinking and smoking (carefully!). I saw other women’s normal breasts. I saw naked bodies that hadn’t been photoshopped. They were all different and they were all lovely. I could look at another woman’s body and just see everything that was beautiful about it, not pick out the flaws I saw in my own mirror. It made me start to realise that if all of these varied bodies were beautiful, then maybe mine was too.

When I was in my third year, I was cast in a production of Cleansed by Sarah Kane, a role which would require me to be naked on stage. I was honestly quite excited. We all had naked rehearsals together, since everyone had to be naked at some point in the play, and it quickly felt normal to be naked. We were just people not wearing clothes, rehearsing and chatting and laughing as usual. It wasn’t possible to feel shame in this situation; when you’re all naked together it becomes natural. It begins to seem almost strange to get dressed. Once you’re all naked, you wonder what you were worried about. On stage, when I took off my dress, it didn’t cross my mind for a second to wonder if people thought my body was weird or ugly. I was proud that this was my body.

In my final year, I took part in an incredible project called Trilogy. Despite how comfortable I had already begun to feel in my own skin, it still proved to be a transformative experience – in many ways, but especially regarding my relationship to my body. A performance art triptych, the first part of Trilogy culminates in an exuberant naked dance performed by volunteer women of all ages and shapes. Leading up to the performances, we participated in a week of workshops where we eased in to being naked in a completely emotionally supportive atmosphere. I can say without reservation that it was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. To look around a circle of dozens of women and see slim women and big women and women who’ve had children and women who have scars, and to see the beauty in every single one of those bodies, rid me of any last vestiges of hatred for my own. This dancing wasn’t about looking sexy, it was about loving how your body feels when it dances. It was feeling your body wobble and loving it. Absolutely, purely rejoicing in the way your body moves and in its strength and power. I loved every moment.

Since Trilogy, on a couple of occasions I’ve gone with some other women to climb a hill and be naked at its summit. I have found such freedom in moments like that. In being naked I become aware of all the other things about my body apart from how it looks. I can feel the warmth of sunshine on its skin, and the breeze, and the grass. I can make it spin and run and dance and love the way it feels. I can just enjoy being in my body.

I still sometimes catch myself looking in the mirror and comparing my body to perfection. But I push the thoughts away. My body is not a photoshopped image – it’s a million times better. It’s soft and warm, and it can breathe and bleed and run and sweat and fuck and cry and laugh and think and dance.

My body is real.

by Hannah, age 23

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