“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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“Although I don’t particularly dislike my body, I much prefer it covered.”

Although I don’t particularly dislike my body, I much prefer it covered. I don’t feel particularly comfortable naked but I do want to be. I am not ashamed of it, but I wish parts didn’t wobble so much, or that there wasn’t stretch marks or cellulite. But fact of the matter is, it’s perfectly natural for my body to not be completely smooth and toned, but the only images I see of women’s bodies are (usually) perfectly smooth, and almost seem sculpted; not a lump or a bump, a mark or a scratch. And that is what is not natural! I should not be embarrassed, or uncomfortable with myself naked, even when I’m on my own. But I am, and I don’t even really like seeing myself in the shower. I am trying though. For the past year or so, when I feel OK with myself I’ll maybe not get dressed straight away after a shower, or I’ll take my time getting dressed and try to ‘hang out’ with myself naked. Something I have never done before. I don’t know what was a turning point for me to realise that I wanted to get over my naked fear, I just started to want to be happy with being naked.

I don’t really know why I feel so uncomfortable being naked, I don’t really feel uncomfortable being around people who are naked, not that i have much experience with being around naked people (and maybe that’s what I’ve been missing!) but I would struggle to be naked myself, I would sit in a certain position so that I’m mostly covered and I’m not sure why. Maybe I feel indecent, but it would only be indecent if I was being naked in a situation where it would be inappropriate to be naked! I think I’ve only been naked in ‘public’ (and that was at a party with a mix of people I did and didn’t know – not just out in the open!) once or twice, I was probably drunk and I think I only got my boobs out, I did feel a sense of freedom but also fear. I don’t want to feel that fear.

I’ve also recently started taking baths with a close girl friend and I think this will be something that will also help me become more comfortable. Hanging out naked is something that I haven’t done often, and maybe not something I want to do on a regular basis with just any old soul, but with the right friends/woman it’s something that I could really benefit from and see being an enjoyable experience. But it’s all about baby steps I think, or at least this is what works for me. And I’m not doing this so I can just strip off in a big room full of people and be completely ok with it, but I want to be able to be myself in my own skin and not feel like there is something wrong with me, which deep down I know there isn’t, but it’s breaking down to that point where my conscious thoughts feel and think that way. I know I’m not fat, I’m not skinny, I’m not muscular or toned, I’d say I have a healthy body so why am I not happy with it? What is it I want it to be like? I don’t know the answer to that question, I couldn’t say what I wish my body was like as I don’t want another body… I just want to like/enjoy being naked with the one I have!

When I’m naked I feel a bit cheeky and silly, there is a certain thrill that comes with being naked, even when I’m just on my own. This sort of changes when I see my naked body in a mirror though, because I then just analyse every bit of it, whether good or bad. And actually, I can’t remember the last time I looked at myself properly in the mirror whilst fully naked (I’ll be in my underwear at least as I don’t have a proper mirror in my room and am definitely not ready for hallway nakedness). I don’t seem to analyse my body when there isn’t a mirror though. I don’t really look at it, but I am very aware of being naked. I’d like to enjoy naked time, and I believe with time this will come.

I hope this blog can be the start of a great journey for me, and for many woman, who want to be more comfortable with the body they are in, or want to celebrate the body they’ve got so we can all love and glorify all that is natural and beautiful with the female form!


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Welcome to Project Naked

We decided to start this blog to get women talking about their relationships with their bodies. We think we spend too much time thinking about what our bodies “should” look like and comparing ourselves to something that isn’t real, and we want to spend a lot more time celebrating our bodies for their function and their strength, for the way they wobble when we dance and when we run, for the hair they grow and the blood they bleed. We want to spend more time loving our bodies, and we want you to get involved.

There’s nothing wrong with your breasts. There’s nothing wrong with your thighs. There’s nothing wrong with your bum. We have bodies – beautiful bodies – to live our lives in and we want to find joy in them!

This isn’t about finding a dress to disguise your tummy, or the perfect pair of control pants. This is about spending time with your naked self and appreciating every part of you.

We all feel differently about our bodies – some of us love them more than others. Maybe you don’t love yours at all. But it makes us sad that so many of us feel like that, and we want you to join us on a journey through discovering and loving your body.

We want to hear from you. Here are some things to have a think about. Send us an email at projectnaked@gmail.com – you can send us an experience to share on the blog, or just send us a message. Let us know if you’re happy for us to publish it, anonymously or otherwise – and if you want to include a picture of your happy naked self, feel free!

  • How do you feel when you’re naked?
  • How do you feel when you see yourself naked?
  • Do you wish you felt differently about your body?
  • What do you love about your body?
  • How has your body, and how you feel about it, changed over the years?

We’re excited about starting this project with you!

love,

Hannah and Megan

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