Our Bodies, Ourselves (26 page)

Ananda:
I have learned a lot about myself sexually by having sex with many different men and some women. One of the most amazing sexual experiences I have had in my life was in a threesome with a man and a woman. The orgasm that I had was like falling off a cliff into weightless outer space. If you had asked me forty years ago if I could imagine doing this, I would have said absolutely not. My mother would have been appalled to know. I find these experiences delightful and they have not much at all to do with love but being in the moment.

Francesca:
For me sex is better when it is enhanced with love. Yet sex for the sake of sexual need can be good. However, physical closeness, cuddling, nonsexual intimacy, etc., are always better with love.

Leigh:
I really dig the idea of love as action, where demonstration and practice are more important than verbalization and romantic gesture. I don't want to think of love as a solid, assumed foundation, but rather as
praxis
, as the place where ideas/emotions/verbalizations meet practice and action.

Sophia:
I can't imagine having the relationship that I have with my husband without being totally in love with him. Our biggest arguments early on were over how to raise our children because
of the baggage we carried around about our own childhoods. Within the last decade, we moved four times, a different state each time, while our children were going through elementary, middle, and high schools. Moving and getting adjusted to new jobs, new communities, and new schools during our children's formative years almost tore us apart. The financial, emotional, and day-to-day struggles put our commitment and love to the test to the point where we had to seek therapy. As a very private person, I wanted to solve our problems on our own, but once again, my awesome husband was right about going to see a marriage counselor. It was the best thing we've ever done for our marriage.

The initial passion my husband and I felt for each other has grown into a relationship that is based on fierce devotion and is simultaneously comfortable yet ever-changing. The kind of love, strong emotional connection, I feel for my husband is so powerful now that I can't conceive of feeling the same way about anyone else. Whatever love is, it's what has kept us together.

Alexa:
I'm currently living with my monogamous boyfriend of two years. As a larger woman (size 18–20, 230 pounds), I occasionally engaged in relationships in my teen years that I didn't particularly want to be in because I felt lucky that somebody would be interested in me in spite of my body. Now I am with a great guy who is attracted to me for many reasons, but partly because of my body.

I recently realized that physical attraction has a lot to do with intimacy, and what I actually resent is that the contemporary media have decided on one type of body that is acceptable to find attractive.

Sophia:
I am 5'3” and on average 140 pounds. I've always wished I were thinner and taller. I used to wear loose, shapeless clothes to hide my body. My husband, who is tall and lean, told me
that he loved my “curves.” I had a hard time believing that he was not just flattering me.

When I got pregnant, I was a little worried about how big I was getting, but my husband just marveled at how my body was changing in response to pregnancy. We had some of our most amazing sex while I was pregnant. After pregnancy, my husband was awestruck by the way my body changed and slowly got back to prepregnancy condition.

I've come to terms with my body. I will never have the body that will allow me to wear whatever I want, but I don't wear baggy clothes anymore. I exercise and eat sensibly for my health, not because I want to get to a certain dress size.

Lydia:
For me, the experience of being in a sexual relationship has been incredibly grounding in terms of enjoying my own physicality and the physical presence of others (namely, my girlfriend). I feel like I have permission to really
pay attention
to her body in a way that few settings in our culture offer us: the joy of getting to know, intimately, the shapes and smells and movements of another bodily person. And then the reverse: having someone else become so familiar with my
own
body and take such obvious delight in it.

Victoria:
Your description of how your sexuality grounded you in your own physicality really resonates for me. When I started college and started to come into my identity as a feminist, I started to really think about what I'd been taught about sex and my body, and to consciously reject the shame and guilt I'd internalized. I started to masturbate. I read erotica. I had sex for the first time. I talked more openly about sex with other women. And I felt more and more present in my own body, and more and more comfortable with my own sexuality and sexual desire.

Now, at thirty-three, after eight years of marriage and two babies, I feel lost again in my own body. I'm not happy with what I see in the mirror. I'm not happy with my squishy, stretchy belly. I'm not happy with the width of my hips or the jiggle in my thighs. I don't feel the kind of sexual desire that used to make me want to ignore everything else—homework, messy apartment, no food on the shelves—and snuggle up to my partner. And I know, I
know
, I should feel beautiful and proud of carrying babies and embrace the new shape of my body. But it feels really empty when I say those things to myself, or when my partner says them to me.

My two-year-old just peed all over the floor. And I wonder why I don't feel sexy?

Cody:
I've just started dating a genderqueer transmasculine person who has had top surgery and takes T [testosterone]. I'm actually surprised to find myself feeling a kind of body discontentment I haven't experienced in a long time. Learning the geographies of my lover's body, hir flat chest and strong arms, small hips and stubbly cheeks, chest hair and defined abs, I'm craving a body like hirs and I can't figure out if it's about gender or about old habits of self-hate. Why do I want to be shaped like that? Is it because I've always struggled with wishing I was smaller and didn't have these wide hips, or is it because I want to transition in the ways that ze has and be read as a boy?

It's a new thing to me, to actually be jealous of a lover's body. I'm hoping I can keep it manifested in sweet affirmations of how hot ze is, in love notes and whispered intimacies, and I can tell hir all the time that ze's a stud. I'm hoping it's not something that makes me sad when we're in bed together, and I feel too big and soft in all the wrong places, and I'm being held by this person whose body is perfect.

Danielle:
It was incredibly difficult trying to be in relationships before I transitioned, because someone telling me I was handsome was actually a bad thing. I didn't enjoy being “handsome”; what I really wanted was to be told I was
pretty
.

So finding someone who would tell me that was pretty incredible. And then, as I went on hormones and my body started changing, it was likewise amazing to have someone tell me the changes were making me that much more attractive to her. And having her reassure me about the things I
did
like about my body—smooth skin after shaving, my growing breasts, my hair—was an important part of me finding enjoyment in my own body.

Chloe:
Part of the reason having sex with other trans women was important to me early on was that it helped me come to love my own body, too. Seeing them and their body however it was—pre-op, non-op, post-op whatever—as beautiful helped me see my own body as beautiful, too. Part of it was coming to understand how my body worked with new hormones, new feelings, new body parts. Part of it was finally feeling comfortable in my physical body. But part of it was also unlearning cultural stereotypes and socialized messages that make me and other women, trans or cis, hate our bodies.

Heidi:
My ex-husband was not happy with my body because I have a very small chest. He used to encourage me to get breast implants, which we could not afford. He would watch porn that depicted women with large breasts and make occasional comments that really made me feel self-conscious. I spent a lot of money on specially made push-up bras in an attempt to look as close to his standard as I could. Whenever I was naked around him, I was always very aware of my chest and never entirely comfortable.

Now I try not to care, but I do occasionally feel self-conscious about it. It has become a pet peeve of mine that natural is no longer good enough when it comes to breasts. It also really bothers me that I let him make me feel inadequate (and sometimes still do). He has some extra weight on him, which didn't bother me at all, but I now see it as an example of a double standard in which women's bodies are typically more rigidly scrutinized than men's bodies.

Since having children I haven't been with a partner who does not have experience with a mother who has given birth vaginally, as I am worried about what they would think about the different color and shape that comes with birth. I am also worried about the fact that I don't like to shave, and I have been told that pubic hair is no longer “normal” on women. As much as I like to think that I am happy with my body, and as hard as I try to make that a reality, it really isn't, and it affects many aspects of my life, including my relationships with others.

Victoria:
I share your frustration with the idea that natural breasts (and normal pubic hair!) are no longer considered sexy. Honestly, I think someday people are going to look back at breast implants and Botox and bikini waxing and think our culture was completely bizarre.

Cathryn:
Pubic hair is totally normal on women—don't buy into that myth. As for the rest, I can relate. I feel much, much better about my body these days, ironically when it's physically broken (multiple back injuries), but there is plenty I would change if I could. But at sixty, just being able to get out of bed in the morning with minimal pain is very nice and serves to put the rest in perspective.

Nidea:
There was a point in my life that I hated my body. I didn't fit that saucy Latina image; I was a lost bird that wore oversize clothing. Sexual abuse didn't help my insecurities. I needed to find ways to make myself feel invisible to men and sometimes would even cut myself over it. Family would call me fat, so I was not only dirty but fat, and all I wanted to do was hide under anything I could.

But as I matured, my relationships became a safe haven. Relationships provided a safe and healthy space for me to learn about myself and define and redefine myself. For eight out of the
past nine years of my life I had a boyfriend, and I have been single for the past year. I am slowly integrating myself into the single scene, and I am trying to maintain the confidence I built within the security of a relationship—as well as avoid the stereotypes that exist to define and confine me before I can speak for myself.

Zoe:
I've always thought that I had a cute face and pretty features, but when I think about my actual body, I start to have doubts. I'm taller than most women, and in heels I'm over six feet. In college, I hung out with a group of girls who were all about 5'2” (if that) and I would always joke that I felt like Gandalf and the Hobbits because I towered over them. To top it off, I'm not a small girl—size 14—so everything about me just felt big.

I don't actually know if I could be with a man I thought was smaller than I am. I would be far too insecure. I've dated a lot of men who are around my size and even that feels strange to me—I tend to feel more comfortable with either larger men or African-American men, who I think are more used to my body type and who I have more in common with culturally. The relationships I've been in that have been most successful have been the ones where my partner reassures me that I'm sexy, attractive, and that he desires me.

Madigan:
When I was fifteen it was discovered that I had been born without a uterus or a vagina, a condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH). The diagnosis came after much medical trauma, as I was initially misdiagnosed and put through a painful and unnecessary surgery. I was immediately pressured to have a neovagina created but was too ashamed and shocked to deal with anything at the time. Over the next three years, I hid this secret and was deeply ashamed of my body. I thought if anyone knew, they would reject me or think I was a freak. Being sexual and/or intimate under these circumstances was difficult and painful. I was never able to be sexually present or enjoy myself, as I was always focused on keeping people from penetrating me.