Take Back Your Beauty!

There probably aren't that many women around who have never said no to sex because of the way they feel about their bodies - and those that can say yes to lovemaking with abandon are the objects of great envy for the rest of us. But aren't you tired of us women being made objects? Aren't you tired of festering in envy, especially when the woman you are investing so much energy in hating probably doesn't feel as perfect as you think she is? Maybe it's time we all saw ourselves through someone else's eyes.

It seems that there are two kinds of women - us and them. The trouble is, regardless of how we are perceived by our fellow females, most of us don't consider us to have the beautiful body that would earn us the enviable position of being one of 'them'. 'Us' women are flawed, and boy, do we know it. In fact, we like to rub our own noses in it at every opportunity.
But as a certain popular TV psychologist often asks - how's that working for you? So we have things about our bodies that we would give our eye-teeth to change - for some of us, our eye-teeth are top of the list of change-worthy body parts - but is dogging on ourselves making us feel any better about it? Truisms earn their pithy status for one reason alone - because they are actually annoyingly accurate. And it might be easier said than done, but constantly undermining ourselves for not being made a particular way really doesn't do us any good. It certainly isn't making my eye-teeth look any better.
So back to the sex. And our envy of the women who are having it. Most women cite the reason for their unwillingness to participate in a little hanky panky to be a lack of time and lack of inclination - our partners treat us like goddesses, but only the domestic kind. We want to feel special, we say, to feel beautiful. Well that's a truly noble sentiment, but isn't the truth really that it's our own derogatory selves that are making us feel less than special?

Really, there is no us and them - we are all just who we are, and after a certain point, there's very little we can do about that. Some women derive great comfort from the fact that celebrity women, those touted as being the beautiful the rest of us wish we were, are also all too quick to point out their flaws. Not me - the sooner the rest of us can admit that we are beautiful in our own way, the better.

They might have come up with a scientific explanation of what is beautiful (symmetrical is best, apparently), but I choose to reserve judgement. By which I mean that each of needs to judge for him or herself what exactly beautiful is.
Beauty is all around us. It's found in closeness, in intimacy, in a certain look, a smile. I've spent hours arguing with girlfriends about which actor is sexiest - we never agree. Isn't beauty the most personal attribute of all? And don't you, once and for all, want to decide that you are beautiful too?

I know I do. I am fed up of denying myself life's pleasures because I don't measure up to some very arbitrary physical standard. I am fed up of other women looking at me with envy, because my body is a particular size. I still feel fat. But too, I feel beautiful sometimes. And when do I feel most beautiful? When I remove myself from my own thoughts and find a real appreciation of myself in the eyes of someone else. I am awed sometimes by how much my friends love me, but these are not stupid women - they must see something good. And my husband, my gorgeous husband - we have earth-shattering, groundbreaking sex that has absolutely nothing to do with the way I feel about myself. For once, I lose myself completely in feelings that aren't my own, and I wallow in the fact that I am beautiful to him.

It sounds simple, and it is - the secret isn't in hating yourself for what you're not. It's in loving yourself for what you are. And if you can't see it, forget about yourself for a while. You might just find the you that you've been looking for.