I’m a lot older than I was when I first started posting photos of myself online as part of whatever-it-is that I do.
Here’s June 2000, when I started live weekly webcam shows, on my site beautifultoxin. Aside from getting me to write/blog every day, to build up my first community of viewers/readers, and getting me wet with many of the concepts I still work with — surveillance, celebrity, identity, performance — the cam project let me amass, with very little effort, tens of thousands of images of myself from a four year period (curiously, I killed the thing around the time Flickr launched).
I can go back and see my “flaws.” See that I have always been soft around my belly, had rounder hips than I do breasts, that my ass and breasts sit high on my body. That my forehead is prone to wrinkle up and my chin will double if not held just right to the camera. That just putting on lipstick makes me look like a different person depending on the light. That holding my arms slightly away from my body makes my hourglass figure pop but bringing them in close adds weight I don’t really have. That I do care about looking good on camera. That good to me, for me, still means slender, if not thin.
I know how to fake it, but I know that everyone knows how to fake it.
And I only really get how deep this gets me when I see something like this burlesque number from Mad Men, see a girl’s curve and shape and belly and softness and roundness and remind myself, I want to be as good to touch as I am to look at, want to feel as at home with myself at 30 as I did at 20 as I wished I did, and maybe really did, at 10. When all I wanted, by the way, was “a real woman’s body,” and that was, at the time, just like this:
(I know, she’s also a glamorous femme, a stripper, a dancer. But wait for the lingering shot as she slides her gown down her hips. That should not be shocking.)
Honey, those “flaws” describe a lot of what I found drop dead desirable about you all those years ago. Round butt and belly? High breasts? I’m sorry, these are “flaws?”
I know what this culture has to say about your body type, and personally, I think the concept that it is sick and full of something-non-too-pleasant should remain on the table in regards to discussions of the flesh.
Speaking as a scrawny, emaciated bitch, I have to say that I am jealous of your body, though I generally settle on mild envy, rather than maliciousness. At any rate, I’m on a steady diet of Coke, potato chips and pastries in a dire attempt to put some fucking curves on this skeleton. (Which is the oh-so-marketable and oh-so-sickly body type that looms over your psyche. Irony, no?)
To conclude: You are Hot. Really Hot. Flaws? Christo in Crispies, I always thought you looked smart (thus hot) when your forehead did/does that crease thing it does, like you had a lot on your mind, and a deep well of insight about it. Those transformations of perception due to lighting and make-up? Too a shapeshifting sexual sorcerous, that is the stuff of sweet sex dreams to me.
Don’t get to down on your flesh. Its nice flesh.
*smooch*