When My Body Started Being In the Media Again

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.)