Beyond the Gospel According to Darkness

Related article: Unraveling the Mystery of Self-Esteem

“Men…in my experience are far more forgiving of women’s supposed imperfections than most women are themselves.” Reader asks, “I’ve read that sentiment in many places but never a place whose writers I trust in the way I trust PW writers. So, I’d like to hear more about what that forgiveness actually looks like. Is it that men notice imperfections but aren’t turned off by them? Or is it that men just don’t notice imperfections? Or something else? Are men sick of having this conversation? In virtually every other realm of my life I embrace and celebrate my many strengths, yet sexually I still fear that I am defined by my cellulite.”

Hello…

I posted this as a reply below, but I want to move it up where more people will see it.

The forgiveness I’m talking about involves enjoying companionship and sex. What most people don’t quite get up to recognizing is that sexual contact is based on chemistry, not a checklist. I think many men are exhausted with how judgmental of themselves so many women are, how much work they think they have to do to be presentable outside the house. I am deeply saddened and often horrified by how many admissions and stories of bullimia I have heard come out of the young women who work as models. They are endless, and it’s not just models, either.

Back to chemistry — the thing that counts. Chemistry can be subtle, it can be overt, and it can be so strong that it backfires, but when it’s there, it’s there. It’s based on emotional makeup and interplay, and intellectual, and I believe to some degree aesthetic. There are women I think are absolutely gorgeous, who are exactly “my type,” who I am not interested in as erotic partners (this generally involves their values or self-awareness level). Taken from the other side of the spectrum, we have all had the experience of, “this person is not my type, but damn, they’re hot.” And — notably — we’ve felt just about every possibility in between.

I suggest that you pay attention to who you are attracted to, and experiment with the energy. Many people avoid the people they are attracted to because they decide in advance that they are not going to be attracted back. Sometimes this is true; sometimes it’s not. There is just one way to find out.

There are some people who don’t like fat, some who don’t mind, and some who love it. There are some people who don’t like small women, some who don’t mind, and some who love them. To the large women in the audience I would alert you to the existence of men and women who are actually into larger people. And since half the country or more is technically overweight, there are plenty of them to go around. I was in Canada a few years ago and read a newspaper article about a study that found that overweight people, on average, get more sex than their lighter-weight counterparts.

Yet in almost every instance (in my experience) the psychic chemistry overrides the physical details, no matter what they are. That chemistry involves plenty of responding to how someone feels about his or her existence, body included. This is the heart of the matter. I believe that in relationships we respond do our partner’s relationship to himself or herself. The relational diagram is not a straight line between party A and party B. It is: party A vibrates with a certain feeling tone, a certain level of self-acceptance or lack thereof (and other factors); same for party B; and then either there is attraction or there is not.

Many people who know they are attractive have the frustration of intimidating others and therefore their own apparent attractiveness works against them. Listen and you will hear a lot of these stories. Many women are horrified at being attractive (even as they work for hours a day to present themselves), hate the “unwanted attention,” or feel that their beauty is a curse.

There are many themes that have been identified (by therapists, for one) involved with being, or feeling, over-large. I know women who are thin who feel fat (and therefore ugly) and women who are pretty fat and feel hot hot hot and, by golly, they can get some or all of what they want (in the complex, sometimes painful game of human interplay).

Relationships are internally mediated. How you feel about yourself is the single most important determining factor. So if you feel your cellulite is what is insulating you from contact, from feeling attractive, that is true — and maybe that’s it’s job. But I don’t think you need to ‘get rid’ of it to change its job; and once you give it a new assignment, it may well begin to dissipate.

Remember that many of the people [in particular women] who you see and meet, who look, to the eyes, the most beautiful, are wracked with constant doubts about their attractiveness. That is in part why they put so much effort into making themselves look attractive. In truth, attractiveness is inwardly mediated.

That is good news — we can do something about it. It’s bad news — sometimes that is difficult. It’s good news — there is a journey involved, and self-acceptance does indeed reflect on the outside. In my experience working with many people it is THE thing to strive for.

We could continue this conversation with the methods people here have learned and also experiences on the journey of self-acceptance. It is deeply personal territory but we have only to gain by creating an environment that sustains self-acceptance. I suggest you start in a mirror, and spend as many hours there over as many months looking, not just judging, until you start to actually see your own beauty. If you cannot see it looking at your body as a whole, get really close and look into your eyes: until you actually see yourself looking back.

I will leave you with one of my favorite songs ever, given to me by my friend Jane in Vancouver: The Gospel According to Darkness by Jane Siberry.