We’ve never had the privilege of living in a world where our appearance wasn’t viewed as our primary form of social capital. Hair and makeup, body glitter, eating right…on the bright side of beauty there’s unicorn eyeshadow palettes and healthy living. But there’s a dark side, too, that’s explored and examined in the fascinating book Beauty […]
Instead of feeling liberated, going barefaced made me feel anxious and unkempt. The thought of staring at myself in the mirror for an hour in a workout class where I’m not wearing makeup makes my stomach turn. Aside from the occasional hiking trip, I haven’t gone a day without makeup in years. Until today. It’s […]
I reject the insistence that a woman can’t choose what makes her feel beautiful without regard for the judgement of others. 1997: The girls at school collect Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers. We line them up on one of our desks, form a circle, compare. The most basic come in standard fruit flavors like lime and […]
Countless hours, days, weeks, months, and years spent wondering if I am good enough. I haven’t shaved my legs for a few weeks. It wasn’t intentional. I just haven’t made the time in the morning to get it done. There is a part of me that wants to just say I’m done. I’m going to […]
Some days you can just live in your body and give yourself space to be not OK at all. It’s completely OK to look in the mirror and be sad that your stomach is a curtain for your pubic hair. I was a precocious kid: intelligent, insightful, nosy, bossy. I was the teacher’s pet, the straight-A kid, […]
I think she looks fabulous, but people sure have a lot of opinions about it. My 9-year-old daughter has never been shy about her preferences and opinions. Right before she began kindergarten, she asked if she could cut her hair short. Since then, it has varied in style, but has stayed pretty short. Over the […]
People can be ten thousand things, and really, looking beautiful is only one of them. I recently participated in a photo shoot, and the photographer posted one of the images on Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends posted underneath, You look [insert fabulous adjective here]! However, one person commented: This is the true essence of you. […]
I want to celebrate my beauty and my body and my whole self as I am, not as I wish I were. When my memoir Stripping Down was published in 2012, I thought I would be done with needing to talk about my risqué younger life, which included stripping and nude modeling. I would be […]
While I’m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today’s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity. In the early 2000s, when I was a burgeoning fashionable fat girl, I stumbled across the LiveJournal community Fatshionista. I loved seeing pictures of women […]
No matter how many anti-fat shaming and body acceptance posts I read and share, the feeling of inadequacy returns. A Victoria’s Secret model mocks me from my refrigerator door. Her stomach, smooth and flat, taunts me as I glare at it. How I wish I could take a butcher knife and just slice off the […]
When I visited a nude beach, I realized the only person making me uncomfortable was me. I lifted my shirt over my head, took a deep breath, and pulled the strings of my bathing suit top loose. Immediately, my mind began to race. What if people stare at me? I wish I would’ve spent more […]
The intimacy I experienced with my body and my developing baby during pregnancy was perhaps the most compelling transformation I have ever known. Why would I want to erase that? A close friend of mine from graduate school was in town over the weekend, someone I hadn’t seen since I was mid-way through my pregnancy. […]
