Body Image and Sex

Becoming a woman is a bit like becoming celebrity, only more traumatic. This is either a fairly agreeable, or vastly unpleasant experience depending on what you look like and how popular you are. You go from being an uninteresting skinny child, more or less left to your own devices, to suddenly being incredibly fascinating to everyone the moment your breasts and hips start to appear.


Three months ago you were just a kid, blissfully unaware of the storm awaiting you with the onset of puberty. Nobody cared if you had hairy legs or short fingernails, chubby ankles or even if you were a girl or not, but now all of a sudden everyone has an opinion on you. From your split ends to your unpainted toenails and everything in between, suddenly everyone you know (and plenty of people you don’t) wants to tell you exactly what’s wrong with you. Magazines are full of pictures and articles and adverts of how you should look, your mother is tutting at your stretch marks, your aunts tell you how easy it will be for you to give birth with those hips, boys at school shout obscenities about your vagina across the playground. It’s all very stressful.


Then there are the body changes. Boys – a bit of extra hair and a deeper voice do not a dramatic pubescent transformation make. Try growing a pair of boobs (it hurts) and going home from school one day to discover your pants are full of blood (yeah, that hurts too). I think it took me about ten years to get used to the shock of getting an unrecognisably new body in the space of about three months. Granted, the transformation isn’t as a dramatic or fast for many girls. I was envious of my peers’ girlish bodies with their tiny pert breasts and slender hips, but perhaps they were jealous of mine too. I couldn’t do the things I used to do, like climb trees and dance and run about, without my new body getting in the way. It was like it had betrayed me.


It is against a background of all this drama and bleeding and trauma and pressure and tits and image and advertising and probably some awkward lights-out fumbling teenage sex that we emerge into our twenties. It is unsurprising then, that girls carry some insecurity into our relationships, specifically surrounding our bodies and exposing them to the critical eyes of others. I’m certainly not saying that guys don’t have insecurities too, but there isn’t quite that same intense pressure that we are under, to be perfect. Once the clothes come off and presumably there’s been some snogging, so many of us have this nagging feeling that we aren’t up to scratch. That scar, that spot, that stretch mark, that bit that wobbles a bit too much, that bit that doesn’t wobble enough…it’s a minefield.


And it can stop us from actually enjoying the experience - inhibition about our bodies gets in the way of good sex. Don’t you wish you could just laugh about the whole thing, not care anymore? Not that it isn’t easier said than done, it took me years to get over feeling inhibited and self-conscious about some aspects of my body. I’m certainly not all there yet either. But I’ve learned a valuable lesson along the way too, in that how you feel about yourself is what others see. People pick up on our carefully hidden insecurities.


Once you get over worrying about your flaws, you’ll realise no-one else really cares about them either. I once asked a male friend about whether guys are actually bothered about a bit of extra wobble, prominent ribs or boobs that are slightly different sizes whilst in the throes of passion – he said this: Woman, we’re so stoked to be having sex with you at all, we couldn’t care less or even notice. All we’re thinking is – this girl wants to have sex with me, she has tits and a fanny – awesome.


Not delicately put, but you get the idea.


Alice.


Twitter: @lucyetlapin
URL:   http://aliceetlapin.blogspot.com

A Curious Case of Hair Colour - Body Issues

I have always dyed my hair every colour under the sun (please see embarrassing photos below), but until I decided a couple of years ago to go back to my natural state of blonde I truly didn’t realise the difference that hair colour has on how people treat you.
I find being a blonde to be a negative hair colour, as a lady I want to be treated as one but as a blonde I find that most of the men I encounter like me because I’m blonde, blue eyed etc... not because I’m alright to talk to and am moderately intelligent.
I want to find out whether this is true for all hair colours, in the matter of all things LYYB it simply wouldn’t work without an experiment, so I have dyed my hair red and my eyebrows to see if I evoke different reactions and as ever at the end I will some up my findings. I’ll also be speaking about previous hair colours I've used in the past.  

Red Head
I was a red head for a couple of months, dying your hair red is a massive effort, It runs out so quickly and costs a small fortune to keep looking lovely, so is it worth it?
I think although superficially the hair looked fabulous, I think what I felt inside was not so good, I did get what I suppose you could class as more positive male attention. Gentlemen started to approach me more, I could even go as far to say the calibre of men I was attracting were of a higher standard. The conflicting mental issue that I was having was because I started to feel like people didn’t like the real me. The real me is blonde. If men are treating me different because of a hair colour then surely they’re not as amazing as I first thought.
I have to say that even women I encountered during this time treated me differently, as a blonde I find women can sometimes come across like they hate my guts... as a red head not so much... I didn’t realise hair colour made this much of a difference. It was like all of a sudden I became less of a threat. 

Black Head
When I was younger I had black hair... SHOCKING. People used to think because I dyed my hair black I must’ve been an Emo or a Goth. You’re wrong. I dressed quirky, but I always have regardless of hair colour. People felt the need to brand me with a label so they could deal with my ever changing strange look.
I was once told that I couldn’t have a job unless I changed my hair colour from black to something more natural because I was deemed ‘unapproachable.’ Which is ridiculous, I was a normal eighteen year old.
Don’t even get me started on how people used to treat me, girls my age thought I was a weirdo and boys my age pretty much thought the same thing. All this because of a hair colour?

Blonde Head
As I stated earlier I sometimes find being a blonde has a negative impact on my life.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of people that do honestly assume that because of my hair colour I must be an idiot. I’m clearly not. I’ve found it to be a nuisance at times when I want to blend in, when I lived on my own I would constantly be harassed by men shouting such creative things as ‘Hey Goldilocks you can sleep in my bed’… I think that’s my personal favourite. Having blonde hair is like an invitation for abuse... blonde jokes, misinterpretation, perverts and people honestly believing due to hair colour you’re a slut.

I do however believe through all this negativity you have to be yourself, so after having black, red and blonde. I’ll stick with the blonde this time and wont be so influenced by the way that people treat me.
If you don’t like the blonde hair... You know what to do.
LYYB x