On Being Plain

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I have this problem. You’ll probably think of it as a self esteem problem and that’s fine. But the thing about my problem is that it might seem trivial and instantly deniable, but it affects every aspect of my life in big and small ways all the time.

I am not very attractive.

I don’t think I’m the ugliest person in the world – that would be crazy. But it is a given that in any room, in any group of people I will consider myself to be the most unattractive person there. And that, I consider to be sane(ish), for some reason. I guess because can look around rooms. I can corroborate the way I feel with actual visual evidence. I’m fat. I have thick heavy framed glasses (which admittedly aren’t actually part of my face – but my hopelessly craptastic barely-functioning eyes are and the bottle end lenses make those eyes look considerably smaller), I have lines on my forehead, my hair is uselessly wavy and has a widow’s peak which means it won’t even do the decent thing of lying flat over my weirdly liney forehead. I am a mess. I am, essentially, pretty unpretty.

Recently, briefly, I met a woman who Jack had been on a couple of dates with not long after we met. My version of the story – which may not be exactly true – is that he didn’t really pursue things with me because he was so new-relationship high about me he couldn’t really give enough emotional attention to anyone else. After (recently, briefly, remember) meeting this woman I walked away like I’d been burned. I was dazed in dumbness (tough luck – I got over it) as a stumbled out into the freezing night where people were huddled, smoking in cold doorways.

But anyway, out in the cold, there’s me. All stunned after I saw the woman Jack was too distracted by me to court. And here’s why. She was completely beautiful.

Jack had followed me outside. He touched my shoulder and asked if I was okay and I said nothing or maybe that she was pretty. But my heart was banging it’s confusing through to my brain. WTF! Does not fucking compute! No one would choose me over her.

Perhaps I misunderstood and that isn’t what happened.

But you know, even if I did misunderstand, Jack has been out with a whole bunch of women since that particular failure to launch. And they have all been so pretty. So, so much prettier than me. I am that little blip on his graph. I am dragging his average down. Whether you believe this or not, by conventional standards they are all prettier than me. I am the fattest, most myopic, freckliest…

I should say, full disclosure, Jack has someone new right now. He is truly, totally new relationship high over someone else. He has new kitten syndrome. And me, I am no one’s new kitten. I feel blue with it – to tell the truth. Stumbling on through and trying to live with not being anyone’s most special. I know polyamory isn’t meant to be about that, but my sexuality seems to trend quite heavily towards dishing me out predelictions that I cannot actually do. If you’re wondering just how great that is – the answer is about as great as you imagine.

Course, deep secret here is that I keep thinking, well, maybe I should get myself new kitten. But that’s until I remember that I am unpretty.That finding a submissive man is a horror movie I know pretty well and in which I normally get to star as a terrifying dissapointment. I guess that’s what I’m really struggling with here. The idea that I will never get to be someone’s new exciting thing. Pan was a fluke, Jack was, um, another fluke – surely my luck is through.

And before you start to scoff at how pathetic I am sounding here, I think a lot of people feel like this, really. Inside. It does seem weird to admit to it. But that is the dirty truth. I am ugly and unloveable. The people who do love me have made terrible mistakes… okay, even I am getting annoyed now. But, hey, there’s nothing more attractive than self confidence, right? So I guess I really must be the unfairest of them all.

When I replay that scene in my mind where I met Jack I don’t get it. Like, shouldn’t there be a bit where he recoiled from my grotesquery? How come he kissed me? Was he in shock? My broken lying subconscious reels as it spins and tries to make reality fit with the reel it likes to play in my mind. And where it can’t make fits it rewrites everyone else. ‘Of course he was shocked by you not looking like an immaculate goddess. He just doesn’t like to say.‘

It’s like being a bad transvestite. I have a real and strong feeling that I do not ‘pass’. And that’s probably why I hate forced feminisation as the main humiliation pole holding up the femdom big top. Ha ha, look at you, you don’t cut it at as a woman. You are not feminine, are not pretty and delicious. Yeah, like I love that there are voices in my actual own sexual culture endorsing that idea of acceptable feminine ideals and how humiliating it is not to meet them. (incidentally I don’t think cross dressing or gender bending is all a big slimy puddle of bad. I just have a problem with the way it is used in femdom as femininity is a humiliating state for a man – particularly the notion of him trying to be fem and failing because he is not divinely pretty enough. Men celebrating their own femininity is different – the opposite in fact. I like a little masculinity accentuating femininity on the right man. Pan, used to have the longest Kate-Bushiest hair and I was weak for it. But there’s not much wiggle room left for that kind of thing in if you are a submissive man that isn’t tainted by misogynistic women-are-lesser shit.)

But this is a post about not being pretty. About being plain. Either about the fact I believe I am plain or the fact I actually am. (But this whole blog is often woolly on whether I am talking about something that *is* or something I just think *is*. Sometimes though, life is like that too.) Here it’s hard to say which it is, depends which part of my brain you ask. And, oh I don’t want to be even more whiny in a post so whiny already it’s practically its own whininess festival, but, it’s hard to write this. You can’t say these things without a gazillion layers of meaning adhering themselves to you. Not least the one where I do not want to care about this shit

But I also can’t deny that I do. That feeling certain of my lack of attractiveness has shaped my entire life. So I want to express that. This huge and confusing part of me.

So I’ll just have to ask you – even if you refuse to entertain the notion that I am ugly (I am) – you’ll just have to simply accept that I believe that I am in a way that is not going to be easy to shake off and understand that belief informs much of what I do in life.

That is why when I tie my boyfriend to a chair and pretend he is a prisoner I am interrogating, I struggle with my self consciousness that is all – at heart – about the fact he is looking at me. (I don’t have this problem anything like as much having sex – but I don’t know if that’s because I am just more fine with the expectations of being a vanilla woman, or if I am too distracted by the happening sex, or – oh I don’t know. This subject is one, you may have guessed, where I have very few easy answers. Just anecdotes and pitter patter.)

I don’t find blindfolds so very sexy – but I find them very safe. As the veil comes down over his eyes it is like something lifts from me. And that is true no matter how much I love and trust him. Even when I see nothing but love in his adoring eyes most of the time – I still find it easier without his eyes when I am playing a woman on top. And this, despite my clinging to the claim that female dominance is about his beauty and my desire. Despite my believing that – coolly, rationally, consciously – the insinuations of femdom and it’s insistence on being about female beauty have seeped deeper into me. This is why it matters, btw, to people who ask why I complain about this stuff. Who ask why I let the culture around me affect the way I think about who I am and what I do. Because I am not a robot, that’s why. Of course the culture around me affects the way I think – that’s what a culture is, you dumb mother fuckers!

Sometimes I feel like the way I feel inside most of the time consists of a variety of states of negativity and turmoil that are all taboo one way or another. Just like you are not meant to get off hurting people. Just like you are not meant to dominate men for your own personal enjoyment (unless that claimed enjoyment is part of your marketing strategy.) You are not allowed to say that you are ugly. Or you are, but only as a cue for people leaping to tell you how wrong you are. Even if you have never seen me I am sure you are telling yourself right now that this is all hyperbole and self stroking and plaintive demands for pet me, internet, pet me. You’re either leaping to pet or stalking off in disgust that I should try such underhand tactics to get a stroke off of the web wires.

But that’s my problem

Of course my other problem with writing rambling, vulnerable mess of a post like this is the worry that I am undermining myself. That now, every time I complain about femdom culture there will be an instant retort that of course I think that because I am fucking psychotic (and, obviously, not in a hot way – I don’t think that, really, it is possible to be psychotic in a hot way.) That every time I post anything it can be dismissed as Bitchy is just jealous of hot prodoms, asshat hot amdoms, everyone who isn’t her, men in lingerie who still look hotter than her.

Whatever. Who am I to say that interpretation is wrong? Although the last one probably is.

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Filed under I didn't have a tag for polyamory before?, Jack, beauty, dominatrix, everything is broken, everything is broken including me, femdom, feminisation, my whiny emo pain, pan, polyamory