BODY
I've always been a mind who resented having a body. I take a fierce joy in neglecting it, glad it's mine to ruin. I drink, I don't exercise, I alternate between eating garbage and eating nothing. I'm over beauty, and I find the pursuit of health for its own sake narcissistic.
When I was younger I was too keenly aware that my body was my primary currency for securing love. I starved and plucked and colored inside the lines, hemorrhaged time and effort. I hated every fussy, fretful moment I invested in this object, instead of in myself. I still didn't get the love I wanted. I should have gotten ahead instead.
After my body depreciated in worth (age 22, according to the data), I hid myself. I thought it would feel powerful to see but not be seen, to refuse to serve the guilt-free portions of free-range flesh that people thought they deserved from me. I was still letting my body hold too much power. The ideological battleground of the female body permits no neutral stance, so I was still nothing more than how I looked, what I wrapped my body in, whether I fucked. I was judged and pitied for the poverty of my sexual liberation.
I'm doing this now for the same reason I like to dress extravagantly and to wear bold makeup. Take this thing I've shed, if you want. Look at this, not me. I hate this, I'm not this, and I never have been.
SEX
Everything that was once empowering has been calcified, commodified, weaponized. Sex positivity is used by creeps to coerce me into unwanted sex acts. Body positivity is used to sell soap and bras. Sex itself has been transformed from an act into a lifestyle of perpetual posturing.
Feminism is supposed to be about choice. We do have more choices now, each one with its own flavor of shame. As a gray asexual, the shame I'm burdened with-- from other women, from potential sexual/romantic partners, from both mainstream and subcultural mores-- is for not being sexual enough, not kinky or transgressive enough, not "liberated" according to some prescriptive definition. Before I had sex, and long before I had an orgasm, I was pushing myself to go into sex shops, to wear bondage gear, to seek extreme porn, because the way I was born wired was somehow not OK, according to the people who were busy telling everyone else they were OK. Starting in middle school, I counted down the years until I could be a fetish model or a sex worker, because I realized that my intellect and creativity didn't matter to anyone else unless I was sexual in precisely the correct way. I am still convinced of this, I just stopped caring about mattering.
What meaning do our choices hold, given our complicated matrix of social and personal incentives, biological predispositions, neuroticisms, lack of free will, etc.? Who among us is mature or self-aware enough to make decisions about their own sexuality? Ban sex; we're not ready for it yet.
LOVE
Wait, no. I take it all back. I can be anything you want. Do you like to hurt and humiliate people? I am more willing to be hurt and humiliated by you than anyone else is. Do you like thin women? I never cared for eating. Do you expect intercourse every day, twice a day? Do you want a pliant doll wrapped in lace, or in leather? Do you want a sex slave you can share with your friends, or a perfect wife in pearls and heels? I can accessorize with any personality or career of your choice. I can amputate anything that isn't to your taste. I want you to break me into pieces, whether you want to or not.
I promise to always love you more than you love me. I promise if you devoted your entire life to loving, if you joined a monastery in Italy where you spent every day in a cell meditating on passion while a novice brought you gruel and emptied your chamber-pot, you could not be equal to the love I feel for you on even my most distracted day.
I was doing well for a while, and now I am ashamed of every stable part of my identity, of my age, of my past, of anything I can't change to bring you closer to me. I apologize for my body; I don't like it either. I apologize for my face; I should've gotten it fixed years ago. I apologize for all the years I didn't work on myself because I was in thrall to someone else's preferences, someone else's values. It'll be different this time; it'll be forever this time.
I know you deserve more than I can offer, but let me make you happy, let me make you proud of me, let me be the shadow of your shadow.