Ok first of all I want to start by saying I really don't think much of my photo, I know it looks posed (which it is), looks as though I took it myself (which I did) and that the lemon tree prop is kind of naff (I'll let you decide on that one). But it must be said, it took me a long time to get that picture. I took what felt like hundreds of photos of myself to get that one pic that I'm mildly happy with.
So it's fair to say that I have relatively low self esteem. When I'm out and about, the very first thing I do is to look around, check out every woman in the room and then rank myself, by attractiveness compared to the company I'm in. And of course attractiveness is subjective, so if I was at say a Bon Jovi concert (where its all stone washed jeans and big eighties hair) I probably wouldn't be as freaked out as I was at the Sufjan gig the other week where it seemed everyone had perfected the look I always strive for ( in case you're wondering, that's fifties girliness infused with indie sentiment- and no I didn't say that ironically). I get myself in such a state some nights that I find the bathroom mirror in the public toilets very, very confronting. I either don't want to look in it, for fear of what I'd see, or I don't want to be seen to be looking in it by the other women, for fear that they will see me as a hopeless case, and my going through the girly motions of fixing my hair or make up to be a monumental waste of time. And other times I get to the mirror, look up and realise I'm not quite as hideous as I've convinced myself I am. Ah, the mind is a funny thing.
Why am I telling you this? Because, in the name of Hello to Modern Living, I have performed not one but two feats of extreme bravery. Back when this blog was just a concept I posted a pic of myself on Hot or Not? as a type of social experiment and I thought it would be a cute little topic to write about. If you're not familiar with the website, its where, based on a photo posted by yourself, people around the world click on a score from 1 - 10 based on how attractive they think you are. That score is then collated with the score you got from hundreds of others clicking numbly away as photo after photo is presented to them and then you find out, out of ten how hot you 'really' are. It is, for someone like me, an awful, dreadful site that should never be entered. But enter I did.
Now the pic I chose was fairly harmless. I'm wearing a Partridge Family Come on Get Happy
t- shirt, I'm smiling at the camera and generally look quite like myself five or so years ago (that's when the photo was on the site). I think I left it up for 24 hours and was delivered the painful truth that in the world of attractiveness I was a 6 or maybe worse still a 5.9 - the details escape me. The inevitable searching through for women ranked lower than myself followed as did the slump, and the tears and the general ill feeling.
But, self destructive behaviour never lies dormant for long and recently I posted another photo. This time I was savvier. This time I understood the trick. This time I posted a lingerie shot! When my husband to be went overseas without me early in our relationship, I sent him some pics that I'd taken of myself - just to remind him which side his bread was buttered. One of these photos was of me, on all fours, looking as saucily as I could down the lens. I was wearing a black lacy bra, with plenty of cleavage and if you let your eyes follow the line of my body, you can just make out my bum sticking up in the background. I am resting on my arms, and I have to admit in hindsight it does kind of, sort of, look like I am missing one hand - perhaps it was that and not the suggestive clothing or the pose that increased my score to an 8! That's right, this 5.9 became an 8! And the thing is, I felt excellent! I felt better abut myself than I had for some time. Strange because I understood as I was doing it, that my score would be better on account of the fact that I was wearing next to no clothes in the second shot. Men love that sort of rubbish.
Scanning magazines in general, it appears that naked and near naked women are a part of many a men's magazine - and I don't mean the type of mags you hide under your mattress. Magazines about cars, about boats, about health and fitness - they all seem to feature scantily clad ladies in varying positions. The soft porn of Zoo Weekly and the much classier GQ, have women as an adornment, an embellishment to the articles. The same cannot be said for women's mags. Why is it that women prefer looking at and reading stories about other women, about diets, gossip about stars, pictures of models with cellulite and no make up, and the bulimic and anorexic and the depressed and the divorced? Why can women read stories about weight loss, or scrap booking or fashion without an accompanying shot of a man in a g string, picking up a box, his muscles glistening with the exertion - or better still - two men picking up boxes? Why is there no knitting annual for women called 'dicks and knits'?
So, I was both a success and a failure on Hot or Not? Go to FHM.com (not you Matthew!) and the playing field is leveled. They have their own version of Hot or Not? called Girl o Matic, where every lady is in a bikini, or their knickers, and these girls are experts at the saucy look down the lens. They are all gorgeous in the traditional men's magazine way - big boobs, big lips, long hair, brown skin. However, when faced with only gorgeous women, it appears that the men who vote on these sites, lose focus, or perspective or something - because all of the women I saw were rated a 6 or a 7. Now that's less than me! I don't know what to make of that though. Should we be concerned that when faced with images of women like that, men seem to get numb to them, that they then might want more; more explicit photos, bigger boobs etc to get a reaction?
All I know is that sometimes I feel good about myself, sometimes I feel poo - just like everyone else. I know that we are complex and strange and that if you want to see it, most people really are attractive in their own way. I also know that the single biggest and best compliment I have ever had was not about my looks, or my bum or my boobs but about me. My husband, when we first met said "I find you interesting in the extreme". Now that was cool.
