Girly magazines lie to us all the time. For instance, this month’s Cosmo advised me to give a blow job with Jell-O in my mouth (vom) and Glamour seems to be implying that high-heeled strappy sandals and wool socks can be worn together now (no).
But to be fair, there’s one solid gold nugget the femme glossies dish out every single month that actually isn’t a total sack of crap: you won’t truly enjoy sex if you’re not comfortable with your body (and yes, that goes for those of you who wield the peens too).
Full disclosure: I wouldn’t be quite so passionate about this unless I hadn’t experienced the process (and subsequent glorious results) of letting go of my own body insecurities in bed. See, long before my love of sluttin’, I had a love of stuffin’. More specifically, I had a love of stuffing one shoulder pad into the right side of my bra. Yes, my friends, at the risk of sounding like a beast, I must make a confession: my breasts are totally different sizes. No, seriously — my left neener is a C cup and my right is an A cup.
While my epic discovery of the padded pushup bra has improved my life such that I don’t stuff anything but my vag anymore (sorry, couldn’t resist), being a helpless adolescent onlooker while one of my twins became a monster and the other remained a midget was, well, damn near heartbreaking. My doctors, my mother and even the lingerie lady at Nordstrom all assured and promised me my girls would level out by my 20s. I must have spent seven years waiting for my right tittie to catch up with my left one; after all, D.J. Tanner, Joey Potter, Kelly Kapowski and the pink Power Ranger all had matching sets, so my right boobaloob was obviously going to materialize overnight to end my teenage troubles, right?
Yeah, but no.
It was a huge point of insecurity for me in high school. I didn’t care about my skin or my weight or my hair or what I was wearing. Just my boobies. Hell, I didn’t even bat an eyelash when the very first dude I had sex with told the whole school that our condom got lost in the murky depths of my snatch (memo to “Travis”: it’s because you bought MAGNUMS). As far as I was concerned, it was all good in the ‘hood as long as his dirty little acne-covered ass didn’t breathe a word about my itty bitty titty.
Somewhere in between Freshman and Junior year of college — probably between dude three and dude six — I realized I’d been spending far too much time waiting for and worrying about Mr. Right Tit; I was 20 and he was still totally MIA. I was never one to wait around for guys (if he ain’t here, he ain’t coming), so I’d had quite enough of this bullshit. I couldn’t really bear the money and time expenses of getting an implant, so my only other option was to deal with cold, A-C reality.
I wish I could tell you what exactly within me changed and made me accept my body for what it was. I don’t mean to go all Girl Scouts on you, but once I stopped obsessing over what my partner thought about my itty bitty titty, sex became infinitely better. For one thing, I used to always swat my guy’s hands away if he tried to touch my chest; I was afraid his wrinklebeast would literally shrivel up and die if he got an up-close-and-personal feel of my mismatched neeners.
But once I allowed him go to town on my boobies and nipples and stuff, I (duh) enjoyed myself a whole lot more. Plus, I was focused on feeling the sensations of sex rather than obsessing over what the dude was thinking.
Itty bitty titty aside, of course I know my body isn’t model perfect. But seriously, if I’m having sex with someone I love, he probably loves my body as it is; if it’s a random hookup, I don’t give a shit what he thinks and the bastard is lucky enough to be sleeping with me in the first place. If he cares about the scar on my stomach or that my chest isn’t Scarlett Johansson-esque, he’s welcome to take his peen and his unpleasant brand of douchebaggery elsewhere.
Girls, chances are that if he makes the decision to have sex with you when your clothes are on, he’s not going to find something under your clothes that’s going to make him vom. Plus — surprise, surprise — he’s got body hang-ups of his own!
I went around this week and asked a bunch of people to talk about the parts of their bodies they were most insecure about when they were nakey. 11 women worried about their tummies, three were concerned about thighs and one was troubled by the double chin that makes an appearance when she’s lying down.
My peen-possessing friends were a little more surprising: yes, two of them assured me they were insecure about absolutely nothing, but seven worried about their tummies (the dude guy next to me in the Regent lounge bemoaned his lack of a six pack). One wished his back acne was a bit less severe and two said they thought they were a bit too hairy for most womens’ tastes.
Excuse me, but if I’m worried about my titties and you’re worried about your lack of chiseled abs, who in the hell is going to worry about whether we’re enjoying ourselves?
So listen. Even though women’s magazines are always trying to tell us how to look and feel “sexier,” they do (once in a while) manage to wedge a couple of legitimate words of wisdom between their impractical and likely UTI-inducing sex tips. You ARE sexy, you just need to let yourself believe it — odds are, if you’re confident, your partner isn’t going to care about anything but the two of you getting off. Incidentally, today is National Love Your Body day and if there was every a time to let go of your insecurities it would be today. We can’t all have abs like Britney back in the day; we all wish we looked a little more this or a little more that; but when you’re getting laid, can you please just do me a favor? Worry about nothing but getting laid — trust me, once you hit that orgasm, your itty bitty titty won’t matter at all.
Jenna B. is a senior. She can be contacted at opinion@cornellsun.com [1]. Bedroom Eyes appears alternate Thursdays.
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[1] mailto:opinion@cornellsun.com