“Trading Sex” - New York, May 19, 2008
by zohefilms
“If I only knew then what I know now” – something I have heard adults say throughout my childhood – is a phrase I have always hated. Yet, now that I am in my forties, I find myself wanting to utter it too sometimes, but knowing that it won’t work for me any better than it worked for them. Honestly, I am not even sure what I would want to tell my young self if I could.
Then two days ago I was out with my girl friend Pat Cisarano for dinner in Soho and she said:
“Oh my god I saw a picture of myself in my twenties, and I realized I wasn’t bad looking, I was actually pretty.”
I felt like saying, “Duh!” but I controlled myself because she still thinks she is ugly today and the same thing could be applied now.
“But you know that fat thing…” she continued, “It was always hard to think I was pretty when I was overweight.”
Of course, I see Pat’s attractiveness – I am outside her inner story. Pat being heavier than the twiggy American ideal doesn’t detract from her beauty; it is and was always part of her beauty.
Pat’s comment made me think of my Aunt Shirley who always dressed meticulously and has never let her weight get over 105 pounds at 5 feet 5. I recently saw a super 8 movie of my mom and dad returning from their honeymoon on a ship from Bermuda. Greeting them at the dock were both of my grandmothers and my aunt, who must have been about 28 years old. All of them were dressed to the nines, with white gloves and little hats and their patterned dresses cinched tightly at the waist. My aunt was gorgeous; she looked like Elizabeth Taylor with black soft curls and big brown eyes and an hourglass figure. She was giggling and flirting with the camera (my father) in that oh-so-feminine way that took my breath away. This was my aunt who never married and who considered herself the ugly duckling compared to my mom (even to this day). I wonder what her life would have been like if she could go back and change her feeling about herself when she was younger.
Recently I enrolled in a writing class with the writer Martha Shulman at the Open Center . Last week she assigned us an exercise, and I began writing it as I always do. It went something like this: “Homely child makes big effort, and therefore gets boyfriends, who always leave her because she isn’t pretty enough.” It is true I was never a great beauty, but looking back now (as with my Aunt) I wonder what choices I would have made differently if I didn’t think I was so ugly and unlovable? Trying to write this story memoir for Martha’s class, I realized that the reality of my life actually contradicted what I felt: because from a young age there was a stream of boys and men that were attracted to me, leading to a continuous line of relationships (in which most commonly I broke up with the men) to the present.
I actually was shocked at this sudden new picture of my history. How could that homely girl attract the opposite sex all her life? Why was it that boys and men wanted to be with her (even when she didn’t try, because half the time she was so sure she would fail that she didn’t make any effort)? I have carried around this “ugly girl” story around like a precious parcel until now.
In the back of my mind, I have always attributed any male attention to other causes: they like me because of my girlfriend, Pat (who is a cool musician); they like my profession, filmmaking (also very cool); they like my family, American, (which, when I was younger, it was still cool to be); they like my loft, which is big (and again, way cool); and of course there was always the possibility that they like me because eventually I was willing to have sex, (which of course was the coolest of all); the list goes on and on. Never did I ever think that a man really liked me for myself or that I could be alluring as I am.
And of course when I was younger, I traded sex to make up for my perceived ugliness. And sex goes over well with boys. I thought that if I didn’t give sex, no guy would look at me - but now I see that I may have been wrong. My self-perception led me down many roads that perhaps I never would have traveled if I had thought differently. I am still struggling to integrate the idea that my “story” may a different one than I think it is. Because if this story, the one I’ve been telling myself my whole life, isn’t true, then who am I? I wonder… what would it mean for all of us – Pat, My Aunt, and me (and most women I know) – if we saw our beauty in a real way?
June 5th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Just discovered your documentary and was floored by it. Beautiful and gritty all at once. I am eternally puzzling out the dual experiences of motherhood and rarely find a forum to talk about it. Most women have such guilt over feeling anything but joy about a baby. Thanks for your honesty andthe willingness to invadeyour own privacy.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:55 am
This is such a great post, Jennifer, and strikes me very personally.
My mother, I think, had a very similar experience. Even still, she talks to me about wishing she could have appreciated how beautiful she was when she was younger, and how caught up she was in what was “wrong” with her body that she couldn’t see what was right in front of her. The irony is that she still has a great deal of trouble appreciating how beautiful she is TODAY, and the hint of wistfulness I always hear in her voice when she talks about her halcyon days of beauty makes me feel like she is still unable to see and feel how incredibly gorgeous she is in the present, and how enduring beauty is into the future.
It has impacted the kind of woman I grew (and am growing) into significantly—I have been overweight, in varying degrees, all of my life. It has been a struggle to to appreciate my own beauty without qualifying it, without telling myself “I would just be pretty if…” especially as that is something that I have heard from the rest of the world, like when complete strangers would come up to me, grab my face, and say, “You could be a model! But just the face.” It always struck me as suspicious; I saw plenty of fat women who were stunning all of the time, who did not need to change a thing about themselves. I didn’t want to be like my mother in the way that she was unable to celebrate herself in the way she deserved, and at some point, I made the conscious decision to not engage with negativity about my body or my beauty.
As much as I hated to hear it at the time, “If I only knew then what I know now,” was really valuable for me. I listened. Of course, it’s still a challenge at times, but I am so lucky to have had that lesson from my mother, even if she is still working to learn it for herself. It brings a sort of clarity to parts of your life, your relationships with others, and to yourself that I am infinitely grateful for, and hope to never let go of.