HOT GIRLS

I objectify her with the eyes of the man of my worst nightmare, internalizing her body parts as a collection of props and comparing them with my own. 

These days, I absolutely cannot stand hot girls.

When I was in high school, I was obsessed with Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and knew that as a woman, I was being raised to experience feminine sexuality as an appearance, rather than a feeling. I was determined to embody myself, to encourage all other women around me to embody themselves, to experience my sexuality from the inside out. I felt good about my body on the basis of feeling good in my body, in delighting in the gift that is having a body. 

Yet somehow, between then and now, I have learned to experience my sexuality as an appearance, as a commodity and an object. It is a deeply fearful indulgence; often when I see a beautiful woman roaming the Earth with such strength and confidence, I stare at her with the fascination of an admirer. I objectify her with the eyes of the man of my worst nightmare, internalizing her body parts as a collection of props and comparing them with my own. 

Almost always, mine falls short in some way, and I conclude that I am not woman enough. It is purposeful torture of myself, and it feels good to torture myself because it feels as though the pain that I feel is proof that I am looking for the truth. It feels more true than the shallow compliments that I receive from my social media posts about my life that somehow always end up being about my beauty just because I am in them and a woman. 

In the mix of the aggressive messaging that my body and femininity are not enough, and that I am extremely beautiful from my friends and family, I wonder about some objective truth of beauty. By staring at these hot girls, whom I know are objectively beautiful, I hope that I can compare myself to them and know how I really look to other people. I often find myself wanting to just ask people if they actually think I am beautiful, in the most brutalizing way possible in the search for truth, but I know that nothing they could say would help.

As a queer woman, and as a woman who loves womanhood, it is painful to experience such agonizing animosity towards other women for the first time. In sexuality, I once found pleasure and beauty and sensuality–now, all of those are deadened. They are interrupted by a newfound hatred of womanhood. I hate hot girls, I hate myself, I hate being unfeminine, I hate being feminine, and I hate the vulnerability of pleasure. Envying beauty is the most unerotic emotion I have ever felt, and I desperately wish to wash myself of it, but find myself looking out for the truth regardless.

I know from the older women in my family, who are completely transfixed by their own beauty, that I could spend my entire life feeling so unembodied. I think it’s in part a symptom of nonwhiteness–once I was talking to my mom about it, and she offered the possibility that if my family never moved to the United States I’d feel beautiful, because the beautiful women back home look like me. I know that our culture produces envy between women, and that no woman can meet the inhuman standard of what a perfect woman should be because we, in the land of the living, are messy.

I wish desperately to rid myself of the sickness of this. Sometimes just seeing another woman nude makes me actually sick to my stomach–my heart starts racing and I am overwhelmed with panic. Alongside that, there’s so much guilt that I am turning out to be a lot more of a misogynist than I initially thought. It’s so dreadful, so graphic and painfully unerotic, and I want to feel eroticism again. But at this point, I’m not quite sure how.

I often consider cleaning myself of my social media feed, because it drains me of so much of my erotic energy. It’s truly disastrous–upon opening up my feed, I am blasted with these unreal white women who purchase a slew of products that I could never afford, devote hours of time to their appearance that I could never see myself realistically blocking out. Or, contrarily, I’ll see memes about girls and women, boys and men that make me sick to my stomach. I’ve never felt more pressure to perform as a conventional woman, because these unreal women seem discomfortingly real, and painfully superior at playing The Woman.

I guess because of the social media, movies, books, and TV that I grew up around, I always imagined the ultimate true adult women to be these conventional, beautiful, impractical things. Regardless of my feminist development, I was still raised as a conventional American girl. I thought of shaving one’s legs or being allowed to purchase makeup as rites of feminine passage in the same way getting one’s period or wearing a bra were. I sort of just assumed and accepted that I would never feel like a real adult Woman in that way. It never really mattered to me, especially because there is a certain stigma in being overly feminine as a woman, as well. I happily embraced being a woman, being feminine in whatever way felt regular to me. I didn’t have some imaginary man in my head punishing me for not being a conventional woman. 

But unfortunately, once the imaginary man entered my mind, it was hard to fully erase myself of him. I gawk at the pornography of women’s bodies through his judgmental gaze, I judge the fittedness of my outfits by his preferences, and I exit my sexual body to look at it from the outside when necessary. Considering that there is no such thing as a perfectly conventional woman, my God, womanhood is a hellish aesthetic. 

AUTHOR: Catherine Du ARTIST: Christina Xu