[Parker]

Originally Posted by AlexHunter

The media puts so much pressure on women to look a certain way: to be rail thin, but not with a flat chest; to always be perfectly put together; to have completely symmetrical facial features; to conform to society's idea of femininity; and the list continues.

I have been with plenty of femmes who struggled with body image issues...

But what about the butches?

My body issues never stemmed from not looking feminine enough - I've never been feminine. Even when I was trying to be feminine with the dresses and makeup in college because that's what my mom wanted me to do - I still wasnt all that feminine and that was ok with me.

Conversely, my body issues never stemmed from not looking male, masculine, or man enough - because I am not, never was, and never will be a man.

Man or male and butch are not the same thing - it took me a few years to figure that out when I was first coming out because the fallacy that all butches are like men, or want to emulate men, or want to and eventually will become men was and still is out there.

But I love my female body - and I love being the butch that I am - so I had no issues with not looking *anything* enough. No one's opinion of my butchness (or the lack thereof, in their eyes) has ever really mattered to me.

My body issues come from my size, my weight. When I was in high school, college (the first time), and the Navy, I was thin - some said too thin at 135lbs and 5'10". After I got out of the Navy in my mid-20s, I gained about 65lbs in one year, averaging about 200lbs. It took me a few years to be ok with that weight. But now I am even bigger - about 265lbs and what I see on the outside is nothing like how I perceive myself on the inside. It sometimes makes me feel unattractive, unlovable, and undesirable.

I know that, along with men's and society's expectations of what I should look like, the birth of my issue probably also comes from when I was young and my mom - who wasnt really "fat" at all - would continually diet and complain about how fat she was. That thinking stuck with me as a kid and into my adult life and it has now become my own issue.

It is something I rarely talk about, but struggle with all the same.