https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/ascend/
Let us ascend from this murky and boggy ground of female competitiveness over males! Let us ascend from this assumption that beauty and sexual desire can be defined by a look and refined by expensive clothing…
My lifetime dream, this was – finding, buying and wearing the perfect sexy dress; the garment that showed just enough to titillate without being tarty; the material that would cleave flatteringly to my curves – without, not to put too fine a point upon it, drawing undue attention to the overhang!
Over the years, I have sought this Holy Grail of a frock near and far – with conspicuous lack of success! I have bemoaned my fate, wept copious tears, lamented the shape with which I was born and wished, on countless occasions, to be more like girl A, woman B, crone C.
I imagined, in my most lurid daydreams, slinking around in a little number like that shown above, being wolf-and-other-wild animal-called by men the length and breadth of the land. I genuinely thought that, if I lost enough weight, I could replicate this kind of beauty. I genuinely thought this to be a worthwhile aim.
Or did I? No, not really. Not, deep-down honestly.
But still the search went on, year after year, decade after hopeless decade, with the inevitable disillusionment at the end of each ghastly shopping trip, and the tooth-gnashing jealousy when confronted by women who have a natural flair for clothes.
Yesterday, for reasons which I am not going to go in to, I briefly slithered back down into the Hell that is Ali’s Sexy Dress Quest. Hitting Clarks Village in Street, I forced myself to step through the doors of female clothing shops (whose names now escape me!) and, finding several possibilities on various racks and rails, braved that well-known Dante’s Eleventh Circle, the Dressing Room, with additional purgatorial implement of torture, The Full Length Mirror.
As an aside, whichever smart-arse designed that Inquisitorial Weapon of Mass Confidence Reduction deserves to burn in boiling chip fat for all eternity! As a general rule, I’d pay good money NOT to see myself in toto!
So, back to the Limbo that is trying on clothes in a shop. The first problem for those of us who are Alternatively Thin (aka fat!) is the old conundrum of, ‘How the bloody hell do I get into this welter of garish material without a shoe-horn, a catapult or a cannon to be fired from?’
The second, lesser misery, is the contortion required to do up the zip without possessing eight arms or the pliancy of a python. The third, that stomach-churning moment when you realise that the underwear you donned in the morning is more suitable for Armed Forces assault course than potential seduction, and that the cantilevered bra you are sporting could get you the part of Brunhilde without audition…
But the worst part of it all – and I am sure many a woman will be able to identify with this! – is that moment when, looking at the full horror of the reflection before you, you know, with pitiless clarity, that you are the spitting image of a Pantomime Dame, Dame Edna Everage or a life-size Miss Piggy.
Oftimes in the past, I have had colourful, and nasty, fantasies about shaving bits off the superstructure in order to turn into a siren!
Back to the point, and the shop: There I was, clad in a fussy full-length sleeveless number in a daring shade of coral, giving myself the honest eye: A sobering and underwhelming experience, let me tell you! The aforesaid dress might have passed muster had I possessed a waist (as opposed to an Equatorial Region), had my bat wings been slightly more reminiscent of humming bird’s wings, had my gestational overhang been a little more discreet instead of throwing itself out like the Rock of Ages, had I been nineteen instead of fifty-nine…
I could go on, but I am sure you get the idea!
I hung the dress (the sixth I had tried) neatly back from whence it had come, and climbed back into my jeans and russet jumper, catching strands of recent copper re-sparkling as I did so…
…and, as I prepared to leave The Black Hole of Sartorial Calcutta, I caught sight of myself in the mirror – and it was a revelation!
There I was, jeans, trainers, thick russet jumper, long curly red hair, with a red feather and copper sparkles in it, smiling in utter relief and joy at having disrobed – and I thought, ‘Why, Ali, are you trying so hard to conform to this stereotype of desirable, gorgeous womanhood? When, actually, you are everything you need to be without embellishments, and without trying to ape other women’s looks!’
Neither beauty nor sexual attractiveness are contained within a woman’s wardrobe, make-up box or shoe collection. They reside within the woman herself. No individual dress, no matter how inherently sexy or divinely-modelled by a professional, can touch the inner Goddess, a part of womanhood that can shine through any material.
I do not have to prove myself in this way. In truth, I never did. I do not have to buy, or buy into, the notion of forever making the best of myself through potions, lotions, diets, clothes and face-painting. I am not saying it is wrong. If other women choose this path, that is their right. But it is not for me. It never was.
Too often women buy such garb in a competitive and insecure way (as I have always tried to do), basically because they want to outshine others, because they are unsure of their own inner loveliness, because they want to attract or keep a man – and because, at some level, they believe that they are defined by their ability to be sexy around the male species.
I am who I am. My Quest for the Sexy Dress is at an end. It proved to be a False Grail. Sexuality shines from within. My Grail pours forth its water from within too.
I choose to walk away from this kind of damaging inter-female competitiveness, this sartorial upstaging of other women. No man is worth the kind of terrified vanity which causes women, on a daily basis, to need the words, ‘You are the fairest of them all!’
And most women are worth far more!
Chronicles of an Orange-Haired Woman! 