Dear [insert name]
You are just a normal guy in a world where we are constantly exposed to casual nudity and sex…where women’s bodies are used to sell everything from email providers to oranges…where nobody has to try anymore because marriage isn’t sacred, divorce is cheap, unfaithfulness is common…where we are constantly encouraged to look for the bigger, better deal…
And here I am, in the midst of this world, trying to carve out a comfortable place for myself as a woman, where I can look pretty without being objectified; feel sexy without being called a slut; love a man wholeheartedly without feeling that I need to be perfect, like the airbrushed bodies on the internet, or he will look elsewhere: for me, gender is political and I’m angry that I am part of a race so relentlessly associated with the body, when the truth is that what matters most to me, and I hope to those that love me, is my brain and my heart…
I think it’s sad, the world we live in, because it glorifies sex and makes so little of love…but the truth is that to be fully human, we need both, together, because in the absence of emotion, sex is just two animals, scratching an itch…
As a little girl growing up, I was in no doubt that the most important thing for a girl to be was pretty. I can remember being 6 or 7 and looking at myself in the mirror, examining my face from every angle to try and work out if I was going to be attractive. I didn’t think so. And then the first boy that told me I was pretty, who was some years my senior, did some scary, horrible stuff to my body which I really wasn’t ready for, and I guess that was the beginning of this tension in me, between wanting to be pretty and sensing that being pretty might be dangerous. At the same time, he taught me that my body didn’t belong to me, that it was there for the taking and that to get male attention, I had better be prepared to share it. Refer back to paragraph 1, and you’ll see that the world has done nothing to disabuse me of this notion, quite the contrary. My political anger intersects with my personal experiences, which is why when we talk about feminism and gender politics I will get so agitated. It’s not just opinions which will burst out of me, it’s my lived experience of being a girl and a woman and it has been, and continues to be hard…
The truth is I am soft as butter, like my alter ego, Softy Butterpants! I am a romantic. I am a born monogamist. I want to live in a world where love means more than sex. I want to live in a world where people get married and stay together forever. We’ve lost something, cheapened something really beautiful, and central to our happiness, by creating a world where you can watch strangers screwing anytime you like, 24/7…where you can go to your email client and see someone else’s wife gyrating in her knickers…and for me, to go with it, to watch that stuff, to engage with it, is a betrayal of my values because, titillating as it is, it’s not healthy for us on a personal level, or as a society. Maybe you feel, that in the moment, it doesn’t hurt anyone, but it’s more complicated than that, because if everyone stopped clicking on that stuff, maybe our world would change. (I won’t even get into the shocking statistics about the amount of females in the sex industry who have been abused as children). Where has it got us, as people, as societies, this impersonal, sexually driven world and our quest for female perfection and readily available bodies? – We have higher divorce rates than ever, a higher instance of mental health issues than ever…it’s just one of the factors in an increasingly unhappy society…because we are meant to pair for life…we live longer, we smile more, we hug more, we are healthier, we live better, and more meaningfully when we do.
You’re not me. You might not feel this way and you are entitled to your opinion: you share these opinions with millions of other people, who think ‘what’s the harm?’ and that because the people they look at are on a screen, it doesn’t constitute unfaithfulness and that because women’s bodies are everywhere, we might as well take a peek now and again. But, these are my core values, old fashioned as they are and I want you to share them.
I know we are animals. I know there are prettier women in the world than me. I know you will want to look when you see a pretty face. I know you will fancy other people. I know how easy it is to find female nudity and porn: you don’t even have to look for it, it’s right there when you go to sign in to your email client. I’m not naive and it’s no different for me; although, I am less visually driven than any man I have ever met and most women I know. But, you don’t have to entertain it. You don’t have to look twice. You don’t have to click on it just because it’s there. For me there is a relationship between cyberspace and the real world: if you met a gorgeous woman in a bar and she offered to strip down to her knickers for you, I hope you’d walk away, so why should it be any different because she’s on a screen? I know that in the real world, she’d constitute more of a threat to our relationship, but it’s not really about that. It’s about choices. It’s about values. It’s about respect for me and for what we could have together and the distance offered by the internet does not mean that what we do does not have consequences. Following the same logic, would it be OK to watch animals being tortured, or children abused on the internet, because they are not in the same room with you?
If I see that you have casually clicked on videos of other naked women, it will make me feel inadequate because I will never achieve that level of airbrushed perfection: she probably doesn’t even look like that in real life; it will make me feel betrayed because you actively chose to see another woman in a sexual way; it will cheapen what we have because it will make me feel like when I offer you my body, it’s nothing special, it’s just something you can get anywhere, anytime and it will threaten me for the same reason. If you can’t resist a click now, can you blame me for worrying about what it is you might not be able to resist in five years, ten years?
Do you want the kind of girlfriend who can laugh it off? If so, walk away now. I am an old fashioned girl, and in return for your total faithfulness I will give you mine, my heart and my body, with 100% commitment and I am a deeply passionate woman. I will never do more than look once. But I can’t be with you unless you want that too: there are no half measures, it’s all or nothing. I will never make you feel bad for finding other people attractive (and yes, I will probably know when you do!): that’s just being human. But acting on that, in any context, will always be a a step too far for me and that’s just the way I am. Life has made me that way, experience has made me that way and I don’t think I can ever change.
I hope you can understand me; I hope that you think I am worth it, but if you can’t, if you don’t, then please leave me be.
Love, Face x
faceatthewindow 