Being Sexual vs Being Sexualized: Part 1  A heads up before I even start: This is going to be all over the place and may or may not make sense because I'm writing this out to organize my own thoughts and I'm low key confused myself. In other words, as I'm writing this, I feel like this spongebob meme:  Something I've been thinking about in the past few days is how I feel like I'm often sexualized and looked at mainly through a sexual lens while also feeling incredibly ugly and undesirable to where I feel like I'm going to die a virgin. Basically, I feel like I can't be sexual but I often feel sexualized.  And I feel like I can't admit to myself how I feel ugly and undesirable in the eyes of other people.  My brain immediately points to "well you can't complain about feeling undesirable, I'm sure if you put yourself out there, plenty of people would want to fuck you. You're built like a Kardashian without trying. There are women out there who try to get surgery to get what you naturally have and there are men out there who like pictures of women on Instagram who are trying to emulate what you have and that pisses off their girlfriends." But I still feel ugly and undesirable. *sigh* There's a lot to unpack. If I were to summarize my thoughts without getting too messy and detailed, I would say this. The difference between being sexualized and being sexual comes down to consent. Being sexualized is something that is put onto you. Being sexual is something that you choose for yourself. Being desirable has it's root in empathy.  I guess the only way all of this will make sense as it pertains to this weird complex I have is if I go chronologically. So I went to elementary school in a mainly white area. I remember getting the message of what it means to be beautiful really quickly, skinny, tall, blonde, blue eyes. I on the other hand was a short chubby brown kid, basically the opposite of the spectrum. And all of the kids, both girls and guys, just labelled me as ugly. They never pointed at one particular trait and laughed. They never even pointed in my brownness. They just thought I was ugly without any awareness that this might have a racial undertone. At that age I didn't even think  it had anything to do with my ethnicity until I had to unpack this shit in therapy more than a decade later.  Then I got to middle school. And I would say that the environment was pretty diverse. I would say that there are handful of experiences that basically foreshadowed the bs that I would have to deal with as an adult. One time I liked a guy and he rejected me. That sucked but I got over it. What caused me to get trauma from this incident and cry myself asleep a week later was when I found it's because he "only dates white girls." I was 12 and I had no idea how to handle this and my family definitely didn't help and my grandma insisted on trying to bleach my skin and get me to lose weight. Another time I guy liked me and I rejected him. It was kinda awkward because we were both socially awkward 13 year olds but it honestly wasn't that bad and I moved on with my life without a second thought an hour later. What actually made this uncomfortable was that a coupled months later I found out that this guy had a princess Jasmine fetish and basically had an Asian fetish mixed a white savior complex.  (also now that I think about it, throughout middle and high school, most of the white girls had a boyfriend and some of the WOC who had Eurocentric features also were in relationships, the rest of us were single).  So that was the race part. Now I'm going to talk about the way that my body developed.  Growing up (and even now to a much lesser extent), I felt fat and as a result ugly. Looking back at old pictures, I really wasn't fat, just short and as a result a little squishy because my weight didn't distribute like the skinny tall kids. The standards of the early 2000s really messed with my head and I have written about that in the past. I also started physically developing at a earlier age. So while all of the other kids still looked like kids, I looked grown. And race doesn't help either since women of color tend to be seen as older at an earlier age and be robbed of their childhood in a way. And my curvier body on one hand was deemed disgusting by the standard of thinness and thigh gaps while at the same I had men twice my age look at me and yell vulgar things at me.  And instead of having an adult guide me through this and explain to me what was going on, I instead had my mom call me a fat whore who's asking for it just by existing. She made sure I covered up and made sure I never ate too much. But even when I covered up and starved myself to a size zero in plain sight, my tits and my ass still remained. I still looked like a grown woman because of how I'm built. And even though I'm in college, I don't really get guys my age hitting on me. I always get approached by guys who are roughly a decade older than me. And even though I consider myself lucky that I have yet to run into someone super sketchy since all of these guys backed off after they found out how old I was, I also feel like I don't exist to guys my age romantically or sexually (I guess it's relevant to mention that I go to a predominantly white university where racism tends to run rampant). I brought this up with friends and they told me that  " you don't look like a teenager or someone in their early 20s because of the way you're built."  It's like even though these guys probably weren't creeps who were just looking to have sex and leave (tbh I don't even know because the conversation never lasted so long for me to figure out), I still felt sexualized I guess because of the way I was aged up and the way that reminded me of the shit dealt with growing up. I'm sometimes tempted to try to lose weight again just so I look my age but I remind myself that I tried that before and it didn't go over too well.  After dealing with all of this, I still learned to see myself as beautiful. I genuinely think I'm beautiful. But I do have a hesitation when it comes to whether or not other people see me in that way. There is only so much you can heal in a toxic system.