I Based My Entire Self-Worth On How Fuckable Men Thought I Was

So I opened my marriage and what happened next sure surprised me.

Hi there,

I had a little editorial discussion with Lovely Charlie yesterday in which he told me that he thinks my introductions to these stories can be more like a paragraph as opposed to the six or eighteen or forty-seven or whatever paragraph ramblings I've been giving you. There was a part two to his suggestion, which is that he thinks I should byline an additional couple of longer stories myself each month. I don't know which seems harder, holding back from telling you all the tiny little details of my existence every single time or composing more actually structured pieces. But I am up for trying anything and want this to be the best for you, of course. So here goes my first attempt at a brief intro:

Shit, this is already graf 2 (note that efficient spelling?), so I am now cutting 200 words I just typed without thinking, all about people I have encountered since I was with you here last (Tina Brown was one) and if any of you want to see them, ask and I will paste them in the comments. And as I keep inadvertently writing and then redacting almost as much as you know who these days, thus miserably failing the assignment, let’s move on to today’s featured story: Many of you know Dana from other incredible pieces she has written here, but she contains multitudes, clearly, and this story shows an aspect of her life that I think none of you had heard about. I very much look forward to talking to you and Dana about her piece more in those comments.

PLUS Coming up in mere days: New book club picks for your final votes, and happy results from our Beauty Editor auditions where you were the judges. With potentially minimal introduction from me!! You're welcome! Thanks, Charlie!

xo always, Jane

Likely the last photo of me and my blurred husband when we were still sexually non-adventurous.

By Dana Walker Inskeep

I used to base my entire self-worth on how fuckable men thought I was, and that’s why I opened my marriage.

My husband and I had hit a big slump several years into our relationship. Actually if I’m being completely transparent, it started not long after we were married, took a giant skid after our first child was born, and never recovered.

Neither of us had done the necessary pre-relationship groundwork to make our communication effective. I was still a major people-pleaser, suppressing my needs while prioritizing his…right up until I had our first child and any semblance of sexual desire I had flew out the window. I made excuses while he quietly grew more resentful.

Now call me crazy, but I’m the kind of woman who, in order to actually want to have sex, wants to feel desired. Maybe it was because I was raised on soap operas, but that’s how I’m wired, and it became a requirement once the initial new car smell of our relationship faded into…just smell.

Early on his attraction to me wasn’t in question, but since I was usually the initiator he didn’t have to make much effort...all he had to do was show up. It was much easier for me and my charming codependency to be the one to get things going and bust out the ambiance in those early days.

I was so afraid of losing him that I would’ve done just about anything to keep him around.

That was all before two kids came along and drained me of every iota of sexiness I had. At that point I needed him to kick the seduction into high gear in order to feel amorous, but since his romantic default back then was “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I was only setting us both up for disappointment.

This family photo is from my older son’s tenth birthday visit to Universal. Nothing to see here…just a normal family doing normal things.

When I began to voice things like “I don’t feel sexy anymore” or “I feel like I’m drowning all the time,” he took it as rejection. When I’d offer suggestions for how to help me get in the mood, he’d reluctantly comply once or twice then revert back to his norm of waiting on me for direction. Eventually I stopped, because the last thing I want to do is force my partner to be someone he’s not.

And so our sex life — or lack thereof — devolved into both of us feeling unfuckable. Enter ENM (ethical non-monogamy), now known by the preferable term, CNM (consensual non-monogamy).

We decided to open our marriage because, in short, we both deserve to have our needs met. The process certainly wasn’t easy or linear. There was jealousy, miscommunication, and deception on both sides. But as it turns out, we love each other enough as human beings, family, and best friends to have forgiven each other for some pretty big mistakes and managed to figure out what works for us.

Our current arrangement of living together, co-parenting, but not having sex with each other (a.k.a. “platonic nesting partners”) has been steady for the better part of three years.

This cover of our son’s Ranger Rick Jr. magazine became a source of great merriment in one of our MeWe groups. (“Hummer” is slang for “blow job.”)

In the beginning things were happening mostly online. He was involved in a sex-positive community through Tumblr, but once the people who spend their wild and precious lives looking for things to be outraged about (like scouring Disney movies for offensive imagery) got wind of it and complained to the internet Overlords, that got shut down. From there most of that bunch moved over to an app called MeWe, which I would sum up as “Facebook with porn.”

For the first six months or so, I held off on participating in the scene and spent the majority of my time trying to figure out how to reignite my nonexistent sex drive. I overpaid for an online course led by a woman who markets herself as a “vaginal weightlifter,” purchased a few relatively useless sex toys, and proceeded to…ahem...get busy with myself.

The results were mixed.

This was one of the first pics I shared. (Obviously the black and white filter made it classy, not smutty.)

Being fully convinced by the weight lifter lady that strengthening my vag muscles would reinvigorate my urge to use them for something fun rather than functional, I bought a Kgoal — a device that you can pair to an app on your phone, insert in your vagina, and…how do I put this? Well, you squeeze and relax your muscles to operate what is basically a video game controller. It’s like playing pong on Atari, but with your cooch.

While I eventually strengthened things down there enough to clutch a yoni egg inside me until the world ends (yoni eggs are porous egg-shaped crystals made from jade that Gwyneth’s Goop crowd [I am cool with this Gwyneth reference because it’s neutral and seems accurate, but I am overall protective and careful with calling her out because people put her down for no reason -Jane] swears by to tighten your pelvic floor), I had no interest in developing a UTI as jade eggs are known to do. And honestly, it didn’t get me all that fired up, although it did help with the hiatal hernia I developed from having carried two fetuses with gigantic pumpkin heads.

Eventually I had enough of sitting on the sidelines while my husband had all the fun, so I decided to engage.

The biggest mistake I made right away was creating an online profile on Ashley Madison. I took it down after getting overwhelmed by like, a thousand connection requests in less than 24 hours. (Some of those messages were absolutely revolting.) My husband was…not pleased, pointing out that AM is a site for cheaters, and we’re supposed to be participating in consensual non-monogamy.

Good point. Moving on.

I’m not small (the PC term is “curvy”) and I had spent my entire life thinking beauty was only meant for tiny women.

So the next step was to see what that online community was about. At first it was confusing, because MeWe isn’t very user-friendly. It’s difficult to navigate and has virtually no customer service to speak of, which is probably why it hasn’t really gained much traction. (The stupid name doesn’t help either.)

My husband brought me into a few of the chat groups he was in and introduced me. I received a warm welcome, even though I didn’t post any pics of myself right away.

How do I describe these groups?

Sex-positive communities, like every other type, exist on a spectrum and adhere to certain social norms and levels of decorum. There was a social hierarchy and could be a bit like high school at times…except with fake names and faceless identities, as most people used an alias and only posted pics in which their faces were obscured in some way.

That particular community also had a variety of interests outside of copulation, so there were chat groups based on sports, pop culture, travel, etc. Mostly, though, groups revolved around fetishes like feet, jewelry, BDSM.

Days of the week elicited posting photos based on themes like “Moon Me Monday,” “Topless Tuesday,” “Sexy Sundays.”

You get the idea.

A photo I submitted for a color theme day. (It’s arty, not porn…right? RIGHT?!?)

Sexy. Oooooh…talk about a word that was highly overused. But expected, since it was a community that revolved around sex.

If you were new to the group, there were those who might reach out and give you an introduction to what was being discussed, but mostly newbies were encouraged to just jump right in, baptism-by-fire-style, and post an introductory photo.

I keep talking about photos and I can only imagine what that’s conjuring, so I’ll just say it. Yes, people were posting semi-to-full-on-nude photos of themselves on the internet. Some people got pretty graphic, posting masturbation videos and/or other sex acts with partner(s).

This is all past tense, by the way, because about a year after I deleted my profile, those killjoy sensors had gotten wind of MeWe and raised a fuss, so all of the offending groups were removed from the server without warning. From that point the community basically fizzled out.

I spent a couple of years on and off inside that social network, sharing photos, commenting on others, and having really intense, personal text conversations with people who were basically strangers. In doing so, not only did I re-establish my long-lost fuckability, but I also came to believe something that I never thought I would...I’m kind of hot.

I’m not small by any means (the PC term is “curvy,” thank you), and I had spent my entire life thinking that beauty was only meant for tiny women. But that experience showed me that women of every size can not only be considered beautiful by others, but some of us have collectively come to the understanding that sexiness doesn’t necessarily adhere to narrow, unattainable-for-96%-of-the-female-population standards set by the fashion industry in the 1960s.

In fact, sexy has nothing to do with size. It has way more to do with swagger. So “fake it ’til you make it” it was, and that’s a lot easier to do in a photo.

While I typically didn’t post nudes, I would share tastefully provocative pics. I’m rather well-endowed, so they tended to be received with great fanfare; I even had a sort of following after a while. I had my fair share of creeps, too, but I’d say a good 88% of my takeaways from that scene were positive.

By the time I took this pic, I had the angles/filter/touch-up skills down. (Now THAT is art. Not porn. I swear.)

Comparing my body to other women’s bodies was my default setting right out of the gate, because that was my default setting in life at the time. But here’s what worked for me…I got to see many *real* women’s bodies. Filtered, sure, but not airbrushed into pseudo-perfection.

And the best part? Not every single body was a single-digit size. I was in my 40s and had never seen that before in my life. My exposure to female nudity/pornography had, up until that point, only been slim women...I gifted my college boyfriend/ex-husband a subscription to Playboy for much of our relationship, and I didn’t gravitate outside of that too far.

But in the MeWe community there were women of all shapes, shades, and sizes being complimented, even celebrated, for their beauty and sexiness.

It absolutely fucking blew my mind.

I also started dating again, which is just surreal when you’re still married. It felt forbidden even with permission, but once I got through the initial awkwardness it was pretty fun. I’d had a brief stint after divorcing my first husband before I met my current husband where I “explored my sexuality,” so to speak, but it was way more about finding the next man to validate my worth than actually enjoying myself.

This time around, it was different. Turns out that some men think “non-monogamous” means “nymphomaniac,” so I had to develop a solid screening process, learn how to set and enforce boundaries, and most of all, trust my intuition. I ended up having some great experiences, some difficult ones, and I can’t even put into words how much I’ve grown and changed as an autonomous human being. (Goodbye codependency, you needy bitch!)

That’s what turned me from doubting my attractiveness on a repeating loop to believing that I’m beautiful — and fuckable — just as I am.

Yes, I’m getting older. Yes, my weight fluctuates. I don’t have a six pack or cellulite-free thighs that don’t jiggle, but you know what? NOBODY CARES.

The men I’ve been with have appreciated my body regardless of its supposed imperfections. One of my prior partners referred to my body as a Botticelli painting come to life, which is still the loveliest compliment I’ve ever gotten. Who wouldn’t want to be considered a work of art?

Of course not all men will find me attractive, but that doesn’t matter in the least anymore. I finally (FINALLY!) think I am. Mine is the only opinion that truly matters anyway, and I now know my value with or without fuckability being a factor.

Yes, I still have bad days where I look in the mirror and start winding up a criticism pitch to throw at my reflection. But I’ve worked on that enough to stop myself before I let loose. I’ve learned how to show myself some compassion for being a human woman with adherence to gravity and lack of a Kardashian-sized surgery budget.

Acknowledging my beauty doesn’t make me arrogant, and it doesn’t mean that I think I’m better than anyone. What it does mean is that I’ve embraced a quiet and crucial act of self-kindness, and that is something I’m very proud of.

So that, my friends, is the pocked-sized version of my non-monogamy experience. I have stories for days, so if you’d like to read more just say the safe word. (It’s pineapple.)

My husband and me. (He’s the one under the sticker.) This might be the last photo of us as a “vanilla” couple. (“Vanilla” is a term in the lifestyle that means “sexually non-adventurous.”)