What It’s Like Having A Hot Body

The Urban Dictionary definition of butter face (word of the day: July 13, 2009) :

n. A girl who is hot, except for her (but her, butter) face.

This word has plagued me since freshman year when it first reared its ugly head face from a classmate’s mouth: “She’s a butterface”. Other things that have been said about me:

“I don’t like her face…but she has a hot body.”

“Her tits are huge and she has an ass like a black chick’s.”

“She’s the opposite of Adele.”

Once at a party, a man grabbed my hips, conveying his lust in the rhythmic grinding of his hardening junk. I got into it, dancing back into him, until he spun my face around towards him to initiate a dance floor makeout. He said “sorry” and then promptly disappeared into the crowd.

My girlfriends will tell me that guys talk about my tits, my ass, and my legs, but I never hear them say “So and so said Elle was cute/pretty”. My ex-boyfriends have not met the stereotypical standard of attractiveness, but I liked them back when they started liking me because they wanted me, all of me. So I accepted the love I thought I deserved from them and went with it. Usually I’m the girl that guys want to bang for the carnal fun of a pair of firm young tits and an ass that they can grab a good handful of. In the dark. While blurry-eyed drunk. So when guys wanted to be with me and look at my face, I went with it, forget low standards.

The problem is, I’m hot, but I’m also not. I am split in two, into a body and a face. Being dubbed attractive, but not enough, and falling short in an area that I cannot change (save for plastic surgery) is worse than having the two halves of me match up. If I’m an ugly girl, why can’t I be given a body that fits my face?

And so I try to compensate.

I don’t consciously do things because I don’t like the way I look but my dislike for my face is still a powerful underlying motivation. I hate taking pictures. I need to wear excessive amounts of makeup before I feel comfortable having my friends see me. I’ve grown my bangs long since high school and always have them covering half my face.

I work out excessively. I’ve gotten up at 5 am to run to the gym in the snow and work out for 2 hours before class. I’m constantly conscious of my diet and make myself throw up after eating foods that morph into regrets in my stomach. I do these things because my face isn’t enough, and my body is apparently all I have. It’s exhausting to desperately cling to a regimen of fitness not because you want to but because you have to, in order to protect your one redeeming quality.

When my friends tell me “you look hot” before we go out, in my mind I amend this to “your body looks hot” because no one is looking at my face when I’m wearing a black bustier top that barely holds my 32E breasts and a skin-tight shimmery body-con skirt pulled taut around my backside.

I recognize that I have taken to heart too much of what others have said about me. But I know with a body that both men and lesbians alike lust after, something has to dull in comparison.

I can’t be “hot” or have a “hot body” thirty or forty years from now no matter how hard I try. I can be “pretty” or “beautiful” into old age, but even now when I’m in my physical 20-something prime with nary a wrinkle in sight only catcalling homeless men have said those words to me. The best adjectives are always saved for the girls whose faces you want to look at.