body image

This is an interruption to my recent narrative, because this post is important. It’s been stewing in my mind for a couple of weeks, and I’ve decided that I’m going to post it.

I get lots of questions in the inbox on my tumblr page, and I try to answer all of them. I like to have an open line of communication. I try to respond to Fetlife messages and emails, as well, but contacting me with something small over tumblr is pretty effective. A couple of weeks ago, I got the following question in my tumblr inbox:

You have a large, chubby, big bottom. Do you think you 

can take a hard spanking because it has so much padding? 

Do you like your bottom?” 



My natural reaction to a message like this is to feel badly about myself. Oh. I’m big. Thanks for reminding me. In fact, there have been times when these sorts of messages or photo comments or emails really tore me up. They pushed me over an edge of self doubt and lack of confidence. They reminded me of the thing that I feared: that I was fat. That I was the biggest girl making spanking videos. That I was really not all that pretty. That I largely got by as a model on my personality and, as the note mentioned, my ability to take a beating. That I’m not a tiny little thing, that I don’t fit over a lap as easily as the more petite girls and all my other fears and doubts relating to my height.

The truth is, I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling extremely insecure. I wrote a long post about my feelings towards my vertical size just about a year ago and it was one of the most vulnerable and personal things that I’ve ever written on this blog. I’ve never really mentioned my insecurities about my figure too openly, but I think a lot of people know that they’re there. I’m in a very body centric profession with a shape that’s different than many people in said profession, or even in the visible media. I put myself in a position where people discuss me in a public forum and where other bloggers think it’s a compliment to describe a girl as “pretty despite her size” when in reality, she’s about a size 8 and tremendously beautiful. It’s not hard to figure out how all that might make me feel.

A few months ago, my insecurities were peaking. I just flat out didn’t like myself physically. I was losing weight, but I was never satisfied. I didn’t like my shape. I didn’t like my height. I didn’t like my curves. I didn’t like bottom. Because modeling is my job, I pressed through working, but I didn’t expect to like any of the things that I saw. I was negatively comparing myself against some of my friends who are just built differently than me, and I was making myself feel awful about it.

There’s nothing wrong with me. 

Eventually, I got to the point where I was honest with my friends about these feelings, and basically everyone I talked to was tremendously supportive. I was struggling with a general sense of depression to some degree for a while, especially over the winter, and that was adding to the way that I was seeing myself. I’m not going to name the people who talked to me about my body and my self image, because our conversations were extremely personal and intimate, but I’m eternally grateful for them. Their combined efforts helped me to realize that I was viewing myself through a dysmorphic lens and that I’m really actually quite pretty.

This is a feeling that’s been blooming and growing recently. I’ve gone into whatever the opposite of a depression is. Happiness. I like my life. I like the way that things are for me. I like what I do. I like the people I do those things with. I like myself.
And I mean that.
I feel drastically differently about myself than I used to.
I don’t feel ashamed about myself. About anything. I don’t feel ashamed of my sexuality, or of the things that I want, or of my history, or of the things I don’t know and can’t do well, or the times when I’m just not a real adult, or of my emotions. I don’t feel too tall. I don’t feel too fat. I like my shape. I like the way I look and feel draped over a lap. I like my long, curvy legs.

I feel like I look tall in this photo, and that’s okay with me.

I want to stress that no one ever made me feel the way I did before. In fact, I had tremendous emotional support to try and help me be my best. I just… did.
Now, I don’t.

So, I’m going to answer my Tumblr question.

I don’t really have that big of a bottom. It certainly doesn’t need three adjectives to describe it that way. I have a round, perky, spankable bottom. I like it. A lot of people like it. It’s my favorite part of my body. I like the way it looks. I like the way it bounces when I’m spanked. I like how it looks when I’m bent over, or over a lap. I like the way it fills out panties.

Chubby isn’t the word I think about myself when I see this.

I like the way it looks when I walk around. I like how it looks in a short skirt. I like how it looks in jeans. I wouldn’t change it. I mean that. It’s mine (well, and someone else’s, too, and that just makes it even better!) and I’m proud of it.

I don’t think that I can take a harder spanking because of the way that I’m built, but I wouldn’t entirely discount the idea. Honestly, I think that I can take a hard spanking because that’s what I’ve always wanted, and because Malignus taught me a lot of wonderful things about both active and passive submission over the years. I know that I’m less at risk at having my bones struck because of the way that I’m built, and I’m grateful for that because I do like being hit hard (in the right situation).

I’m not less spankable because of my shape. I can still feel comfortably emotionally small, vulnerable, physically supported… everything that I want to feel. I’m not just saying this. It’s a real change.

I hope that this answers the OP’s question.

I’m going to get a bit personal here, for a moment, and talk about things that I normally keep to myself. 
At 5’8″, I’m of fairly average height for a woman. I’m not particularly tall. At a 150 pounds and a dress size eight, I’m really quite average all around. 
I’ve never felt like it, though. I’ve always felt like this: 


Maybe it comes from the fact that I was told by doctors that I would likely grow up to be over 6′ tall, and I began intentionally stunting my growth for fear of that when I was just a little girl. Maybe it’s the fact that I was taller than my mother by the time that I was ten, and that I reached my current height before I entered middle school. Maybe it’s the fact that one of my childhood best friends was so tiny that in third grade, our teacher couldn’t see her over the desk and thought that she was absent on the first day. Maybe it was that I grew up in a small house with low ceilings and tiny rooms that gave me a sense of claustrophobia. Whatever it is, I never, ever wanted to grow. I always felt that I was too big. 
I’ve done various things to make myself seem smaller– I wear lots of vertical stripes and clothing which is cropped in a way that shortens a person, I choose prints and patterns which are cute, dainty and diminutive, I slouch as much as I can possibly get away with (which I was doing fairly well for myself with, I felt, until Malignus decided that I needed to improve my posture) and I’m never seen wearing heels. I did bring a pair with me to TASSP, and it was the first time that I wore heels in as long as I can remember, certainly at least a year. 
There was one thing which I always took comfort in, sort of an adage that I’d come to love: “All girls are the same height when they’re over a lap.” I really, truly believed in this, and it did wonders for me. While being spanked OTK, no matter by whom, I felt truly small. I don’t mean that I felt “little” or that I felt “young.” I felt like a small thing, and it was an absolutely beautiful feeling. 
Recently, I was talking to one of my Tops about these feelings, and about how badly I wanted to have a smaller body, and I said “At least I can take comfort in the fact that when I’m over your lap, you can’t tell!” “Well, you know that’s not actually, true, right Alex?” he asked. I shook my head. I thoroughly believed that it was true. “I can still tell how far you stretch out to, and your center of gravity is still in the wrong place.” 
I never believed in Santa, or in the Easter Bunny, or any of that stuff, and I originally didn’t believe in God, then forced myself to, so when I stopped believing, it wasn’t painful. As a result, this was the first time in my life that I really experienced having something which had previously been rather sacred to me taken away. 

You’re sure? I’m still too big? 

I still haven’t recovered from it, entirely. It never mattered to me what my size was compared to the person spanking me, but suddenly, it’s become something which is on my mind. I know I’ll get over it. I know I’ll let go and stop worrying and let myself feel safe and good while being spanked. I’m just still a little heart broken. 
The day that I had that conversation, I called my doctor friend and my scientist friend and asked them if there was a way that I could be shrunk. When they promised me that there was no safe way, I started doing research on my own, JUST IN CASE. 
I know that I’m just going to have to find a way to accept myself. 

For a while now, I’ve been dating a boy here in Sioux Falls. He’s clever and funny, he gets my sense of humor, and on our first date, we spent most of the time discussing Hume’s empiricism. He’s also 6’5″ and extremely strong because he does physical work. For the first time since I was a teenager, I felt small beside him. I could put my hand up to his and feel like I had little, tiny fingers. He could pull me down with the tiniest of efforts on his part. We were just “getting there” romantically, but I had high hopes for it. See, I don’t need all of my relationships to satisfy every part of me. That would be very against the point of Polyamory for me. I was hoping that if I had, for the first time since I was a girl, someone who made me feel small sometimes around, then I would get over the complex that I’m big in general. I imagined that having someone who made me feel small would make it so that I never felt “too big.” I thought that it would make me alright with my body.

Sorry, not happening!

Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I imagined might happen, because he met someone with whom he wants to have a monogamous relationship, so we won’t be seeing each other anymore. 
I realized tonight, that this may actually be a good thing. There are no “drink me” bottles floating around, and I’m stuck with myself for the rest of my life. The truth of the matter is, I don’t need someone else to make me feel good about myself. I have to rock what I’ve got and be truly confident in myself in order to be happy and successful. The way that I look or appear to others or seem next to them shouldn’t influence the way that I feel. 
The truth of the matter is that I’m the only one who thinks that I’m so large that I take up the entire room and I’ve got my head on the ceiling, but as long as I’m seeing myself this way and acting like that, people *are* going to see that I’m not fully comfortable with myself. 
So, I’m going to be alright with myself, no matter where my center of gravity is. I’m not going to surround myself with environments that make me feel better about myself. I’m going to feel okay with myself.
I’m not entirely sure *how* I’m going to get there, but I know that I will, because I am nothing if not determined. 

Oh, Hai!

Alex

Los Angeles, California, United States

First and foremost, I’m a girl who loves being spanked. It’s at the very center of my being. I’m also a professional spanking model, which means I get to do what I love for my job. I’m twenty six years old, and currently located in Los Angeles when I’m not traveling around on my adventures. My vanilla interests include poetry, film history, academia, Pokemon, indie music, baby animals, baking and cooking, collecting vintage clothes and lots of cuddling.

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