Allow me to paint you a picture. Platinum blond hair, cut at a diagonal. Tanned arms, bared in her lacy black halter top. Jeans, tight and low-slung. She refuses to carry a purse and cannot walk in heels. But she will smile at you when she sees you looking at her above the cigarette smoke and blaring bar music. She’ll feign a coy glance as she looks away, but linger just long enough so that you know she is interested. She won’t tell you about her boyfriend of two years who is at home, keeping the bed warm, paying the bills.

Now allow me to tell you, I used to be that girl. I used to relish the attention I could garner from men when I was in high school and college. I was self-conscious enough to need the boost it gave me, and just confident enough to use my looks and flirtations to obtain it. I knew just how to catch his eye, tilt my head in affected shy vulnerability, how to respond to whatever opening line presented itself, and appear entertaining to five men in simultaneous conversation. I knew how to draw them out, how to morph my personality into who they wanted me to be. I knew not only how to appear, but how to act the part.

A friend in college once told me when I complained of being called a “tease” that at least I wasn’t being called a “whore.” I hadn’t realized it was an “either or” situation.

In reflection, it makes perfect sense though…being called a tease. I became a woman while watching “Gone With the Wind” and fancied myself Scarlett O’Hara. I hadn’t yet learned that it was, in fact, Melanie (“Melanie Hamilton, that goody, goody. Who wants no secret about her!”) who was the better character to esteem.

It didn’t take long to see the emptiness of such “affections.” I wanted, longed for, a much deeper connection with someone who would know me, love me, accept me for who I really am. I wanted to be sexy beyond the halter top and early flirtations.

I began drinking wine, shopping for lady-like heels and trouser pants, and spending time with friends outside of bars. I began covering up the shoulders, hips, and calves that had attracted so much previous attention. I revoked my search for the faulty self-esteem boost it had once offered.

And ever since, it’s difficult to admit, but I’ve struggled with feeling sexy at all. I wonder all the time what it takes for me to feel sexy. What does sexy look like? What does it feel like? Does it always have to be about attracting the attention of men?

When I dress in a classy, age-appropriate manner and my platinum blond-haired, tanned, and half-naked friend accompanies me to the bar; it is she who is the object of their attentions now. It is she, not I, that gives off the air of being so clearly “up for it.” I sit in her shadow because of my choice to refrain from that false sense of self.

Sometimes I bask in this break from playing “the game.” Other times it is difficult to remember why I’ve become a spectator in the first place. I see the challenge appear before me, but don’t rise to it anymore. I tell myself that if I were to bare more of my own skin, smile in such a way, and allow drinks to be purchased for me; I might also attract my share of attention. I tell myself it isn’t real and it isn’t me anymore.

These men are strangers. They do not know us, nor care to–not beyond the way we look, feel, and sound undressed anyway. And so even casual conversation seems mundane and unmerited, even if I hadn’t finally found a relationship where sexy isn’t so much what you see as what you can share.

But then I’m smiling in spite of myself when a man approaches me on the street, introduces himself, and asks if I’d like to have lunch sometime. Without a moment’s delay I’m telling him “my boyfriend wouldn’t like that very much.” And I’m walking away thinking, yup, still got it.