Sex Appeal

Can I be candid for a moment?

Since I was fourteen, the one thing I’ve felt consistently confident in is my sex appeal. The summer before my freshman year of high school, my AA’s went to DD’s, and I dyed my hair a black-brown color. On the first day of school, TJ Main—a guy I’d known since elementary school—sat down next to me and asked if I was a new student. He said I looked like a girl who used to go to school with him.

Yeah, dummy. She’s sitting right in front of you.

But women “aren’t allowed” to feel that way about themselves. Especially women who have goals, and plan on making a difference in the world.

So I hid a lot of that confidence in the shadows—for many reasons. One, because it made a lot of women feel threatened and insecure. I always wished women would let their guard down long enough to get to know me. And even worse; god forbid their husbands or boyfriends interacted with me at all. Don’t worry, plenty of them were in my DMs.

Two, because in the workplace I started to go mad wondering if I’d made it as far in my career because I was a pretty face or because people were genuinely impressed with my skills. It still pisses me off to this day that I’ve never had a normal workplace experience (because people don’t know how to act when an ethereal woman enters the room).

So I spent years pretending not to know that I am an attractive, charming person. Just to make others comfortable.

I’m done with that.

A woman can be extremely intelligent, an influential artist, a great listener, have so much compassion for others, have a head for business—and a bod for sin.

Get over it.