Beauty and Pain

I've lived in the Western world for all my life now, so I've seen many depictions of beautiful women's bodies. I've been to the ballet, I've watched videos on MTV, I've seen countless movies and TV shows filmed via the Male Gaze. So I understanding the feeling that seeing a beautiful female body is generally assumed to invoke - the grace, the balance, the smooth feeling of harmony, the aesthetic calm grace of it.

Now that I am meeting with a trainer at the gym twice a week, and doing the hard work required to carve my own female body into a beautiful woman's body (long way to go, campers, don't get me wrong, but we're getting there), I understand the feelings from the other side, the feelings felt by the owner of the body, and it's just the opposite of the feelings that experiencing the body is supposed to invoke.

You have to heave your muscles around past the point where they comfortably want to go. You have to move your muscles when they are too tired to move. Those muscles can feel sharp pain, dull aching pain, a decentralized all over distressed nauseous pain through whole sections of the body. Two days later they seize up into painful rocks and you can't move properly or get up off your office chair and walk smoothly down the hall. All day after a workout I feel like I have a mineral imbalance of some sort. Like there's a big hole inside, or more like the inside of me is shot through with holes like the inside of a malted milk ball. (Or a Violet Crumble). There's lots of yelling and grunting and moaning during the periods of activity that cause all of this. Sweat, redness of face, lots of panting and gulping of water. Face screwed up into a grimace of bravery and effort so I can get to number 13, 14, 15.

It's kind of new to me, this level of athletic effort, this consistently, for this long a duration. I realize, I guess, that all beautiful women with beautiful bodies must do this much work all the time. But it's so disconnected, that to get that graceful lovely way that makes men sigh, you have to do such sharp, painful, jarring things. From the inside, the enjoyment of it has a completely different character than from the outside it's supposed to be like. I suppose everyone else in the world probably figures this out when they're seven or ten, but it's something I've just been thinking about now.