Eventually I decided that to fit into the modern world, I would have to lose my virginity, whether I liked it or not. I grimly set about finding an acceptable partner. Out automatically was any man who was too pushy or insistent, and in helping me fend them off, jeans actually came in handy. I made it a point to wear on any first date a pair of high-waisted, two-tone, acid-wash jeans that, because they were designed to be baggy on anyone else, fit me quite well. Getting them on required a lot of wriggling and coaxing; no one could get them off me without either excessive force or my deliberate cooperation. Luckily no one was willing to use the former when I withheld the latter, and I learned without too much anguish who not to go out with a second time.
I finally found someone I was willing to sleep with, not because passion for him overwhelmed me, but because I figured he’d treat me decently. One night in bed, early in our relationship, I confided that I hated my ass. “How is that possible?” he asked. “It’s terrific.”
“I don’t think so,” I said glumly.
He was silent for a moment, intent on exploring my body. Then he exclaimed with a rushed laugh, “You have a glorious ass!” He laughed again, adding more slowly, “It’s soft, but with an inner strength.”
I made no reply. I couldn’t formulate one. Was it possible? Could he be sincere? Was it really possible that my ass, rather than being the worst affliction I could be cursed with, was, well, an asset? Was it possible that someone could find me attractive and like me and maybe even love me, not despite my ass, but because of it?
The only way I could make sense of this new information was to conclude that it had to do with how my body felt, not how it looked. As Fabienne says in Pulp Fiction, explaining why she wishes she had a pot belly, “It's unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye is seldom the same.”
I was always a good dancer—not extraordinary, but good enough to get a couple of choice solos at recitals during the many years I took lessons. I studied enough ballet that I danced en pointe and enough tap that I graduated to flamenco. There was also plenty of hula in the mix, including a couple of weeks of lessons in Hawaii—I quickly mastered the simultaneous hip swivel/undulation it requires. In junior high I made my mom teach me to waltz and jitterbug, and I fulfilled my college PE requirement with a country swing class. I loved that dancing required no hand-eye coordination or mastery of props, just a strong internal sense of where your various body parts were in relations to one another, and it made having a body feel joyous in ways nothing else did.