UCU's Hookup Culture Through Waves of Body Dysmorphia

by Perlei Toor

An infatuated kiss, captured through a brief flash of light piercing the darkness and fuelled by a surge of passion, lust, longing. In this moment you place your beauty in the hands of another. Just for a while, until the moment fades, the hookup passes, and you are both off, smiling in the darkness. The light lays on your lips. You feel beautiful, sexy, desired. They have assured you of your undeniable radiance. You shone, united, yet you casually shrug off the glow. It was just a hookup, a fusing together of two beautiful bodies. Passing and finite, it is nothing more than a shining moment in the night.

When you’re living with body dys morphia, this need for valida tion is strong. It takes hold of you, pulling you up into the sunlight and dropping you from a terrifying height back into darkness. It shakes you until your view of the world is distorted and the mirror becomes blurry. It is so easy to rely on that moment in the dark, where a stranger stands in front of the mirror, holds their hands on your face, looks you in your eyes and tells you ‘you’re okay’. Their vision of you, for that dark moment, is enough.

Although things I know to be true are limited, girls are often conditioned from a young age to believe that if we want people to listen to us, we have to be beautiful. Through the evidence of my life, I realised soon enough that I had to be thin with perfectly placed female curves. This narrative in my mind was elevated through years of navigating all the misguided shapes and forms of love, sex and admiration. Over the years, I de veloped an eating disorder as I clung, des perately, to the attention that walked hand in hand with beauty. I understand that if I want people to spend time with me, physi cal attraction surely must lie somewhere in the fine-print, hidden underneath the clutter of years of baggage.

So as I recover from anorexia, and years have gone by since I’ve touched another person, I question my value. UCU presents its hookup culture party scene, and I navigate the waters with a knot in my stomach. I flinch when I’m kissed, for it must mean I exude the very thing I’ve spent years convincing myself I can’t achieve. I flinch at the thought that somebody thinks I am beautiful. Yet, when I pull back, it isn’t because I’m not interested, but because I fear you will find out what's behind the image I’ve presented to you.

If you find me attractive, I must have been lying to you. How will you feel when, in an hour, my body changes? When you uncover the lies that lured you into my presence in the first place?

When hookup culture offers you a moment of light and validation that shines on your body, it affirms to me the deeply damaging rule I know to be true. So instead, I swim. I swim like Alice in her own tears, the sea level rising through years of self loathing and pressure. I swallow mouthfuls of water as I reach my hands out. I search for a connection, somebody to tell me I’m more than my body. Somebody who lusts with passion and desire for my mind. I can let go and breathe as they pull the plug, disputing the fact that the body is the most important thing about me.

The physical manifestation of this imposter syndrome reveals itself in a focus on my body that hookup culture elevates. Your validation hardens the blow when I look at myself in the mirror later that night and see a different body. A body that could never earn your desire. How then, am I to find peace with the war that rages in the space between myself and the mirror?

So as you search for a moment in the darkness, I envy you. I envy the unification of two beautiful bodies. I envy the joy with which you kiss a stranger as I battle my discomfort. One day, when my room of tears has finally been drained, I may join you in your moment, glowing and finite.