Brushing Off Invisible Spiders

Everyone wants to be loved.

And most everyone is loved from the get-go. There's something about a tiny screaming lump of squished, purple human being that makes parents go shaky. Perhaps it's that the kid has selflessly taken on the screaming part of the process after a very difficult few hours on the part of the mother.

From that point on, we revolve around love. Being loved is what keeps us dry and fed. Eventually though, we hit puberty and start looking for another kind of love. Romantic love. This is the cause of most of life's frustrations. Unwanted, unrequited and unlasting. There's a plethora of pit traps to avoid. We're hard-wired to want new and exciting love rather than old and comfortable love. That rush of adrenalin, serotonin and a cocktail of other fun drugs flood our systems making us feel like Greek gods. All swanned up and ready to go.

But there's one sort of love that I've become addicted to. It doesn't last for long, but then it doesn't have to. It's the love you get when you step out on stage in front of sixty people and they all want to see you succeed. You make them scream with laughter and it's only for a second but it's pure and it's multiplied by the amount of people in the room. It's the thrill of knowing that everyone in that room, if only for an instant, wants to take you home and be your best friend forever.

One way to get that acclaim is to remove clothing. I've done it dozens of times and people lap it up. It's said that when a girl takes off clothing it's sexy and when a boy takes of clothing it's comedy. I can attest that in the boy's case this is true. Having a room full of people laughing at your semi-naked form is pretty darn intoxicating, and yet, it is tinged with sense of rejection.

Female performers have moaned that they feel over sexualised trying the same joke and that the double standards leave them feeling hard done by. Myself, I feel the same frustration at not being considered a piece of meat. I'd like to think that I have an attractive form but the old ego can take a hit when it hears how terrifying and comical an ordeal it is for people to witness me in my underpants.

Then I found something better.

I posed as an artist's model. It was intoxicating. For an hour and a half I stood or sat naked as an artist friend of mine made me feel like I was the most important object in the room. And not because I was clever. Not because I was funny. Purely because I was a beautiful object.

I read some rules about posing that stated that you're not supposed to look at the artist when they draw you but I stared at her as she looked at me and there is something extremely affirming about being glanced at 60 times a minute. It made me feel important and it made me feel beautiful and it made me feel cultured.