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"I remember being 19 and taking off my shirt with a new boyfriend. We&amp;#039;d slept together a few times before, but always in the dark \u2014 this was the first time he saw me naked with daylight streaming through the windows. &amp;quot;What is that?&amp;quot; he asked, in a tone of mild shock, pointing to the stretch marks on the sides of my breasts. My face got hot as I stammered a barely coherent reply. For weeks afterward I kept my bra on during sex. I have always struggled with body image \u2014 no more or less, I suspect, than any woman (perhaps any person) growing up in a media-saturated environment. We&amp;#039;re always comparing ourselves to the women on TV, in movies, in ads, in magazines. It&amp;#039;s difficult to avoid getting caught up in the quest for a perfect body, even from an early age. I remember aching with shame in sixth grade when another girl shouted across the science classroom, &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you stop sticking your chest out, Lindsay?&amp;quot; I wasn&amp;#039;t sticking anything out \u2014 I just had good posture and early-onset giant breasts. I discovered the body acceptance movement when I was still quite young, which helped. While my self-image was still taking form, it was great to encounter smart, mostly female writers on blogs like Shapely Prose, The Rotund (which doesn&amp;#039;t seem to exist online anymore), and Fatshionista, who insisted that you didn&amp;#039;t have to be thin with perky breasts to be beautiful, valuable, or loved. &amp;quot;At some point in your adult life, you&amp;#039;ve probably walked into a party and felt a frisson of relief upon discovering at least one woman there who was fatter, uglier, and/or dressed more inappropriately than you. We sure have,&amp;quot; the founders of Shapely Prose and The Rotund, Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby, wrote in their book Lessons From the Fat-o-Sphere. &amp;quot;But if you want to have any hope of making peace with your own body, you need to knock that shit off.&amp;quot; I needed these messages desperately at an age when I constantly felt I wasn&amp;#039;t thin enough, pretty enough, or graceful enough, and they went a long way toward bolstering my self-esteem. When my mom asked if I wanted a purely cosmetic breast reduction at 20 years old, I told her that I was happy the way I was, thank you, and there was nothing wrong with my body that needed to be fixed. But I only partially believed it. I still fantasized that I would wake up one day and my breasts would be small and pert, and I&amp;#039;d have creamy, flawless skin and no scar-like birthmark on the side of my nose that used to make people ask if I&amp;#039;d been bitten on the face by a dog. I believed with all my heart that all bodies were equally attractive and equally worthy \u2014 except maybe mine. I still wanted to look different. I still thought that a cute nose and a flat stomach might be the key to the confidence and popularity and hot sex life that always seemed just a little out of my reach. Then, in college, I started sleeping with women. I had known I was somewhere on the queer spectrum since I saw Eliza Dushku as the totally hot and subtly lesbianic Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I&amp;#039;d always mostly dated boys. The very first time I had sex with a woman, my relationship with my own body underwent a seismic shift. It was almost like I was looking at myself for the first time, through new eyes: Oh my god, women&amp;#039;s bodies are awesome \u2014 and not just the ones conventionally pretty enough to be on TV. The first girl I slept with did not resemble a magazine cover. She had cellulite; she had body hair; her breasts were not impervious to gravity. Her hair got messed up and her makeup was mostly rubbed off by the time we were done. She was the most gorgeous person I had ever seen. I used to feel like anytime someone was interested in me, it was because I was doing a good enough job of pretending to be attractive, of covering up my flaws and playing up my assets until I passed for pretty. I thought of myself as a checklist of pros and cons, where my net score needed to be positive in order for a potential partner to declare it Go Time. But my first encounter with a woman erased that childish notion from my mind. I realized that when you have chemistry with someone, they have no cons \u2014 just quirks and idiosyncrasies that only add to their unique appeal. I had never expected the guys I dated to be teen-magazine heartthrobs \u2014 my taste tended toward geeks and artist types \u2014 but it never occurred to me that if they didn&amp;#039;t have to be conventionally attractive, then neither did I. Pop culture teaches women to value men for all kinds of reasons besides great abs and perfect hair (the schlubby dude with a supermodel wife is so common in movies and TV that it&amp;#039;s clich\u00E9), so it wasn&amp;#039;t too shocking to be attracted to dudes who were not Channing Tatum. But when I started sleeping with women, I realized that what I saw on TV and what I wanted in my own bed were so widely disparate that the &amp;quot;ideal&amp;quot; was more or less irrelevant. And if I could adore women&amp;#039;s bodies despite what beauty standards insist are their glaring flaws, other people must be able to feel the same way about me. It doesn&amp;#039;t make sense to think of myself as unlovably fat and gross when I can see a girl with bigger thighs than mine and just want them wrapped around my head. I have never looked at a naked woman and thought, Her boobs are too big, or, Her legs are too skinny, or, Oh, she has stubble under her arms; I&amp;#039;m gonna go home and play solitaire instead. I&amp;#039;ve been attracted to girls who are tall and short, fat and thin, cis- and transgender, furry and clean-shaven, girls with scars or piercings, tattoos or crutches or vitiligo, and one girl whose thick, gorgeous hair made me die of jealousy until we were about to fuck and she unceremoniously yanked out her clip-in extensions, revealing locks as fine and flat as mine. I&amp;#039;ve never seen a naked woman up close and had any reaction other than &amp;quot;Hell yeah!&amp;quot;  None of this is intended to imply that being queer wipes out body image issues entirely. I understand and appreciate my body more than I used to, but I still sometimes wish that my breasts were smaller, my stretch marks fewer, my teeth a little less crowded. One study from 1994 showed that lesbians do have slightly higher body image satisfaction than straight women, but a more recent study found little difference, and it&amp;#039;s not like anyone is impervious to the pressure to look like Blake Lively all the time. Lesbians can be just as demanding and unrealistic about physical perfection as anyone else. And queer women have plenty of role models whose beauty we can feel bad about not living up to, from Buffy&amp;#039;s Willow to The L Word&amp;#039;s Bette to Santana on Glee. As much as I&amp;#039;d love to embrace this particular stereotype, queer women don&amp;#039;t live in a magical utopia where everyone dances around in uninterrupted harmony with themselves and with nature, eating organic vegetables and never bothering to look in a mirror. It&amp;#039;s just that when I started seeing beauty in other women, I had an easier time finding it in myself. I&amp;#039;m certainly not everyone&amp;#039;s idea of totally stunning, but I learned I could be some people&amp;#039;s. Most importantly, I could be my own. Two years or so after I broke up with the guy who didn&amp;#039;t know what stretch marks were, I was about to go skinny-dipping with a girl I had a huge crush on. I felt a flash of self-consciousness as I unhooked my bra and let it fall, but I willed myself to stifle it, even as I sensed her staring at me. &amp;quot;Wow,&amp;quot; she said after a moment. &amp;quot;You know, your stretch marks are, like, perfectly symmetrical. That&amp;#039;s really cool.&amp;quot; Then she paused. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry, was that a totally weird thing to say?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; I said, laughing. &amp;quot;I know exactly what you mean.&amp;quot; Follow Lindsay on Twitter. 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<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a28395/how-coming-out-changed-my-body-image/>