My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
- Sonnet CXXX

Perhaps it's a quirk of the BDSM paradigm that heightens and fetishises conventional interpretations of feminine beauty, especially for those of us who dwell on the bottom. It's considered a feminine accomplishment to be beautiful and beauty is essential to a femsub's function as object and adornment, a kind of floral centrepiece to soothe the male eye and act as a living endorsement of his prowess. Whatever power she has emenates from her capacity to evoke desire precisely by being attractive, by furnishing her top with an appealing toy for his manipulation and amusement. These roles are not ones that I wish to fulfil, which perhaps is just as well: I'm no beauty. You wouldn't even see me if you walked into a room I was standing in. I am no testament to the pulling power of the Smilodon and his friends do not assign him uber-stud status for having collared himself such a dowdy specimen. People wouldn't take photographs of me as some kind of bondage doll and put them up on a website.

So it's a continual puzzle to me: Why does the Smilodon even want to have anything kinky to do with my person? I don't really believe him every time he says he likes to look at me, or when he gives me the eye during a session; I don't like looking at myself and I'm sure as hell that other people don't like looking at me either. Besides, why pick me when there are other more attractive specimens of womanhood all around? Why settle for less? It's no big leap to see myself as someone's friend or colleague or drinking partner, but as an object of desire? As the Smilodon's very own Cat, to whom he likes to do all sorts of heinous and enjoyable things? My mind doesn't really comprehend it, my self-image does not allow for it. I am not supposed to be anyone's lover because I am not pretty enough to be loved. Simple as that. The evidence is before my eyes every day: the girls I see on the street or in the bus, the other femsubs I encounter at BDSM gatherings, the old friends of mine who have blossomed into lovely swans while I remain an ugly duckling.

Every time I talk about this with the Smilodon, he gives me an answer close to Shakespeare's, though not quite as poetic. He thinks I'm attractive (again, that's something I cannot wrap my mind around) but he concedes the point about there being women who are far more beautiful than I am around. But despite that, somehow, he doesn't feel shortchanged, doesn't think that I need to measure myself against them or try to attain some snow-white rose-cheeked coral-lipped ideal. I can only understand a part of this: namely, that what he loves in me is not just my looks, that he likes to speak to me and laugh at my semi-jokes and hear me scream when he hits me with stuff. That much is obvious to me: Surely, if anyone were to love me, it wouldn't be for my beauty, since I clearly don't have any. Yet mixed in with that is the horrific confession that yes, he does indeed find me nice-looking, that he enjoys my form and face and thinks them pleasing. As much as I am flattered by his words, they ring somewhat hollow to me, they sound deluded. It's not possible that anyone could detect traces of attractiveness in my less-than-pedestrian face. I'm no paragon of slim, willowy dollhood.

This clash of expectations has had, I suppose, positive consequences. It's made me re-examine my more grindingly self-flagellating hang-ups about my looks. I realise that prettiness means a lot, but I have many things that pretty people don't have either. I understand that looking nice comes with its own burdens and casualties, complexes that I feel I am lucky to avoid. I now think that I have more to offer a partner than my looks, and if they were to judge me solely on how far I complied with some unrealistic and (to me) mindless image of female attractiveness, I wouldn't have much time for them anyway. Finally, I have gained a better grasp of how my ideas of beauty have been socialised, how diverse aesthetic appreciations of the female form are and how the consumerisation of beauty and the pressure to unify all these diverging tastes can be and has been harmful to individuals. I still feel a twitch of envy when confronted by the beautiful, of course, and I still feel rather down about myself when I look in the mirror on a bad day. But these sensations have become less intense as I learn to understand the pitfalls of prettiness and appreciate myself. I may be no beauty but I'm human, I'm grounded, I'm not ashamed to be judged by my brain. I won't fall prey to the lastest fashion or cosmetics fad stoked up by some company trying to siphon my money out of my pocket.

And I'm slowly becoming more comfortable with being loved and desired, I suppose. In a way I wonder if I've put the cart before the horse, if being desired paradoxically paved the way for me to reject the craving for being desired. I worry, therefore, that my newfound confidence is built on feet of clay, that it would all crumble to dust if the Smilodon left and opened the floodgates of insecurity and self-persecution all over again. So far, though, it seems to be working. As I test each board in this new framework I tap it for its soundness and all seems as well as it can be. I'm learning to see myself as Cat sometimes, someone who is worthy of being desired and can learn to manipulate this desire. It's no longer an awkward enterprise whenever the Smilodon asks to look at me and I enjoy dressing up for him and for myself. I'm coming to terms with my appearance, seeing it within the larger package of who I am and what I can give and placing it in context with all my other attributes. With practice and a discerning eye, I can cultivate what little I've got in the looks department. In short, I'm beating myself up less often and less intensely about it.

Once, when I was feeling somewhat insecure about this as I always am, the Smilodon showed me some paintings of women he liked. He told me I looked like them. For some reason, that statement aroused more than incomprehension in me: I felt, almost, as if something had shifted somewhere and I could no longer happily brush his comments off without a thought. Previously, I'd said to myself that he was deluded or lying; but as I began to look the paintings up, I was confronted by a series of women who, while not exactly reigning beauties, had something about them that arrested the eye. A certain sly smile, for example, a turn of the hip, a captivating gaze. Portrait artists had seen fit to turn them into works of art that now grace museum walls. If the Smilodon could see a shade of me in those paintings, it must be no small honour indeed; and perhaps I, too, could cultivate that something, that quirk of appearance, a look that suggests more than beauty but also an inner life, a personality and an intelligence behind the face. Something that goes beyond the glossy, posed, painted and photoshopped model into the realm of the active, fallible human.

So yes, I'm still an ugly duckling. But I'm coming to terms with it.