The first group have long been accustomed to not being the pretty girl, to not even hoping for that kind of attention. Their lives center around chores, children, and other practical matters, duties to be performed in the furtherance of a good life. Marriage becomes something like a business partnership with a man who hopefully appreciates those same qualities and will treat her decently, perhaps even with respect. While this may be a good working arrangement, it is a very bland dish; it lacks salt, let alone pepper. They require tender coaching and coaxing until they can see that there is more joy that could be theirs.
The second group are more challenging. They may have believed they were pretty once, but have been betrayed by cruel remarks or actions. Getting past the defensive wall they erect is difficult enough, but healing the hurt and redirecting the strength of their anger into something positive can be impossible in some cases.
I've had nothing but success with the first type; with the second, even though I have had more successes than failures, I worry more over the failures. Their actions generally make their situations worse over time. I fear that the hurt and pain they hide beneath their hard exteriors will only get worse, and their exteriors will have to get harder which will cut them off from more opportunities for joy, deepening their hurt and pain. And so the circle starts again. In the end, their chances for leaving that cycle get smaller with each passing year. It's easy to blame men, or a society that fawns over superficial beauty; but that is unproductive - the absence of beauty preferences doesn't help anyone see beauty in everyone.
[A woman with curly blond hair hangs her head and closes her eyes as her raised arms support her against a sloping wall. She's wearing a satin house coat that is unbuttoned revealing a lacy merry widow style corset. One nipple on her medium sized breasts can just be seen peeking out above the corset. The skin under her upper arm and on her neck are just beginning to show the signs of sagging with age.]
Ellen was so shy and fearful of believing that there could be beauty in her that it took well over an hour to convince her to even put on the sexy lingerie. But the fact that she had some she thought of as "sexy" convinced me she still had hope that word could apply to her. I snapped the photo when she gave up in frustration from trying to strike a sexy pose and just leaned on the sloping wall of the attic room. In the picture it appears as if she is holding up the room, but is weary from it all, and the gap in her silk house coat shows that under the strong woman's exterior is someone who wishes to have more. To me it seemed obvious that Ellen's husband needed to see more of the sexy lingerie, but only as a condition of doing more to help her hold things together.
Every situation and person is a little different; how far and how fast they can go, how far they can lead their partner, what method will work best. Women are often fond of comparing men to dogs, especially that dog who wants to hump on every leg that comes near and mount every female who's the least bit willing. It's not a bad comparison for many men, even the ones who don't act on those impulses, but the analogy can go further. The dog can be trained to be a loyal partner; it's all about harnessing those impulses and seeing to it that they can only get rewarded in one way. It really can be as simple as a reward for the right behavior, a small rebuke for the wrong.
Ellen needed to build up her husband's desire by arranging for him to see her looking ready for love, but also understanding that she would feel that way more often if she simply weren't so tired from all she had to do around the house. He could start by just not leaving so much mess behind, "just leave the room as you found it, dear."
Life on a farm, even modern ones like ours, is long and hard work. While city women may be able to put a lot more work on their husbands and get a lot of pampering, this just isn't as possible in the country.
[A dark haired woman glares a little disdainfully at the camera. Her hair is pulled back loosely, she sits on a chair bare from the waist down with her legs widely spread. Her pose is not so much as an inviting gesture, but more of a blatant "here it is". Her breasts with large areolas are revealed by the simply act of pulling her top up over them.]
Constance had a very low opinion of men. I asked her if she would show me a pose that would hint to her husband that she was interested in some romance. This is what she did, saying "This is all men are interested in. Let's just get it over with." I was stunned for a moment till she practically ordered me to take the picture.
I've found in my years that people will more easily talk about themselves if they are distracted a little by some simple physical chore. So my visits frequently happened under the guise of sharing chores to make the work go quicker.
Over many of these visits I discovered Constance used to be Connie when she was a young girl. But at some time during adolescence she switched to Constance. She didn't have to fill in too many details for me to see that teasing about her appearance and other slights moved her to see herself as the stronger, less emotional, harder to hurt, Constance. But that was only the beginning. When she met her husband he responded to her strengths and made her feel important. He never lied to her with false flattery, but his actions made it seem that superficial beauty wasn't that important to him. They "fell in love" and were married, as she told it, but I suspect that they both just felt this was a good and comfortable arrangement.
However, a few years ago Constance caught him in an affair, with a much younger and more attractive woman. It was a short lived thing and he was appropriately sorry and promised never to stray again. While the affair may have been forgiven, it certainly was not forgotten and what little passion had been in their marriage before disappeared completely. A two pronged approach was needed. She needed to initiate more sexual contact with her husband, while at the same time ensuring that she was his only outlet. One "prong" involved a little sleuthing to discover where and when he masturbated so he could be monitored later; then catching him and embarrassing him enough to promise not to. The other, initiating sex with him, required her to see her husband's choice of the other woman as more a response to the other's sexual confidence rather than an opinion about attractiveness. This was the harder of the two pieces. Eventually Constance did see it that way, in part because of some examples I could point out. I never had to break any confidences, or bring my friends together, but if you looked around it was easy to see that there were happy, sexually loving couples where the wife was clearly no beauty queen.
[A young woman is slipping a simple shirt on, she's wearing nothing else. She's turned sideways and her pregnant belly protrudes very far, even her belly button is sticking out. Although the rest of her body seems to have retained its original shape her breasts try to perk but sag a bit under their own weight.]
Marietta was shy and timid about her appearance. She knew she had always been the plain girl, but now that she was pregnant she felt she had moved to ugly, fat girl. Even though her husband had wanted a child very much and seemed very excited, ever since she began showing he was more distant and seemed uninterested in any romance at all. He had upped the amount of help he gave her, but the loving attention she used to enjoy with him seemed to have faded. His earlier excitement about the baby and his voluntarily increasing his chores around the house to take some burden off Marietta made me play a hunch that he was just being overly careful. The cure for this would be easy.
I suggested that she be a little forward about bringing up the subject of sex to her husband. Let him know that while there are some things that she just didn't feel like doing, that there are lots of things that she could do, and that most of all she liked to know that he's still interested, because it made her feel better. I said that he would almost certainly be responsive because of his admirable desire to make her more comfortable during the pregnancy. But she should also follow this up by obtaining his promise not to have any sort of sex without her. She could present it as sharing some of loss of physical intimacy together; but the main purpose and value was for him to see her as sexual, even in her condition and for her to make that more intense by keeping him aroused though not always "fulfilled". That sexual energy would come in handy when the baby arrived. I'm happy to say that this worked fantastically and Marietta is a proud mother and a very loved and pampered wife.
[She is calmly staring at the camera while completely nude, sitting cross legged in an easy chair in a living room. Her hands are crossed in her lap, strategically covering her sex.]