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The boudoir session was the perfect tonic.  The shopping alone made me feel excited, alive, and very much in the body I’d basically ignored as I labored over successive drafts of my chapters.  Suddenly I had a new desire, a goal I hadn’t let myself consider before. I’d always been “the intellectual one.”  What if I could be sexy as well, at least for a few hours?

On that warm August evening, we started off the session with me in a black body suit and thigh-high stockings against white satin.  Next came a series in the peignoir I wore on my honeymoon, set against blue velvet. “Beautiful.  That’s perfect,” the photographer purred.   I’ll admit I felt prettier with each compliment, each click of the shutter.  Then came the time to take off my clothes.  Raised by a mother and two older sisters who were all quite comfortable being naked in each other’s presence, I was never especially shy around other women, but I did pause for a moment.

Lingerie was one thing.  Naked was the real thing.

I’d been admiring female nudes since I could remember, especially high-brow, black-and-white compositions, which sometimes produced secret stirrings that helped me understand why men enjoy porn.  But those women were chosen by the (undoubtedly male) photographer as a muse, and thus were certified as beautiful works of art and emblems of desire.  And just as I needed teachers to tell me I was smart, I needed the approving gaze of men to feel pretty.  The light in their eyes was my proof, whether the steady flame of a lover’s or the momentary flicker of a stranger’s on the street.  Without that spark, I was invisible, even to myself.

Commissioning my own nude portrait—not being tricked or charmed into by some libidinous male—suddenly felt impossibly bold, even arrogant.  I was making myself into Beauty, fearlessly daring unknown eyes to see me in the flesh, even if these photos were meant for my husband’s eyes alone.

What if I didn’t make the grade?

Fortunately, I was so at ease with the photographer, so certain this was a risk I had to take for posterity, that I soon lost myself in the yoga-like shifts of my body.  The photographer and I worked together:  sometimes she instructed me to tilt my head back farther, turn a bit more to the right, sometimes I chose poses that felt like me.   When the session ended, I was exhausted and glowing, with a new appreciation for the hard work that models do.  Finishing a Ph.D. is an achievement, but those golden hours in the studio made me feel strong in a whole different way.

Back in the days when cameras needed film, there was one final step in the process—a return visit to look over the proofs.  I spent the week on that same rollercoaster of hope and dread you feel when you submit a story to a magazine. Would there even be one photo worth printing?  Would the camera’s cool eye show me up as ridiculous, laughable?  That was the cynic’s view of the boudoir session, a way for photographers to relieve plain women of their money or even worse as a kind of masturbation, what losers must settle for when they can’t get the real thing.

I remember my heart pounding as I opened the album.

My eye settled on the first picture, the one I still use as my official erotica author photo.  Not bad, I thought.  You have your moments.  I continued turning pages.  Satin peignoir turned to bare flesh.  I’d never realized my back had such a classic hourglass shape to it.  Not bad at all.

Is it too pathetic to admit that I never really saw beauty in myself until I looked at those pictures?