hemingway once wrote a scene where a woman was masturbating, & he wrote it so that she was thinking the whole time abt how hot she was and how good she looked instead of thinking abt something arousing, & that tells me that one of two things must have been true: a) he was so clueless abt sexuality that he assumed that women must find themselves attractive rather than other people, b) he himself masturbated while thinking abt how hot he was & just assumed it was normal
Internalising my misogyny has been the biggest boon to my self esteem
Hmm. Yeah, I suspect the OP is greatly underestimating how common this is, or at least to what extent thinking about one’s own attractiveness is a component of getting aroused for a lot of people. Consider for instance how in many, a crucial aspect of sexual fantasies involving another person is that the fantasizer themself feeling like they’re good, or that they’re really hot to the other person, or whatever. It seems reasonable that this could bleed over into concentrating on one’s own hotness almost independently of imagining another person being into you.
I don’t want to get too personal about this here, but my own direct experience goes a fairly long way to contradict the assumptions that the OP is implying: for me, within the realm of “feeling sexy”, it’s impossible to separate desire for another person from wanting/perceiving myself to be attractive. And I’m a (cis) man who doesn’t perceive himself as all that attractive most of the time and who has had relatively little external validation with regard to being attractive and doesn’t belong to a gender whose attractiveness is constantly highlighted in society, so I can only imagine that tons of women (many more than there are men) experience something like this.
I’m not trying to defend Hemingway here as it sounds like most likely he was being very male-gazey (I haven’t read the work in question), but dismissing a woman being turned on by her own attractiveness as merely suffering from internalized misogyny, as well as characterizing her experience as “sad”, doesn’t seem reasonable to me. (The logic behind such an analysis of course comes from the assumption that being attracted to a woman is equivalent to objectifying her, which I have issues with, but that’s another post.)
Do het people not at least occasionally get turned on by thinking of themselves as hot or is that a bi thing? Like, “wooo I got titties/dick [touches said body part]”
Thats definitely been much more a thing as bi than straight for me