I feel by posing for Playboy I've discovered my own sexuality and beauty, and I feel more confident than ever.

People have only just started to focus in on [sexuality studies], to see it as having sustained importance as something like gender and race. Understanding of the way culture works or thinking about history is really incomplete without a specific analysis of sexuality.

I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity.

Elektra is larger than life and wears her sexuality on her sleeve. So I was wearing clothes that were 100 per cent sexy. And just giving in to that.

We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others.

I have beauty, intelligence, individuality, sensuality and sexuality.