Too Grown- Feminity and Sexuality

Selfportrait Series

I've always looked older than I was but it became especially apparent when I was ten. So at what point did I become a woman? Or have a sexuality?
That part doesn't matter to me quite as much as at what point did I become a possible sex object.
I still marvel at being a person strangers know or feel inspired by. I'm just me, but to a host of followers I'm a glamorous model leading am exciting life. I don't mind people finding me attractive or sexually attractive. I love slightly erotic art work and photos of sexuality and sensuality, but I found modeling for them to open myself up to too much of the wrong kind of attention for me to handle. It created an expectation that I am not just a human with a sexuality, but a woman to sexualize for one's own sexual pleasure. In some cases that's what some models do sell. They want to sell content for other's sexual pleasure, but that is a choice. I think it hit me, not only from the comments and fans, but especially from the other models and photographers in my community telling me what I did was sex work, that all modeling is sex work. I didn't feel like I was selling anything related to sex, maybe a theme of sexuality, but nothing implying to sex. I don't think it was the idea of doing sex work that made me uncomfortable but the frustration at being misunderstood: that being sexually attractive or having a sexuality didn't imply I was provoking sexual invitations.
Maybe that doesn't make any sense, but they're so different to me. I seem to exude sexuality that is innate to me, as evident from my modeling, and from the time I was in pre school and the care takers told my mother I already seemed in touch with that side of myself. What a weird thing to try to imagine.
I wonder if it is that I wear my heart on my sleeve. As my boyfriend says, when I love it is obvious and with so much of myself. If sexuality is a part of human nature then why shouldn't it also be apparent in me like everything else?
Anyway, these are my ponderings lately, as it has become a conversation topic quite a bit and a part of myself I felt endangered by the last few years to the point where I avoided it all together in life in order to shut off any sexuality in my art. It feels like not letting myself cry or feel sad.