I Am More Than My Cleavage
I Am More Than My Cleavage? Seriously?! What kind of world do we live in that I feel the need to write a blog with that title?
In order to truly explain my thought process and feelings behind all this, I must give you some background info. As a teenager, like many confused kids, I had attention issues. Hell, I still do (I mean, hello, I write a blogāpay attention to me! Haha). My attention issues then were different though. Yes, I was that girl that fooled around with the boys before my peers did. As a young woman with large breasts and a curvy body, developed long before I knew what to do with it, it was easy to discover how I could get the attention that I craved.
When I moved to my small town, the place I now call home, I was just beginning to really act out. I desperately wanted to fit in and be one of the Cool Kids. I wanted to be liked and paid attention to. I was a mere 13 years old, but thought of myself as a grown up. It only took a month or two to not only catch the attention of some of the popular boys, but also to make myself ostracized. I realized after it was too late that I was the girl the boys wanted, the girl the girls hated, and the girl no one wanted to be publicly associated with. I wasnāt understood and I didnāt know how to behave any differently.
I struggled with this stuff my entire youth. It was a constant fight inside myself between wanting to be paid attention to and wanting with all of my aching teenage heart to not be an outcast. I wanted to be liked for who I was inside my tender soul, but I kept searching for it with my cleavage.
Now to fast forward many years, many heartaches, many milestones, and much personal growth, Iām no longer that broken girl. But you know what? Society is. We live in this era of everything being sexual, insane beauty standards constantly in our faces, and the most casual attitude of sex that our nation has ever seen. Teenagers (along with the adults, of course) are exchanging naked selfies, even fast food commercials use sex to sell, no one bats an eye at casual sex and āfriends with benefitsā, Ā and we push birth control on 12 year olds. Along with all of this, women seem to be seen in general as sex objects and nothing more. When one is lusting after the barely dressed woman on the cover of Cosmo, he or she is not thinking about who that woman is, what matters to her, or what she has going on in her lifeāhe or she is thinking about how great her breasts look or how amazing those thighs are, et cetera. This objectification doesnāt just go for those we see on television, on magazine covers, or in online ads. It spills over into how we see women in real life. In fact, that statement right there, āreal lifeā, shows just how deep this goes. Those women, photoshopped, covered in makeup, and in glossy print everywhere you lookātheyāre still real women. Ā They still have feelings, goals, family, struggles, and triumphs that have nothing to do with the image you see on those screens or magazine covers.
While writing this, I decided to do some quick research about how many ads the typical American sees in a day because itās relevant to my point on what we as Americans are seeing without even realizing it on a daily basis. There are no hard and fast numbers, but many sources estimate that the number of daily ads we see can reach into the thousands. Think about it, every time you log onto Pandora, every time you pass a city bus, check out at the grocery store, sit in front of your TV, get on Facebook, play a mobile game, flip through a magazine in a waiting room, step in front of a television in Wal-Mart, shop online, walk down the cereal aisle, drive through town, use the Internet to help your children with homework, and even getting into an elevator in bigger citiesāyour eyes are bombarded with advertisements. Thousands of images every day flood into your brain whether you realize it or not, and many of these are using edited images of āsexyā women. According to mediaed.org, it is thought that only around 8% of an adās message is consciously received into the mind. So much info is being put into our minds, and while we may not realize it, that data soaks into our brains anyway. Ā **If youāre curious about the info on advertisements, please check the mediaed.org link at the bottom of this. There is a ton of info in their pdf about sexual images, consumerism, and specifically women and girls and how they are used and manipulated in the media. Itās quite eye opening.**
But Iām straying from my point here. When we are teaching those in society through this constant onslaught of images that women are to be lusted after, that deeply ingrained, unconscious act cannot be compartmentalized into just viewing women in media this way. It becomes how our youth sees their female peers. It is how grown men see their coworkers. It is how old men see younger generations of women (side note, did you know the number two most searched porn term online in America is āteenā, second only to MILF? Thatās a whole different blog to be written but helps to show how much our current youth are in danger with this). It is even how us women now tend to see each other and ourselves. As human beings, our eyes take in how others look and our bodies and brains are stimulated accordingly. Without having guarded hearts and trained minds, we unconsciously objectify others based on these standards in America, and I have recently had much personal experience to remind me of this.
I have been struggling the last several months with having gone through a breakup of a serious relationship and all that goes with that. Iāve had loneliness and a desire to be accepted and wanted by others. In some ways, bits of that broken teenage girl in me crept back to the surface, and that allowed me to put my guard down without realizing it. Unlike when I was a kid though, we have this wonderful thing called social media these days. It often gives a false sense of connectedness with others, and it also gives many people the guts to say things online that wouldnāt be said face to face. I could give several examples of this, but to save face and space to this already very long post, Iām going to just give one example of how outrageous this objectification has become, and it has an impact.
The one incident that punched me in the gut emotionally and I knew would result in this very blog post with this exact title happened around two months ago. Like most, I have a Facebook account and almost 300 āfriendsā on it. Also like most women, I change my profile picture on it often. I use a little app on my phone to make pretty edited pictures that make the perfect size for a āpro picā. One day, I changed my picture without thinking about the unintentional cleavage that was showing. Remember, long gone are my days of wanting to draw people in with my breasts, but because they are large, cleavage happens sometimes regardless. I was leaving work when I suddenly got an instant message from a male friend that threw me off. I wasnāt on Facebook at the moment and wasnāt even aware yet of the comments on my new profile picture, but all it took was one friend to comment about my cleavage on this picture before there were suddenly a small handful of comments about my breasts. What was worse though was the message from my āfriendā. One word. Boobies.
I had no idea what it meant when the Facebook message texted my phone. I honestly thought it was an accident. I got online to inquire about it. I opened up my messages, and sure enough, it was the one word and then a selfie of him.
Him: Whereās my pic now? You always show your boobs hanging out. Let āem loose.
I was appalled and so very hurt. I had previously thought this guy was kinda cute and had known we had stuff in common, so I was actually pleased that he messaged me at first. But I was not happy that he felt it was okay to not just bring up such ugly subject matter so boldly, but to talk to me as if I wasnāt even a normal human being deserving of respect. I was ashamed even though Iād done nothing to ask for this kind of treatment. I was deeply hurt that he talked to me like this completely unsolicited and without an ounce of respect--especially when it was the first time heād ever initiated conversation with me.
Me: Thereās websites for that ya know.
Him: Yeah, but why online if itās local?
I teared up reading his messages. I was thoroughly blown away. In an instant, I was that hurting young woman that wanted to be one of the Cool Kids so badly, but I was also the adult I am now and knew that no matter what I was feeling, I was NOT going to allow this to continue.
Me: Because Iām more than just my cleavage.
Him: Yeah, you got an ass too.
I realized that I felt shame before I had even done anything. There was embarrassment that had lived there inside me so long. Humiliation from acts so long ago that caused me to still feel that hurt as a grown woman. But he didnāt get what he wanted, and I kept my dignity. I honestly meant what I said. I AM more than my cleavage. Whether it was intentional or accidental, cleavage did not give him permission to completely disregard the fact that I am a woman with feelings. I have lived and succeeded through major struggles, I have experienced great joys, I have beautiful children that think Iām the most important person on earth, and I have been hurt badly, loved madly, and helped others gladly. I am a woman, not an object! Even though itās taken me a while longer in life to discover it, I am worthy of love, tenderness, and respect. I. Am. More. Than. My. Cleavage. Ā
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292582/Most-popular-porn-site-search-terms-revealed-Americans-favour-MILF-Syrians-like-aunt.htmlĀ
https://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/241/studyguide_241.pdfĀ
http://depts.washington.edu/thmedia/view.cgi?section=medialiteracy&page=fastfacts
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