A body made for consumption
“Are those your real boobs?”
I’m 14, I’m lounging near the pool at my parents’ marina, drying myself under the sun, hoping my pasty gamer’s skin won’t burn too much under the sun (it will), and this woman – younger than my parents, I know she has little kids – asks me this question. When I was that age, my mother had to coax me into not wearing a t-shirt over my bathing suit to hide my body. She was trying to help me love myself. She’d tell me that every woman dreams to have a body like mine. That every boy my age (and older, but she doesn’t say that) drools over it. Naturally, it didn’t help. At all.
My mom is sitting next to me when this woman utters those world. I don’t think the woman knows we’re related – we don’t look alike. She looks almost as mortified as I feel.
“She’s in high school,” she blurts out.
The woman mumbles an apology and wanders off.
The next day, my mom’s friend privately tells her to “cover me up” because she caught her husband lusting after me a couple of times. That man has known me since I was 8.
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I should be happy. My body has naturally settled into what most women can only obtain with intense dieting and costly plastic surgery – small waist, hips and shoulders roughly the same width for an intense hourglass effect, breasts that seemingly defy gravity. I should relish in the attention. The envy, the desire. It’s a body made for consumption. Attractive people have an easier life, and that’s been empirically verified, although I can’t find the study on that when I try to pull it out.
I spent most of my teenage years terrified of people’s gazes, particularly men’s. Hiding my body with ill-fitting, loose clothing, never donning a skirt, leggings or, god forbid, cleavage.
“People never take me seriously when I do,” I tell my mom. “All they do is stare.”
“Staring is good,” she says. “It means you’re attractive.”
At 14, I was attractive to your 40-year-old friend.
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Body positivity isn’t for women like me. It’s for women who aren’t like me, but who wish they were, because society has told them that this is the ideal form.
“No woman has a body like that naturally,” I read on the internet for the thousandth time, and by ‘that’, they mean women like me. “That only happens with plastic surgery, because our porn-sick world tells us that this is what we should look like.”
Porn stars and strippers pay thousands to look like me, or like a barely exaggerated version of me. I just grew like this. I’m lucky.
“Are those your real boobs?” I must have heard that question at least a dozen times since that episode at the pool when I was 14.
“Your boyfriend must love those,” a guy once told me at a club, after I used the “I have a boyfriend” defense to ward him off.
Now that I’m kept at the lowest weight of my adult life thanks to my medication, I don’t receive as much attention as I used to, which is a relief. But it took me nearly being underweight for that to happen. I can’t help but wonder what will happen to my body if I ever discontinue my ADHD pills. How people’s gaze will change, return to what it used to be when I was underage and 20 pounds heavier.
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Stefan Sanjati – sorry, now it’s just “Stef” Sanjati – made a video trying to empower women like him – I’m sorry, “her”. In it, “she” confidently claims that all those women with a naturally hourglass-shaped body have had work done. That’s right. All the women with the so-called “ideal” body shape out there went under the scalpel. We all crave that male attention so bad that we’ve all gotten implants and lifts and lipos. We’ve made ourselves like this because we exist for other people’s consumption. Specifically, men’s.
Stef wants to be for consumption too.
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Thousands of dollars in student debt, living in a squalid, overpriced basement studio, eating ramen every day, my ambitions have long stopped being about what I want and are much more about pulling myself out of this hell. Med school is no longer solely a matter of interest, it’s a matter of necessity. Every day is an uphill battle against the stress that financial strain is putting on me. There seems to be no end in sight.
I catch my naked reflection in the mirror as I exit the bathroom after showering. Dysphoria is a thing of the past. I’m comfortable looking like this now, except in certain exceptional cases, most of them involving street harassment. My thoughts wander back on the nature of that street harassment.
“How much do you charge?”
How much do prostitutes charge in my area?
This is an insensitive train of thought. Prostitutes are disenfranchised women, not the daughters of upper-middle class White suburban couples. If I’m in debt, it’s because I’ve been in school for far longer than required, and because I have trouble curbing my leisurely spending. It’s my own fault. My misery is self-made. I’m actually wealthy, according to the government and the aid they offer me, at least. I’m not allowed to have those thoughts. I’m lucky. So, so very lucky.
I look around my apartment. Remember that I’ve been surviving off of the leftovers from my job’s Christmas party for 3 days now. Christmas party to which working students like me aren’t invited. It’s just that some of my coworkers know I’ve been having a rough time, so they kindly offered me to take some sandwich and veggie platters home.
Porn stars and strippers pay thousands to look like me. Shave that body hair off and I’m all set to use nature’s “gifts” to me to make the rest of my bachelor’s much less financially difficult. Who cares if I’m a lesbian? Sex workers don’t do it because they’re attracted to their clients. It’s all about the money. If I dissociate hard enough, it won’t be so bad. Right?
I honestly don’t feel so lucky.