Women Who’ve Told Me How My Body Should Be
It’s 12 pm on a Sunday and I’m on the phone with my mom. I’m 22 and walking around Chicago’s Roger’s Park neighborhood. A middle aged woman wanders past me slowly and hollers, “THE BOYS WILL GET SICK OF YOUR TITTIES HANGING OUT LIKE THAT”
I’m wearing a blue tank top. It’s very hot out. The universe has given me this body and I’m not the biggest fan of it but I’m trying to keep it comfortable. I’m on the phone with my mom and a woman is yelling at me about my chest.
“HEY,” I scream at her. “FUCK OFF.”
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I’m 7 years old and my best friend’s mom is always picking me apart. I am too loud. I picked a front-wedgie in front of her. I picked my nose. I sit the wrong way, hold myself the wrong way, talk too loud and too deep, something is wrong, no matter what I’m doing with my body, I’m inappropriate.
Her daughter and I are in deep friend-love and spend every day together almost. She is icy to me. Always correcting. Encouraging her daughter to choose activities that I, with my poor posture and lack of coordination, cannot do: ballet, tap dance, martial arts. She doesn’t understand why I don’t care about my appearance. When her daughter & I crawl around the yard pretending to be demons, we are given an intervention. My every impulse is wrong.
As soon as they move a town away, her daughter stops picking up my calls. My friend’s mother is relieved to have such a bad specimen of girlhood out of her daughter’s life. And perhaps, by that point, my friend is too.
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I am 9 years old and in Girl Scouts, and the troop leader won’t relent in telling me to stop sitting like that.
I’m sitting on my knees. Or I’m sitting curled up with my knees to my chest. I don’t see the problem. I crave the pressure, I can’t sit with my legs splayed out in front of me. It feels wrong. But she never lets me even try it, not for a single solitary second in a single meeting. She’ll stop a conversation to tell me to stop sitting like that.
Everything I do there seems to be wrong. How I sit, how I talk, if I won’t be nice and eat what she wants me to eat, it’s all open to critique. But the sitting is what really really gets her. It’s not ladylike.
