I think I was...11 the first time I was gifted a bra. It was Christmas, and I was still young enough to be interested in the Santa Tracker the local news station had in the corner of the screen even though I didn't really believe in Santa anymore, I just liked the magic of it. I remember I was wearing my favorite Christmas dress, a blue velvet number with gold star shaped buttons (the buttons were a facade, they didn't actually function in a buttoning capacity) and white, puffed sleeves that were a translucent tulle with embroidered gold stars on it. I felt very pretty in that dress, I loved it, I wore it for special occasions, it was THE statement piece in my wardrobe. We were at my grandma and grampa's house and if my timing is correct I believe this is the last Christmas spent with my grandfather before he passed away. I wanted to check my math on that...for whatever reason...and it turns out I was wrong. I was NOT 11 the first time I was gifted a bra. I was 10. My grandfather passed away in 1995, I was 11 that year, but this is a memory of Christmas Eve, and I did not spend Christmas Eve with him in 1995. Because he was dead.
So.
I was TEN the first time I was gifted a bra. And then everything else stays the same, picking back up where we left off....I felt super pretty in my little dress, santa tracker, at my grandparents' house, we're back on track.
Our Christmas tradition was that we got to open two presents on Christmas Eve: one was a set of pajamas, and the other was who knows what, but it was a present that was not pajamas. I had opened my pajamas already, I have no idea what those looked like, I do not remember, but I remember opening my bra because I was the most present and aware of my body in that moment than I had ever been in all my years before that. I can only imagine that I blushed deeply and immediately, because I had been opening my present with the expected panache of a dramatic kid, holding my gift as high as I could to show off whatever thing it was going to be, and several things happened as I recognized it as a bra: I became visibly embarrassed, my entire family started laughing, and I pulled the bra to myself to hide it.
I don't quite know if I would have clocked in that moment that what I felt was sexualization and humiliation, but not in a hot and sexy, nighttime kink kind of way. In the kind of way where there is suddenly, and without my consent, knowledge of my body and its secondary sex charateristics, and it is no longer under my purview, but it is loudly at the center of everyone's world.
The bra had been from my mom. She was laughing at me, my step dad was laughing at me, my sister was laughing at me, and my grandparents were laughing at me. I take the least amount of umbrage with my little sister. She was only 8. But the adults in the room should have known better. My step dad started teasing me about having tiny boobs in a sing song voice that he used all the time and I fucking hated it, and I extra hated it in that moment. My mom told me I had to wear one with every outfit now. I swear I didn't have anything boob adjacent. Nothing. I was still very flat chested, there's a picture of me around this age wearing a bathing suit top and I look like a swarthy little Mediterranean boy who is super into floral hot pink lycra. I was working with NOTHING and without my permission, I was shoved into having to notice my chest and think about my chest and put extra clothing on my chest from that moment forward. I didn't want to think about that. I was still kind of interested in santa. I was still playing with Barbies. The reality of my body and my breasts, wherever they had been the moment before, had been wrested from the ether and have not left my consciousness since.
At ten.
When I was twelve, I had to go to work with my mom one day and one of her coworkers...and older lady...told me I "was going to be built like a brick shit house". I did not know what that meant. My mom agreed with her, though, and I cannot recall EXACTLY the joke she made but it was something about me already being boy crazy and ha ha ha, preteens are a nightmare I should be chained up. It was something to do with me being locked away and once I grew into my adult female form, I was just going to fuck everything all over the place because everything all over the place was obviously going to want to fuck me.
And to the latter point, there is definitely an accurate depiction of how I've been an object for consumption since before I got my first bra. My mom and step dad were assessing my body in a sexual way before I had even an inkling that my body being sexualized was on the table. They made judgements on when I should start to cover my breasts before they existed, and they preemptively made me ashamed of my breasts. Ashamed of my body in general, but the titties came first. They came much sooner than my bra, honestly, because as I write this, I'm recalling a time where I wanted to play in the sprinklers with my neighbor friend, a little boy, and I took my clothes off down to the undies and started running around with him. I was 6, MAYBE 7, and my mom came screeching out of the apartment for me to put my clothes on and if I wanted to play in the water I had to put on a bathing suit. I came in, started putting on my bathing suit, and asked her why I had to put a bathing suit on, my friend didn't have to and she said, "because you're a girl".
At 6 or 7.
She wasn't mad at me, I wasn't in trouble, but she was upset at my body being on display. My six year old little girl body, on a hot Florida day, running through a sprinkler with her friend who was a boy that was ALSO in just his underwear, and there were no functional, visible differences between the two of us. Just two children, indistinguishable except to those who knew them, and neither of us had boobs, but one of us was given preemptive body shame for titties that wouldn't exist for another 7 or 8 years.
It was me, I was the one who got those things.
In eighth grade, I had a boyfriend name Angel. One time I made a poster on a piece of cardboard for my room that said I💜Angel except I spelled his name wrong so it said I 💜Angle. In reality neither thing was true.
Angel wanted to make out all the time and I didn't. Angel wanted to paw at my thirteen year old boobs that were barely there enough, but they were there enough to make Angel notice. Notice and want to grab them. I didn't want him to do that. So Angel broke up with me to date Effie Lamour, a name I swear to you I am not making up. Effie had huge boobs and I suppose made out with Angel all the time because they kept dating, well..."dating"...through the end of the year. On the first day of 9th grade, I DID have boobs. Big ones. I wasn't thinking about my boobs in any kind of way other than they were a hindrance, I didn't want to call attention to them because I felt gross about having them. On the first day of 9th grade, I was wearing a white shirt that said WONDERBRAT on it. The spacing on the shirt and the size of my chest made it look like the shirt said WONDERBRA. Angel came up to me in the hallway and said, "wow, Drea. You've GROWN" and he mimed boobs coming off of his chest with his hands. The ubiquitous hand signal for huge knockers. You know the one, you're either thinking about it or doing it right at this very moment. I hope you're miming it to yourself. I know I did, but I couldn't do it right because of these stupid huge knockers.
Again, my body, despite the personal plans I had for it, which was to wear my shirt and be left alone, was a display piece that was going to be consumed no matter what I felt or wanted. Existing in the body I was born in seemed to give everybody agency and access to my body but me.
This was just the way of the world, and I had very little input. It didn't matter that it made me feel disgusting. Everytime my step dad told me I was going to be a knockout one day. Every time some strange adult man slowed down his car to talk to me as a teenager...an obvious young teenager...to invite me into his vehicle. And the bitch of it all was, it didn't matter how stripped down to nothing I felt by this consumption, I was newly replenished for each new leer, every fresh harrassment, it was like being born again so another man could condemn me to be tethered to his lust. Maybe they drove away and never thought of me again, but I thought about all of them every time I stepped outside. My body was weighed down by each of them, wondering when the next man would comment on my body without my permission, another stone in my pocket as I walked further into the sea.
The paradox came from wanting to be consumed on my own terms. I didn't know what it meant then, but if Elliot Glassman had told me I was beautiful in 5th grade, I wouldn't have been upset. I didn't really like Angel (or Angle, whichever), I liked Jason Krentz, but if Jason Krentz had wanted to put his stubby little hands on my equally stubby boobs that were trying their hardest to grow, I might have been convinced to let him because I wanted that kind of attention from someone I liked by choice. I felt the sting of rejection every time a boy I had a crush on liked Amber instead. It's hard to reconcile the idea that I am ok being an item to be held, desired, and consumed in some circumstances, but not others. It's confusing because I've never been shown that my agency was all that important, and I knew that, but somewhere my agency wanted the thing I didn't enjoy at all and what is that supposed to mean, anyway?
I think this is why suddenly being invisble to the panopticon of The Male Gaze (TM) is so jarring. I've been struggling to put a finger on exactly what it is that I felt strange about even though I mostly feel liberated by nobody looking at me predatorily and sizing me up as worthwhile or not. A few things, really. One, this was yet again something I was given no real say in. Society around me determined my returns to be diminishing after 35, and I had to go along for the downward ride. Could I exert more effort into youthenizing myself so I can stay dewy and youthful looking? I sure could, but I don't want to. If a 42 year old is sexy in her own home, does she make a sound? She does, and the sound is "oh my god I hate wearing a bra". B, you do learn to tune your self worth into how objectified you are. How wanted you are. Your body. Your face. Your clothing. I kept all of that shit adjacent to tight in my twenties and thirties until I couldn't anymore. Suddenly the world crashes down around you when you go from viable to gross when being an object is all you've ever known and understood. Derek can say all he wants that his dangling from the edge of monogamy had nothing to do with my weight gain after the car accident, but you can't fool a fat uggo. Nobody he was being slimy with had bodies like mine or looked like me. none of the women he ogled looked like me, none of his porn looked like me. I was the only one that looked like me in his life, fantasy or otherwise, and for as much as Derek says it was about his own insecurity, I think that's a bullshit excuse from a man who has never really demonstrated that he thinks that much of me as a partner. And I felt like it was all my fault.
And C, I think the worst thing of all is there really is no warning and it is confusing to feel both liberated and contrite, because surely it's your fault that you're so ugly and old.
I'm still trying to process this. In so many ways, I don't recognize myself when I look in the mirror. Like, I'm still me, I know my own face, my gray hairs don't alarm me, my aging body doesn't alarm me. But for as liberated as I feel by no longer being on the menu, I also have never known myself to look uglier in my life. I don't look old, I don't look old at all. I just look ugly. And I suppose this is the crux of the whole thing. I think that ugliness and weight don't actually matter, ugly women and fat women get eaten alive by society just as much as skinny women and pretty women. Any combination of those modifiers is just as eaten. Nothing about it matters, not really. But I think there's a way to hide what you think about yourself when you're in the jaws of society. I don't think my being ugly is a pejorative that I need to fix, it's just a truth that I can accept.
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