Lyda here. We’ll be back to our regular schedule of movie reviews and zombies tomorrow. Oh, and knitting and quilting. And funny weird stuff. Today… not.
I’ve hesitated to post this, but I feel compelled, for whatever reason. I’m just going to put it out there. Feel free to skip this and read yesterday’s weirdness post instead.
I’ve posted on and off about weight and body image and social pressure and sexual stereotypes and such stuff and nonsense. That’s seven, seven self-referencing links. Ah ah ah ah. (thunder)
Now, alas, we come to some personal experiences which I feel oddly compelled to share.
I was the first girl in my class to hit puberty, and hit it hard I did. By 5th grade I was already “busty.” That year, the teachers lined all of the kids up to weigh and measure us. Everyone, boys and girls together, in the gym. One teacher stood at the scale and called out the number to another teacher, who wrote it down. The same thing with height - one teacher called out the number so another teacher could write it down. Their voices echoed through the gym with every number.
I was one of the tallest girls. I was also the first girl they weighed who was 100 pounds. When they called out my weight, kids giggled. Looking at pictures from that time, I know that I was the right weight for my height, my development, and my activity level. I was not fat. But I suddenly felt fat that day.
It was a horrible day. It was no fun for the rest of the girls, and no fun for the boys either. The giggling was a sign of the tension, the nerves. Because there was humiliation enough for everyone that day. As if 12-year-olds don’t have enough self-consciousness about their bodies.
That was the year that we watched an animated film to learn about our changing bodies. At least this time they separated the girls from the boys. The boys went out onto the field to play football, the assumption being that adolescent boys didn’t need to know about their changing bodies nor what was happening to the girls - ah, the 70s.
When the teacher said that wearing a bra helps your breasts to develop (um, what?), all the girls and the teacher looked right at me. As if I had chosen to “blossom” so early.
All this was bad enough in 5th grade, in a school that I’d attend since 1st grade, where I knew the other kids and had good friends and good relationships with my teachers. The gender lines had not been drawn too heavily yet - my best friend that year was a boy, and boys and girls still played together on the playground. We had secret crushes, yes, but we were still kids.
That summer my family moved to a new city, and I suffered extreme culture shock. And my period started. 6th grade was a nightmare. The kids were very different, rushing to adulthood as fast as they could. The girls wore makeup and stockings. Kids dated and smoked and drank. I was the weirdest kid in my class, maybe the whole school, with my very frizzy hair and my odd clothes and my midwest accent and my unusual family.
I was still a kid but I was walking around in a woman’s body. I only made one friend that year. Everyone else treated me as an object of ridicule. It probably didn’t help that I thought I was smarter than the teacher and 98% of the kids. The library was my refuge; I read the fattest books I could find, including “War and Peace,” that year. That’ll show them.
Junior high was a nightmare, and high school was only marginally better.
My mom began to criticize my eating habits and my weight, and then suddenly one day she stopped. I found out later that she had stopped because she didn’t want weight and food to define our relationship, or my self-image. I thought she’d given up on me.
So I asked my mom to take me to the doctor, who put me on a no-carb diet. I was 16. I took a special girl’s gym class for “weight control.” I was surprised to learn that some girls were teased just as unmercifully for being “too thin” as I was for being large-busted and curvy. And only years later did I realize that I had been at a healthy weight for my body before the diet. And that my doctor could have encouraged me to be more physically active rather than put me on a diet. We had a wonderful teacher who encouraged us to focus on our health, rather than our weight.
But for me, and I suspect for most of the girls in the class (and most of the kids in the school), the idea that our value depends on other people’s judgements about our bodies was already deeply instilled.
From age 12, I was harassed, teased, forceably pinned up against walls by older boys and by men my father’s age. I was pawed and molested, heckled and jeered at, physically threatened and terrified. There was viciously gossip about me, and the girls were as bad as the boys. Boys did not ask me out, but they did try to look through my windows at night. Can’t you hear “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” playing in the background?
Because a girl with my body type must be a slut, a trollop, a whore. She must want it - even though I didn’t even know what “it” was yet. And a girl with my body type must be stupid too, a dumb blonde.
And no one did anything to stop it. I did not tell my dad or my brothers. I was too ashamed. I did not tell my mom or my sister very much either. I thought it was my fault.
I grew up thinking that my body was shameful. I grew up thinking that I was not in control of what happened to it, or to me. I grew up thinking no nice boy or man would want me.
And always, behind the shame and the guilt, behind the anger and the despair - there was FEAR.
Fear for my life. Fear of physical harm, which I did not escape. It’s a short step from sexual harassment to sexual violence.
Fear that I was unlovable, that I was not worthy of love.
Fear that I was what they all said I was.
I was thirty-three years old the first time I pushed a man away and said “no.” I was terrified. But the anger finally overcame the terror.
And I did not die.
That would have been a surprise to the girl I was at 12, at 16, at college.
Since then, I have been trying to learn to love myself as I am right now. I have been trying to heal.
But like far too many of us, I still carry the scars.
Most of them do not show.
Except, perhaps, in my eyes.
