The young boys in my elementary school had already been socialized to evaluate the female form and deem it worthy or unworthy. They decided my body was unacceptable. Starting with the onset of puberty, boys taunted me daily with assaults of “Fatso!” and “Chubby!,” entertained when they discovered my tears flowed easily and encouraged to masochistically taunt more viciously.
At home, my mother and aunt were caught up in the 1980s diet craze and seemed obsessed with becoming skinny. I was enveloped by their excited discussions about the tools one could use to make their body smaller and take up less space in the world. When I asked my mother if I should lose weight, she unknowingly reinforced the insults from the boys at school when she responded that I could “afford to lose a few pounds.”
I was one of those pubescent girls whose breasts became huge overnight. And that made me suddenly sexually attractive. The boys in my high school moved to sit closer to me in classes. Unwelcome catcalls were hurled at me as I walked home after school from adult men who must have known they were too old to desire my underage body.
When I was pregnant with each of my children in my 30s, my breasts ballooned even bigger. After I was done nursing my children, my breasts shrunk and hung low and heavy, with puckered lines striating the sides. During sex, my husband at that time was less interested in interacting with my breasts. After my divorce, my sexual partner for three years did not touch my breasts once.
I nursed each of my two sons with love and devotion. Even now, I am overwhelmed with bittersweet nostalgia as I remember nurturing tiny vulnerable babies in this instinctual and tender way. Mothering infants was at times grueling and torturous but it was also simpler than mothering older children. I could fix most of their complaints by nursing them. Parenting adolescents and teenagers is proving vastly more complex and requires more intellectual demands than physical ones.
Though my body changed thereafter in ways that our culture views as unacceptable, I feel proud of my choice to give life to my children with my body. Not only do my breasts appear differently than before I grew and nursed babies, my belly (though strong from years of physical activity) is overhung with drooped excess skin and Birth Warrior Stripes (a.k.a. stretch marks). Not only are my breasts no longer perky, my belly no longer flat and smooth, but my vagina is less taut. Make no mistake, despite the seemingly unappealing nature of this list, this sharing is not meant to deter or discourage women from growing babies in their bodies or feeding them from their bodies. Nor is it meant to encourage misogynistic attitudes towards women’s bodies among those who are sexually attracted to them. In fact, quite to the contrary.
I nursed babies in public in Las Vegas, NV. When my second son was an infant, I was nursing him in the children’s section of the library when another library patron contacted the police. This patron believed that I was obscene. If you have never been to Las Vegas, you are correct in your impression that sexuality is overt here. If you have been to Las Vegas or reside here, you know first hand how overt sexuality is here. To be more precise, the sexualizing of feminine appearing bodies and the advertising of the idea of those bodies as something to be consumed at one’s pleasure is as overt here as gambling addiction and substance abuse. The idea of a feminine appearing person’s body belonging to her and being used in the way that it is anatomically designed is more offensive, within the cultural context of Las Vegas, than that body being overtly objectified. Residents of Las Vegas accept streets and freeways littered with advertisements depicting bodies as ready and available for sexual gratification twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. And yet, nursing in public, using breasts as they are biologically intended, often elicits complaint.
The anatomical function of human female mammalian breasts is lactation to feed our young. Whether a female choses to offer her breasts in this way or not, is her choice. Breasts can also be a sexually stimulating part of the body, giving both the person on whose body they belong and the sexual partner who interacts with them pleasure. Ultimately, breasts belong to the person on whose body they reside. A person’s breasts belong to that person, as does the rest of that person’s body. We have a long and still present practice in our country (and other countries as well but as I am an American, I’ll keep it to what I personally know) of telling feminine appearing persons what to do with their bodies. Both in terms of their biological function and also appearance, we have a long history of masculine appearing persons telling feminine appearing persons what they may do with their bodies.
During my ill-fated time with the sexual partner who never touched my breasts, I expressed to him that I had self consciousness about my breasts because they were not as perky and youthful as they once were. He said I could get them “fixed.” I expressed that I would enjoy his touching my breasts. He said he was “more of an ass guy.” I wish I could reassure you (and myself) that his responses simply reflect the despicable views of a sadistic abuser. And while he is a sadistic abuser, as illustrated by countless other events, the fact that he related to my body as sectioned into parts to be accepted or rejected, is not isolated to his personal belief system. The statements he made regarding my body represent what is ill within our culture on a broader scale. Our culture relates to the female body as separate from the person who dwells within it. And that dwelling space as an object that should be evaluated and improved to please a person who would like to use it for sexual gratification.
Despite my current and beloved husband’s genuine expression of his acceptance of my body and personhood as a whole, I am still hoping to experience this wholeness. I withdraw when I change my shirt in front of him, still feeling the residual need to hide and apologize for the parts of my body that I was told are not pleasing. I often turn out the lights before sex in submission to the reflex to make myself invisible. I wonder as I am in the final phases of my fifth decade on this earth, whether my physical form will be as pleasing to him in another decade as it is now. I remember how my young pre-motherhood body was celebrated. And I am in awe of my maternal body’s magical strength in growing, birthing and feeding my children. I have yet to integrate these selves. I have yet to access the sensation that I am both maternal and attractive. I am deeply injured from navigating girlhood, womanhood and motherhood in our culture that separates sexuality from reverence.
And I am angry. I resent the circumstances that caused me to feel this way. I am impatient with myself for not being able to ascend and reject a self-loathing mindset. And I am also moving toward experiencing wholeness. I glimpse moments in which I believe that I may not be sectioned and separated into acceptable and unacceptable parts. Yet my sense of self is possessed by the ghosts of the boys and men that rejected parts of me. That haunting isreinforced by the ever pervasive message that women are objects to be evaluated in our worthiness. Perhaps when you look at me, you think that my ass is hot but my tits are repulsive? Perhaps you think my wild hair is sexy but my wrinkles are a boner killer? Whatever you may think of me or any other woman, I implore you not to dissect us. I implore you not to turn us around so you do not have to see our aging faces and sagging tits. I implore you not put a bag over our heads while you do us. I implore you not to charge us thousands of dollars to slice us up and remove the parts that bulge and sag and deflate your c*#k. Women are whole people. We are our folds, our bumps, our wrinkles, our lumps, and all of our sags. The creases and lines on our flesh tell our stories. If our stories turn you off, with all due respect, I implore you to f*#k off.