My Body
Article and graphic by Abigail Campbell
I don’t remember the first time I looked in the mirror and noticed my body was changing. I do, however, remember the way it felt to have my mom point a finger at my twelve year old body under an oversized Hartwell Soccer tee shirt and say, “you’ll need to start wearing a bra to school – and deodorant.”
Though harsh, my mom wasn’t being unreasonable. I was an early developer. By the time I was thirteen, I was wearing C-cup bras. By the time I was in high school, I was already a D-cup. My body matured at an alarming pace while my head, still filled with the kind of wonder a 14 year old should have, stayed behind. I didn’t know what to do when the boys at school started picking me out of the crowd or whispering to their friends about me. The clothes that I wore weren’t provocative for any of my flatter-chested friends, but when I wore them, people stared and teachers pulled me aside to quietly gesture for me to pull my shirt up. Slowly but definitely, I learned that the only version of my body that was allowed around other people was the version that was hoisted up, tucked away, and covered by layers of fabric.
I might look back at my high school self and call her naïve, but I would be wrong. Before the age of 18, sexualizing a body is begging for a mind to be skewed and provoked. There was never anything provocative about my body, but there was something provocative about the way people stared at my body. In the Fall of my sophomore year of high school, I was harassed and sexually assaulted for what would be the first of many times in my life. Maybe it was because of what I was wearing that a boy I went to high school with slipped me substances and manipulated me into his basement with him, or maybe my body was begging for it beneath the modest clothes my mom would buy me. Either way, it didn’t matter. I woke up naked and alone on his basement couch being nudged and pushed by his mother standing over me with a towel, sat outside on the curb by his house, and called my dad to come pick me up. I didn’t say anything on the car ride home.
For two years following the assault, I blamed myself. I shouldn’t have been there, I shouldn’t have given him the impression I wanted to be there, I shouldn’t have taken a drink from someone I don’t know well. The excuses were endless and I’ve never been the kind of person to place blame on others. My head filled with fog and the fog bled into every part of my life. I was barely functioning in school, barely motivated to go to sports, and I became jumpy and skittish around my friends. I didn’t want to meet new people, so I gained a reputation for being a bitch. I didn’t want to mess around with boys who called themselves cool anymore because I knew what cool really meant, so I dated the boys who were nice to me and less popular. At least if they oversexualized my body, they were going to ask for consent first.
Somehow, despite spending most of class time staring out the window, I got into college. It was my first time away from home and suddenly, I was liberated. Priorities seemed different at university. People were asking me about my major, my aspirations, my interests – everything I always wanted to be seen for, but never felt I was. My intellectual freedom quickly seeped into my wardrobe. I soon started dressing how I wanted to regardless of the way it made my body look. I was comfortable, and for once, that was all that mattered. Then, I saw it for the first time. A girl walked into one of my lectures with a loose top on shamelessly showing her nipples through the fabric. I was awe-struck at the idea of not wearing a bra in public.
That night, I went back to my dorm and stripped off my ill-fitting bra. I stared at my half-dressed body in the mirror for what felt like hours posing and hoisting my boobs around to make them seem smaller. The red outline of the bra where the fabric and wire dug into my skin every day for the last seven years of my life slowly faded away as I inspected the flesh around my chest. Nothing about my body seemed especially sexual to me. There were more curves than my friends had on their bodies. My nipples weren’t perky in the same way the women in the magazines were. Still, I felt motivated to explore this new kind of comfort. The possibility of stripping the bounds of a wire cage around my chest for the rest of my life was too tempting not to try. That night, when my boyfriend came over to watch a movie, I wore nothing but a tank top and a cardigan sweater. My cleavage laid flat and natural in the way only I knew and I held my forearms up to cover the bottom of my chest where my nipples poked through the fabric. When I opened my dorm door, my boyfriend looked me up and down and scoffed. “No bra, huh? Brave.”
I knew that by “brave,” my boyfriend really meant this kind of female-body liberation wasn’t for my kind of female-body, and that was enough to stomp my encouragement. I finished college without another boob-liberation, but after graduation, I slowly started to ease my grip on confining my body. I gained significant weight and couldn’t hide under baggy clothes anymore. When my ex-boyfriend and I broke up, I lost the weight I gained, but in the process, I started dating again. It was the first time in almost five years that I was on a dating app, and the first time I was on a dating app was for a joke at a party. I scrolled through photos of myself on my camera roll scanning for an image that accurately portrayed my body. I knew what people were on dating apps for, and I thought at the time that big boobs like mine could be a deal breaker. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone rolling up to a blind date and turning around because they saw how busty I was and decided I wasn’t their type, but I couldn’t find any photos. For so long, I had hidden my body from cameras in the most thoughtful way. It was as if even I couldn’t handle looking at my body in its entirety. I realized that I hadn’t even looked in a mirror while I was naked in years. The thought of doing it made me shudder.
The first boy I matched with on my dating app was a boy I knew from a French class I took at college. He was a safe bet because I knew he knew what I looked like, which meant he already knew I had big boobs. I didn’t have to give him a disclaimer – he opened the floodgates to the way he fetishized girls with big boobs without much convincing. It made me uncomfortable but I figured he was the only guy who would not only be accepting but excited about my body. I agreed to go over to his house for a date. When I got there, we made small-talk for a while. I wasn’t interested in just sex; I wanted to at least know who I was getting in bed with. After a few minutes of talking, he dropped the bomb that he knew a girl from my high school.
“Delaney, you know her?”
“Yeah, she was in one of my classes.”
“Oh cool, she’s my best friend. I actually told her I was going on a date with you.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Yeah, she said you were known for something at the school.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she laughed when I told her it was you.”
“Wait, why?”
“She said you were known as the girl with the tits.”
I felt the chills before my face changed expression. I laughed it off and let him kiss me at the end of the night. We didn’t hang out again, though he really tried to. It made me sick to my stomach that he so obtusely let the words slip out of his mouth. It made me even sicker to my stomach to know that he had gleaned the information from a girl I went to school with. I thought about all the times in high school that classmates made comments about my boobs. I thought about the time my best friend ushered me around drama club to ask everyone if mine were the biggest boobs they’d ever seen, or the time my assaulter lined up three freshman boys to touch my chest without my consent with the rationale that if they were going to touch boobs for the first time, they might as well be Abbey’s giant ones. I thought about all the ways I subconsciously taught myself to hate those comments, thus teaching myself to hate the parts of my body that provoked those comments. I thought about all of the times I sat in the bathroom huddled over my body, stomach rolls perching up my oversized chest, and held scissors to my skin wishing that I could cut off the excess like you might cut around a craft ornament in elementary school. I thought about all of the times I stopped a boy from taking off my bra in hopes that I might not crack the illusion of perfect, big, perky boobs on my chest. I thought about how much I hated my body, and those thoughts gnawed at me fresher than they ever had before.
Over the last year since I went on that putrid date, I’ve worked on my mental health and physical health more than I have in my entire life. As a product of that work, I’ve learned to no longer pick apart my body, but I still have my moments. During a very manic day a few weeks ago, I researched and planned out how I could get myself a free breast-reduction through surgery, only to promptly snap back to reality when I remembered my fear of hospitals. I still continue to struggle with my own body image, only now, the only opinions I listen to are my own. After telling myself that nobody’s opinion matters but my own systematically and religiously for almost a year, I’ve nestled into the truth that my opinion really is the only one that matters.
Throughout my life, I have experienced both sides of the coin. I’ve experienced hatred and slut-shaming for the size of my boobs, I have been over sexualized for my boobs, I have been assaulted for my boobs, I have been harassed for my boobs, and I have abused my own self for my boobs. But for what? All of this hatred for a part of my body that is not only natural, but entirely uncontrollable. I realized that it isn’t only cruel to let these opinions and words influence me, but it’s downright stupid. I’ve hidden from my reflection for almost my entire teen and adult life just because I couldn’t decide if I agreed with those who liked my body or those who hated my body. Then I realized, it doesn’t matter if I like or hate my body; what matters is if I accept my body.
For the first time in my life, I stood in the mirror and, without posing, I stared at my bare reflection. I didn’t poke, I didn’t prod, and I didn’t judge. I looked myself up and down, and to my surprise, all I saw was the body of a pale girl who has never wanted anything but love, and oh boy, do I love her.
