Nobody wants to be colonized

My brain has been chewing on this subject for a while now--maybe even years subconsciously. So maybe it's time to write about it. This is another one of those "perhaps I shouldn't publish these particular thoughts" kind of topics. But, heck, what good is totally obscurity if you can't ramble on the internet about the stuff that bugs you?

A story. I had my first period when I was 13, at the beginning of eighth grade. I'm pretty sure I just lost at least half of my audience with that sentence, so to the three of you that are left--thanks for hanging in there with me. Anyway, the very first day of my very first period in eighth grade, I was walking to class in an utterly suffocating hallway when out of the chaos of teenaged limbs, some idiot grabbed my ass and gave it a serious squeeze. I have no idea who it was, and honestly, it wasn't the first time some stranger had inappropriately accessed my hindquarters. (Sidenote: to those of you who are thinking how awful it is that thirteen year old girls get treated this way by strangers-um, yeah. No kidding. And my experience is on the way, way, way mild end of the violations suffered by women. Sometimes little girls.) It wasn't an accident--not someone just brushing by that I interpreted wrongly; some stranger grabbed my butt.

That's never fun, but on this particular day it was doubly painful. My life had very recently changed--my body had changed and I was barely beginning to adjust to those changes and adapt to my new reality. Now, in addition to the humiliation of having someone take uninvited liberties with my body, I was consumed by fears of what I was doing wrong. Had I leaked? Had my maxi pad shifted in some visible and shameful way? Did he somehow know that I was on the rag, and this was my punishment for becoming a woman?

Because in my experience, women get punished for being women. We are punished for having women's bodies. I don't want anyone to misunderstand. This post--this complaint, I guess you could call it--is not a girls versus boys thing. I don't think men are to blame, or women, or really any individual or group. We just have this long history of devaluing women, specifically women's bodies, and it's so deeply embedded and subconscious that few of us escape it very well. And it hurts us--both men and women--when we systemically violate the sanctity of a human body simply because it has two x chromosomes.

It's not just the physical violations, either. It's been the psychological attacks on my female body that have done the most damage over the years. Women have a hard time winning--either you are too pretty, wherein your flesh becomes an object of desire, gratification or envy, or you are not pretty enough and yours is an object of derision and shame. Either way, you are not a person anymore--you are just an object.

I'm on the not pretty enough end of the bargain. I've struggled with my weight all my life, and I imagine that battle will not end until I lay this mortal by. I'm always the fat friend--the smart, nice girl who everyone thinks would make a great wife--for someone else. That's okay. Those are issues of my own making, admittedly (though not made in a vaccuum), but here's what drives me crazy, and what I think (I hope) is cogent to this particular subject. A few years ago I got serious about my health, and I lost a lot of weight. People, both men and women, started looking at me differently. Friends, family, people with whom I have close, loving relationships, praised me and I appreciated their praise. Casual acquaintances and even strangers also made comments, ones that I believe they meant to be kind, and I tried to accept with all the grace I could muster, but they weren't really kind. Here's the difference. The acquaintances and the strangers were simply judging my flesh. They don't know me, they don't know any part of me beneath what they see. And what they see should not be fodder for comment or judgement. My family and friends, the people who know me, when they would complement me, it wasn't just about how I looked--how they judged my body. They knew how I worked, how I strived, how I changed not just my flesh, but my mind and my spirit, to accomplish my goals. They were not planting their flag in my flesh. They weren't colonizing; they were celebrating my independence.

At Christmastime, I saw someone who has known me for many years--since we were children. We see each other maybe every few years, and it had been several since he saw me. He hardly recognized me. He couldn't stop going on and on about how much I had changed. About 15 years ago, he used to come in to the place I worked. It was my first real job out of high school--I was eighteen. And he could not believe that I was the same person as that pudgy teenager from way back when. I smiled, accepted the congratulations on my weight loss (isn't there a statute of limitations on that kind of thing--good lord, it's been years!), but fumed inwardly. Because honestly--the way my body has changed in the last fifteen years is nobody's business. The way it changes in the next fifteen or thirty or 50, well that's nobody's business either. This body is sovereign territory, and the ruling party does not take kindly to uninvited interference.

See, the thing is, my body is grand. It can create, and love and rage and think. It can sing and dance (awkwardly, admittedly)and climb. It astonishes me the more I get to know it, how glorious a thing this bag of bones and muscles and fat and blood and nerves is. Anytime some casual gaze falls upon it, or some horny adolescent of any age grabs it, physically or psychologically, it makes it a little harder for me to honor it the way it deserves. Why, in a world that is hard enough the moment we enter it, do we feel the need to make it any harder for someone else?

So, my suggestion is we stop gazing, grabbing and colonizing women's bodies--including the women who make their living on runways, ad campaigns and screens. They might not be above it, but we can be. I'm not suggesting we ignore beauty--go on and admire your wife's backside along with her wit--but leave Kate Winslet's alone.

I'm not entirely sure I'm right about any of this, or even that what I've written is an accurate reflection of what I think and feel. I'm still working out what I think and feel on this one. I'm also curious about other's experiences, especially men. I wonder a great deal if there is some analogous male experience--some way they feel colonized. So dear readers, if any of you made it to the end of this post (poor things...) please comment. But be nice. You can disagree, but try not to hurt anyone's feelings.

By the way, the irony of this post, when read in concert with the previous post about the differences between objectively and subjectively handsome men, does not escape me. I didn't say I was perfect! I just said everyone else should be! Ha ha ha....