The Bowdoin Orient

When I was around nine, my mom bought me “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls,” a middle school staple sold by the American Girl Doll Store. There are jauntily-drawn girls of different sizes and ethnicities—I gave each girl a name, written neatly in pencil below the first illustration of her, and followed them through the book as they experienced pimples, bra-buying and first periods. Puberty was a fun new novel, every girl a character with her own story.

In real life, puberty is more of a mish-mash of inexplicable feelings, chocolate cravings and re-learning the topography of a map you thought you mastered at age three: your body.

I posed nude for the Women’s Resource Center (WRC) “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies” photo shoot my first year. I was a little nervous about the idea of exposing myself, but I was excited to bond with my friend and to memorialize my body at age 18. Sophomore year, my roommate and I posed together in just our socks for a friend who was taking a photo class. I participated in this year’s WRC photo shoot as well, with my current roommates, and then we went to Moulton and made omelettes.

The first time I remember being sexually harassed by a stranger, I was 13. By a friend, 11. Most recently, on the streets of a new city I was struggling to make my own. Sexual harassment—unwanted sexual conduct, unwelcome comments, undesired approaches: an indictment of body and soul that leaves an aching kind of fear and makes you wish you were invisible.

My body has a secret: it doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do as a structure of bones and a system of veins. On some microscopic level, cells are attacking other cells and on the outside I am tired and everything hurts. This is living with chronic illness.

Bodies are confusing. Our relationships with them, as individuals and as groups, are complicated. Bodies like mine (white, cis-gendered, female) are in turn privileged, protected and possessed by society. Part of understanding your body as an adult is learning what status it occupies: no matter how people protest that outsides don’t matter, physical forms continue to dictate social and cultural norms. Another part of being an adult is refusing to perpetuate those norms: we are all responsible to say that no body is worth more than another, no body is more worthy of admiration or safety.

When I was nine, bodies were illustrations rollerblading across the page to a section about armpit hair. Two years later, I first learned your body can be mistreated even when you least expect it. Four years after that, I was diagnosed with an illness that I still struggle to spell (Ankylosing spondylitis—so many dubious vowels!). Today, as I continue to learn what it means to be a body in this world, it is important to me to be aware of myself and of others, to be supportive of and supported by women through our convergent and divergent experiences.

I was overwhelmed by the positive, strong energy of the photo shoot this year. I love the photos of myself, my friends and all the other women who participate. There, frozen in a space that was given to us to do with what we want (and that is so many things,—statements are made and fun is had and true selves are shown), I find myself, for a moment, a girl in the American Girl Doll book. The bodies in the pictures are just bodies, being the way that they are, being the way that they want to be. They’re two-dimensional, a collection of pixels on a page—finally untouchable. For me, underneath the statements of self-love and female empowerment and friendship, the underlying message reads: I’m here. Look or don’t look, judge or celebrate, feel uncomfortable or feel empowered by what you see—we’ll still be here.