The boys in my grade five class were more hungry and horny than most.
At recess, they’d describe, in detail, their online porn discoveries, choking through laughter and red faces. We’d crowd around them, pretending to be revolted by their graphic, shrewd storytelling. Asking delicate questions as to not seem too interested, and yet not too uncomfortable.
I knew better than to participate, vocally, in the daily conversation about sex and where to find it online. When boys are young and horny and loud they are boys. When girls are young and horny and curious they are sluts.
“Those 1991s,” our teachers and parents would say. “They’re a bad class, a bad group.”
I wasn’t a bad kid though; I did ballet and acted in TV shows, and loved writing short stories about pet shop owners that doubled as murder mystery detectives. But I was trapped in a vessel that I hated, one that prevented me from garnering some of that attention the boys so frivolously gave out to everyone but me.
Grade five was coincidentally the same year that all of my girl friends began to shop at stores like Off the Wall and Bootlegger, filling out small adult jeans and v-neck tees and with the kind of curves and shapes that the boys liked to see so much online. Smacking glittery peach Bonnie Bell lip gloss onto their lips, the corners of their mouth chapped by orthodontics and well…Bonnie Bell. They were like the girls you see on MuchMusic, walking the halls of our suburban elementary school with an authority that only a girl in the thick of puberty can command.
I still shopped at La Senza Girl and would until high school. Emphasis on the Girl. I had a favourite piece: a lime green tank top with glittery clear straps. One winter, I wore it under my snow jacket, taking it off slowly as we hung up our coats in the classroom cubby, waiting patiently for Tanner or Devon or Brad to notice, that no matter the weather, I was ready to show some skin. I didn’t have curves, but I had guts. I had guts and I had a metallic lip stick from my mom’s makeup kit and this tank top with glitter-fucking-straps. I felt like I was a backup dancer in a Britney video.
But that tank top–that day and everyday for the rest of the school year–failed me. I was ten years old with the tiny delicate frame of a terribly pale fairy nymph, and my classmates made sure I didn’t forget it.
“I could ride my skateboard over your chest!”
I began a relationship with my body that year. I began, like every girl does at some point in her life, wishing I looked different. But most importantly I wished for boobs. I wished for boobs more than anything.
I wished to be Christina Aguilera, as photographed on the album cover of “Dirty.”
The afternoons when my mom went to do errands, leaving me to watch my little brother, I’d wait for the house to shake and thud as the garage door closed. My time alone was entirely consumed by operation let’s see what I’d look like with breasts. Locking myself in the family bathroom, balling up tissues just like in the movies, placing it just over the top of my nipples, wondering if my life would improve if I had some boobs already. A real 13 Going on 30 moment.
My body has always been my currency. At ten years old, in my mind, my lack of breasts meant I had no value. Everything would be better when I had boobs. I would have boys passing me notes during social studies, asking me to the community centre dance. I could wear v-neck t-shirts from Off The Wall that revealed a delicious line of cleavage. I could whisper to the girl next to me in class, asking if she had a tampon.
Narrator: Brittany would not get her period until the middle of 12th grade.
When I felt my nipples swell and become tender, around the age of 12, I asked my mom to inspect. I wondered, if maybe, moms had all the answers for boobs. “I think they’re coming in!” she announced, singing sweet, sweet music to my ears. So, we went to the mall and got a pale pink AAA bra from La Senza Girl for my swollen nipples—I didn’t care that it gaped, I was getting boobs, baby!
Narrator: Brittany’s breasts wouldn’t come in for many years.
The rollercoaster of this relationship, the one between me and my breasts would take many turns. I eventually would return from ballet school, a few weeks shy of grade 12, with a full set of c-cup breasts, grown that summer.
And my value skyrocketed.
I stepped off the plane from a summer in Philadelphia with a real big set of tits, perched firmly on my 95 pound tight and toned body. And it was glorious. These new things were my everything, my golden ticket, the pride and joy I had waited my whole little life for.
My final year of high school revolved one hundred per cent around my boobs.
My girl friends rejoiced on my behalf, asking to see them, marvelling at my new wardrobe, my new bras, the literal bounce in my step. My boy friends gawked and chortled, and made gross, sexualized comments as suburban white boys do, and I loved every damn second of it. I had waited 17 years for this, and I wanted the horny comments to keep on coming and never, ever stop.
We don’t need to get into the psychology of boys and breasts and our cultural obsession with curvy women (but only when their overall physique meets societal standards) because we know all of this. And I think, at the time, a part of me knew this too. It wasn’t about my body being a part of a larger, more important conversation because the thing about self-loathing is that it’s a terribly narcissistic condition that applies blinders to a lot of critical thinking.
I would not grow into my feminism for a few years yet, and at 17 all I wanted was for everyone to notice that I had blossomed.
And notice they did. In grade 12 I had a boyfriend who loved to call me “jugs.” Preferably at an obnoxious volume and in public. But it wasn’t just the boys who got a kick out of my new frame. That same year my female Geography teacher, a beloved instructor who had the respect and friendship of many students, mocked my body during class while handing out our graduation photos.
“Do we think these things are fake?” she asked the class, holding up my glossy package of Artonas. I laughed, loudly—a defense mechanism that I still do when I am put in an uncomfortable position and subsequently blackout from embarrassment.
“I don’t think your parents are going to want this one on the wall.”
But before my beloved breasts came in I was between the ages of 11 and 12 when I began to realize that I didn’t always need to have boobs to get a boy’s private attention, I just needed to be willing to discover. My pre-teen horniness and internalized body shame worked in tandem. My childhood crush and I would kiss in his tree house, making up code words for french-kissing and over-the-pants-stuff. We took turns learning new things about our bodies, about how they functioned, about what each part did when you pressed a new button.
It’s both tender and uncomfortable to look back on that memory. My curiosity was genuine; I liked what I was doing and I wanted to do it more, but the courage to put that curiosity into motion, in a treehouse of all places, came from a desperate place to feel worthy of prepubescent sexualization and to fulfill, what I thought, was something that would only happen to girls that looked like Jessica Alba in Honey.
This discovery, my power as a person with a vagina (and no breasts, and then a lot of breasts), would steer the ship of my late teens and early 20s until my body morphed, and expanded and bubbled and became an entirely new physical person. Sometimes I used my power to soothe and massage my own needs, and sometimes the power worked against me and the attention I garnered became increasingly aggressive and uncomfortable and oftentimes, terrifying.
Almost 15 years after my lime-green-tank-AAA-cup-bra days, my body betrayed me in a whole new way. Well, actually, the patriarchy did but I wouldn’t grapple with that concept for a few more years yet.
To be a small woman walking through the world with E cup breasts (they continued to give me exactly what I had wished for), sends a message to men that you are free for the taking, a target for harassment and sexual violence.
And don’t get me started on the the unnerving gap between buttons on a blouse.
I am not a particularly spiritual person, but I have an uncanny ability to manifest my deepest desires. These manifestations are everything from a private office for my start-up to a Bonnie Bell gift basket at my brother’s karate club Christmas party, circa 2002. The power and gravitas of my vanity and manifestation and devastatingly late puberty spell gave me exactly what I wanted until it didn’t.
Until I wished that I had been a lot more careful about what I wished for. Until I realized that my value had not increased with my literal inflation. My value, of course, had nothing to do with the tits I begged the universe for.
Before I became a functioning, feminist adult, comfortable and knowledgeable of her sexuality, I used my newfound body to assuage my feelings of nothingness and worthlessness. At 29, I have begun cataloguing the ways in which I view my body, how my childhood obsession with breasts contributed to my own internalized misogyny and fat phobia, and relationship to sex.
Although, I still have a sexual appetite that is insatiable. Sex for me, in some ways, is an act, a gesture, a meditative moment that brings me deep validation that my value extends beyond my body dysmorphia. It is my opportunity to indulge without guilt. To engage with my primal self and allow my needs to be met without shame. There is no hangover from self-medicating with orgasm. At least for me. Even during a time when my sexual partners were aplenty, I rarely felt sheepish about it; I got what I came for, and left the rest.
It’s true that as cis-women our bodies are inextricably linked to what we have to offer, sexually, to the male gaze. I embodied that when I was stuffing my bra, and longing for puberty, puckering my lips in the mirror to emulate pop stars, but the lesson came barreling into my life and my therapy sessions many years later.
The reclamation of my body can be dysphoric. Historically, societally, politically, our bodies as women are built for the consumption of others. I need to rustle within the crawl space of my self-esteem and zero-in on who I am beyond the binary confinement of my body. I’m still working on that; so far it’s a wrestling match that cannot be won. It’s a sticky process to remove the blinders, apply critical thinking and breathe new life into the purpose of this vessel.
But my boobs, after a complicated decade, are still my favourite feature. They’re robust, and round and on a good day I’ll tell you they’re perfect. Sometimes, in a gratuitous and hilarious way, I think I might still be proud of them. But maybe that’s just my glib, 10-year-old self finally getting what she always wanted.
Or, maybe, the timid pride I feel is my present 29-year-old self hanging onto something that still, privately, brings me great joy. But a joy that is not tethered to the approval of my grade five class, it’s a joy that belongs only to me.
As Patti Smith wrote:
We go through life
We shed our skins
We become ourselves
