This essay is for a class this semester and after sharing it with a few close friends, and confiding my hesitancy to submit it to my teacher, they urged me to submit it. I have not even had it graded yet, but it quickly grew from just over 500 words to over 1,000. I was told this was important and relevant. So here it is. (I will edit it after I receive feedback from the teacher)
“That’s too tight, everyone will be able to see your figure” they told me. Teenage years, for girls, are a time for experimenting with how you look and figuring out who you want to be as a woman, but not in my family. It is not easy being a teenage girl, especially in a high control religious family. From the moment puberty began to reshape my body my mother and father began to “freak out.” The fashion du jour when I was a teen, was small fitted tee shirts and fitted, flared jeans, often with some part of the midriff exposed. Had caftans and muumuus been fashionable my mother would have been elated. My parents told us who we were going to be, experimentation with fashion looks was unnecessary. The more skin covered, and the looser fitting the clothing, the better.
Feminine clothing was met with the worst kind of scrutiny in my home and yet I was required to wear it to religious services three days a week. Despite how strict my mother was when we shopped for clothing, she would still walk up to me in public and either pull the front of my blouse up because she had caught a glimpse of my cleavage, or pull the hem of my shirt down because a sliver of my midriff had exposed itself. Even as I leaned over in my seat to pick up a book at a religious meeting, her sharp fingers would grab the back of my shirt and yank it down as it would separate from my skirt. All this was accompanied with some sort of comment about not being modest enough that was heard by everyone nearby. It was embarrassing. I was already wearing pre-approved clothing, I was trying, and it was still not good enough. It was so frustrating that I took it upon myself to do my own laundry by age twelve to prevent her from shrinking my shirts that she would carelessly throw in the dryer.
Taking this all in, you can imagine my shock (and my mother’s horror) when my Principal made me change my shirt the first day of high school for being “immodest”. My mother was mad, but for a change it was not at me. She was mad at my male Principal. She had already criticized my clothing before we left, and her standards were the absolute pinnacle of modesty. For this man to think otherwise was an outrage. I began to wear baggier jeans and large tee shirts after that. By sophomore year of high school all my clothing looked more like what a boy would wear. No one ever asked boys to change clothing for being too alluring, so why not dress like them? I wore little to no feminine clothing outside church and shopped for flannel shirts and tee-shirts in the men’s department at thrift stores. I was hiding my body from critical eyes. My gender identity was not in crisis. My sexuality was not in crisis. My self-esteem was in crisis. To acquire and wear pretty clothes was to run a complex, maze-like gauntlet and I no longer had the energy for it.
The irony in all this was that my younger sister could wear almost whatever she wanted. She was slender and athletic and had no cleavage to speak of. I remember one shopping trip with my mom, I was about seventeen at the time. I saw a shirt I wanted so badly. It was black lace over red fabric. She refused to buy it, she told me it was much too tight and low cut. I promised I would wear another shirt under it to cover more skin, it was to no avail. So, imagine my surprise when she and my sister came home a few days later, and she had bought that exact shirt for her!
I asked, “Didn’t you say this top was too low cut? Why she can wear it, but I can’t?”.
“Because she doesn’t have cleavage like you do, so it’s not immodest on her” was the reply. That was her puritanical logic. A double standard for different body types. My body was immodest and could provoke impure thoughts, so it needed to be shrouded in mysterious flowing layers of fabric from my collar bone to my calves. Exceptions were made for my sister. It was this moment that taught me that it was not just the clothing that was the problem, it was my body. My developing brain registered this as: if I had a different body, I could wear the clothes I liked.
There I was with these genes I had inherited, chosen for me by nature. I had no control over where my body chose to store fat tissue and I was sexualized and scrutinized, very nearly punished for it by the very people who gave me those genes. Despite being assured I was attractive; I was supposed to hide that like it was a bad thing. Males would like it and they would look at me. I was expected to be vigilant; I was responsible for their thoughts and it was up to me as the owner of Jessica Rabbit breasts to deter them or be met with the disapproval of God. One day you are a little girl playing with dolls and then a summer passes and you have become a lusty temptress that needs to be contained before you lure young men to their doom like a Siren.
The anxiety and body dysmorphia this attitude created is still very real some twenty years later, and to this day if I were offered breast reduction surgery I would do it. From the moment I moved out I have been in a constant state of rebellion and experimentation with how I look, making declarations of bodily autonomy whenever I could. What do my tattoos mean? That my parents are not the boss of me anymore. Whenever I see a news article about a young woman in her teenage years being vilified for her attire or her body my heart breaks. We just want to feel pretty while our bodies change (which is weird enough), and it is harder to embrace those changes or feel normal if we are made to feel self-conscience or ashamed about them. Oh, and that black and red lace shirt? My sister gave it to me when she moved out. An illness had caused me to loose thirty pounds at the time and I would secretly wear it out whenever I could and I didn’t care who stared at me because I finally felt pretty.
