Thank you

...for making me hate myself. I'll admit it: when I was a teen, I used to wish I had big boobs. My Barbie had had them, my best friend had them, models and actresses had them, heck, even my mom had them. They were an intrinsic part of what made a girl pretty and, like any other normal teenage girl in America, I wanted that. Eventually, genes (thanks, Mom) and some late-college weight gain kicked in, and now I have them. And all I want now is to give them back! Walking up Tremont Thursday afternoon in a red A-tank and *sweatshirt* (not at all revealing thankyouverymuch), a "man" (sorry, I have trouble attributing "manliness" to this joke of a specimen) walking his tiny dog in the approaching direction slowed practically to a stop to have a conversation with my chest. I don't know what he was saying to it, I just know that my face was not involved. I'm pretty certain my chest made no reply to him, but I know for a fact that my mouth said "Fuck you." By that point (it took me a moment to get over some shock before I responded), he had moved on. As I continued up Tremont, around and down where it turns into Cambridge, I passed another man who decided to leer at my chest. As he turned his head toward my chest (not me--my chest), he slowed down in his gait, not enough as that first guy, but definitely enough to give me the creeps. He made ME feel dirty! Just for existing!!! I started wishing that I had never developed; I began fantasizing about binding my chest just so my boobs wouldn't be so *present*. More and more, I've found myself hating my body because it's bringing me unwanted attention, attention that makes me feel as if perhaps I'm the dirty one, not these sick perverts I keep encountering on the street. And then I realized that I shouldn't hate what God and nature gave me. I shouldn't hate my body: it's part of who I am, whether I like it or not...or whether these perverts want to make me somehow ashamed of it or not. It's a difficult task to reverse an attitude that's slowly been ingrained in me for years and years. In the meantime, I hope I'm quicker to tell these jerks to "fuck off!" -robyn