Raised by Wolves: My Journey from Man-Cub to Devoured Woman
Like Tarzan or Mowgli or the ubiquitous tabloid baby — I was raised by wolves! — I spent my formative years among a strange people I only thought were my own.
Standing in line at the grocery store beside a cart full of food, I try to tear my eyes away from the gaunt faces staring up at me. I can’t help it, though. I look. I look at Shape and Self and People and InStyle and Cosmo and all those other magazines strategically placed in front of the checkout stand, and even inside of it. As my food…a roast chicken…a packet of cheddar cheese slices…an avocado…scrolls beneath the vulpine faces of actresses, pop-stars and supermodels, I laugh. I laugh because it never fails. There, plastered across the barely existent midriff of an impossibly attenuated model, a Giacometti bronze in a bikini, is the invective: “Love Your Body!”
I picture the editors of this magazine howling around a ruthlessly well-designed table. A gang of sadistic prison guards telling the prisoners to “Feel free!”
“Fuck you,” I whisper.
The last time I loved my body, I mean my whole body, was three decades ago. Back when I was a man.
Like Tarzan or Mowgli or the ubiquitous tabloid baby — I was raised by wolves! — I spent my formative years among a strange people I only thought were my own.
