Let’s Talk About Tits
I remember when I was working at a genetics lab at Harvard I had to walk home down a busy Boston street every evening after work. There was a man always on the street corner near the lab, where I couldn’t avoid. ‘Nice tits’. He’d say.
Day after day. Without fail. “Nice tits, lady”. Every day for about six months.
I’d finish up at the lab, mentally fried, and walk home past the drunk man who shouted at me, ‘Nice tits!’ I braced for it every evening. The slight little assault. I’d walk past and breathe a sigh of relief and shake it off, feeling disgusted.
I remember a few years later when I was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. I went there to teach chemistry and biology. I remember learning to speak Swahili and translating chemistry lessons into Swahili for a room full of 70 teenage boys. After the lesson, boys would shout from the back, ‘Nice tits, madam’.
I appreciated they said madam, I suppose.
There’s a certain agony in accomplishing things as a woman and being reduced to your body parts. I felt from a young age with a thin frame and large breasts that they were public property. That it was ‘normal’ to be subjected to a gaze which objectified and sexualised my vessel. There was no escape. You can’t escape your body, even if the soul within longs to.
