objectification

When I was 16 years old I took a hostess job at a breastaurant — one of those chain restaurants, like Hooters, known for large-breasted servers.

It’s like being a deer in the headlights. You’re in imminent danger. You know it. But you can’t move. You can’t speak. No reaction whatsoever. You just stand or sit there, frozen in time, waiting for the crash.

Many criticize Geordie Shore as entertainment in its lowest form: fights, drinking, people falling over, nudity, swearing, and “bucking” (sexual intercourse). Yet, to me, it is so much more than that. As a fully qualified human woman, I can’t help myself analyzing the show through feminist-tinted glasses. The decisions and attitudes of the “family” represent, to me, a new kind of feminism.

In my sickest moments, supposedly in the safe hands of health care professionals, I have had a chiro compare helping me undress to ‘unwrapping a gift’; a physio make sexual innuendos about the stockings I had to slip out of for treatment. Again, despite the shame, I remained polite, paying the receptionist for a transaction that left me sick to the core.

I decided to spend a few hours running errands in the summer sunshine while audaciously wearing a loose-fitting baby doll dress, comfy flats, and a denim vest. Apparently my need to keep my legs ventilated served as a Bat-Signal to the fine men of Gotham, who were drawn by its golden glow to yell stuff at me every five minutes.

I felt unique in my passion for martial arts, my affinity for Call of Duty, my go-with-the-flow attitude toward boyish adventures. I wanted to be “one of the guys,” while still retaining the distinction of my sexuality. I longed to be the quintessential cool girl — desirable yet approachable. But in retrospect, all that really amounted to internalized misogyny.

As a curvaceous 27-year-old who developed early, I was constantly reprimanded for my selection in attire. Whether I was complimented by strangers or nagged by loved ones, one thing was made certain: my well-endowed "assets" caught both positive and negative attention, even when it was out of my control.

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