I figured that would get y’all’s attention, but I assure you this is a clean and family-friendly post. It does have its serious moments, though. For the past few weeks, I’ve been cogitating about the idea of “bodily autonomy”: the idea that your body is your own, and that you are the ultimate decider of what you do or do not do with it. Personally, I’m all-in with bodily autonomy. If I’m not the one in charge of my body, please tell me who or what my body belongs to and I will kindly buy it back from its enslaved state of being. Also, I think whoever owns my body needs to pay the bills for its care and feeding, and for the mortgage on where it dwells. Seriously, I am quite certain the only “owner” of my body is me.
It was while contemplating bodily autonomy this afternoon that I remembered one of the many times I got sent to the principal at dear old Delta High School, and it had to do with my breasts. Let me say this at the outset: in my entire DHS career, I never got sent to the principal for doing anything even vaguely considered wrong—except maybe for the time I mooned a trucker while on the volleyball team bus, on our way home from Grand County. I got invited to the principal’s office somewhat regularly because I was simply—but constantly—outspoken about the issues of the times, and my ideas didn’t always sit well with the powers-that-be. I think I made certain people uncomfortable by giving them something to think about. (Story of my life.)
Anyhoo… Back to the breasticles tale. At the time I attended DHS, grades 1-6 were in Delta Elementary and grades 7-12 were in the high school. My cups started to overfloweth beginning in the 5th grade, so by the time my chest and I walked through the DHS doors and into the 7th grade, I was—as Mom would say—”quite busty.” It wasn’t so bad in 5th and 6th grade, probably because some of the guys my age had seen me punch a kid in the face on the playground one day in 5th grade when—I’ll say it this way—he encroached upon my body’s personal space. By the time the kid and I were finished slugging it out, I had him pinned up against the side of the school. I was even wearing a dress at the time! Our fists flew until the playground monitor dragged me away. The guys my age knew I could handle myself. But the older guys in DHS were a whole different experience for me. I learned quickly that the testosterone runs amok in high school boys, if you know what I mean.
The result of the older boys’ hormones included a near-daily regimen of bra-snapping. I saw it happened to other girls, too. It happened in class. It happened in the halls. It happened in the gym at sports events. Bra-snapping occurred in the auditorium and lunch room. Adults were usually around and seemed to see no problem with the practice. I am here to tell you: it was never fun to have my bra snapped or undone. It was never fun to be groped in the process. But from what I could tell, it was a fact of high school life. It was a constant reminder that puberty had somehow magically made my body accessible to boys in this way. They seemed to have permission to do these things. Nobody tried to stop it. It was a daily reminder that my community thought it was perfectly normal for my body to be touched in a sexualized way by someone else, whether or not I invited that touch. I learned my body was not completely mine, but was meant to be used in certain ways by whatever guy on his demand, even in public. Indeed, whenever the bra got snapped, laughter filled the area. Some male teachers laughed too. It never seemed to get boring to the guys who did it. It was like they had just then thought it up and did it for the first time. Every time.
The messages girls are sent through our tolerating this kind of unwanted behavior is not innocent. The more it happened, the less I felt like I could say anything about it. Every bra-snap, every grope, every time someone undid my bra—each unwanted touch took a tiny piece of me away. And when it happens so many times, the smallest of things can add up to something monolithic. That’s how it works. Just because an occurrence seems minor, it doesn’t mean it’s okay. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to un-learn the idea that you are not your own. I am 58, and I still have to remind myself it is not my job to make everybody else happy, at the expense of my own happiness. This idea extends to my body.
So here’s the story I’ve been leading up to telling. One day in my 9th grade year, I was walking down the hall to class. You can guess what happened. SNAP! It happened once, and I girded up my loins and calmly walked on. Then it almost immediately happened a second time. Yup, a second guy snapped my bra when I was about 10 feet past the first bra-snapper. That was it! This had gone on for over two years, and I had had enough! I had reached my limit, and then some. I threw down my books and stood silently in the middle of the hall, amidst a bunch of older students. I pulled both arms inside the sleeves of the t-shirt I was wearing. Whereupon, I unhooked my bra and I wriggled out of it. I did the Bra’s-Coming-Off-Right-Now-Squirm that bosomy women especially know how to do with such finesse. I stuck my arms back out my sleeves and reached down my shirt to yank my bra out the collar of my shirt. I threw the bra on the floor of the hall, picked up my books, and went wherever I had been going. There was silence as I walked away. When I turned a corner into another hall, the laughter began. I did not care one bit. Note that Delta is a small town, so I had known these guys and their families all my life. I considered most of them friends and still do. They clearly saw nothing wrong with what they did, which means they literally did not pay attention to my expression or hear my words whenever they behaved this way. To them, I wasn’t the point, or a person—but an object. I learned a lesson from that, too, as all girls do to some extent from the accumulation of all these tiny infringements: how a guy’s actions made me feel did not matter as much as what a guy wants to do to a girl to show-off for his friends—to get a laugh and an “attaboy” at a girl’s expense.
Fast forward 20 minutes to the loudspeaker calling me from class to the principal’s office. My bra was sitting on the principal’s desk when I walked in. He left his office to give me privacy in which to put it back on. And then, when he came back in, I got read the riot act, albeit only half-heartedly. He understood what I was about, for the most part. A phone call to Mom ensued, during which she told the principal she thought I was completely in the right to make my point in a dramatic way. She also said that if I was ever touched again, she would bring the ladies from her book club to DHS to patrol the halls to ensure girls could walk the halls in safety. The principal did not disagree that the bra-snapping was inappropriate and needed to end. In fact, he usually agreed with my take on things, but he also usually felt compelled to punish me for my unorthodox methods to make my points. I was then written-up for my “disruptive and inappropriate behavior.” I’m sure the write-up still sits somewhere in the file that is my permanent record. Of course, no bra-snappers were talked to or disciplined in any way. I can remember saying, as I left his office, “I’m not the problem. You need to be having a talk with the fine gentlemen in this school.” He replied, “You’re right.” But no such meeting ever happened. This simplest definition of feminism, shown here on my t-shirt, apparently hadn’t reached Delta yet in 1979: feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
My bras continued to be snapped for the duration of my high school days, but it happened significantly less often after my silent striptease meltdown in the hall. The killer irony for me was when I went to church the Sunday after I had met with the principal, the second dude who snapped my bra in the hall the day I’d had enough was the one who passed the Sacrament to my row. I’m not going to lie: I felt sick to my stomach. ⛪️