#MeToo, page 28
I was also nine when I found out what sex was, when I was given ‘the talk’ by my nervous dad, both of us wanting to get out of the kitchen as soon as we could. It’s also the age that a family friend was walking behind me and mentioned to my dad that my legs were so long that I could be a model. I was wearing bathers at the time, walking the familiar route from the Davis’ kitchen to their pool. I know what that path looks like – can still picture the sliding door with its chocolate-brown frame, the cream bricks, pot plants lined up in rectangular iron plant boxes in the corner. This was a house I went to most weekends; these were some of the few family friends we socialised with, the majority of our non-school time being allotted to cousins and grandparents. It took seven minutes to get to the Davis place from our house and my brother and I counted down the time, a rush in the pit of my stomach as we turned onto their driveway. A visit usually meant watching Star Wars or a swim in the pool (depending on whether it was winter or summer – the only two Perth seasons). The four kids went to the same school as me and my brother and I felt comfortable there, taken care of. But in my memory of this day, the path to the pool seems dark, as if the whole house stood in the shadow of the sliding screen doors. There was something in Mr Davis’ voice that I didn’t like, an appraising sort of tone. And he was behind me, so I had to keep walking, knowing that he was staring at me, at the sight of me in my bathers. I remember burning in shame and wishing I was wearing a t-shirt that went all the way to the floor. Even now, whenever I think of this comment, I feel that same prickle on the backs of my legs, as if they’ve been doused with water, or blown on by a sudden breeze, and I still feel the intense desire to cover them.
And then there was Mr Cizek. A teacher at my school whose class I was never in, but who I knew from recess and lunchtime. Mr Cizek must have been in his early thirties when he taught at my school and it’s hard, now, to remember if I ever liked him. On one particular day, I was playing in the yard, on the hot bitumen near the wall where we played Donkey and Dodge. Mr Cizek was talking to Mrs Roberts, who was my favourite teacher even though she despaired at my messy handwriting and told me that I must have been born with a radio in my throat. Mrs Roberts was talking about me to Mr Cizek, and it was Mrs Roberts who commented on my looks, saying something about how pretty she thought I was. Mr Cizek nodded, and said something about how stunning I would be when I grew up (it seemed men were anxious for me to hurry the fuck up and get to the good stuff). He said it while looking me up and down, smiling at what he could see in the future – the figure of some woman overlaid onto the body of a girl. After that day, I noticed that he would watch me with that same smile in his eyes, and the only thing I knew was that this smile incensed me. I wanted to scratch his eyes out, wipe that stupid smirk from his face. I wanted to stop him thinking his private thoughts about me.
So I did the only thing I could. I avoided him. If Mr Cizek was patrolling the sports courts at lunch, then I went to the oval. I turned around if I saw him walking towards me. I answered his questions curtly and without smiles. And he didn’t like this.
I found out how much he didn’t like this when we were in the school church one day. I didn’t like the church, with its hard wooden seats and dead grey air, where Jesus and Mary flanked the altar with their palms upturned and a helpless, sorrowful look on their faces (they weren’t in the business of helping young children, even then). A group of us were sitting in the pews, trying to make ourselves comfortable. Mr Cizek was in front, trying to get us to pray or sing or listen.
‘Natalie!’ he shouted at me. Everyone turned to look. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘No.’ I shook my head.
‘Then can you leave what’s in your nose inside of it?’
Everyone giggled. I shifted in the already uncomfortable pew. I was humiliated by the nose picking, but I was aware of another humiliation – Mr Cizek’s. And I was aware that by calling me out so publicly, he was punishing me for avoiding him, for not smiling, for clipping all the words I had spoken to him.
Another thing: when I was twelve or thirteen, one of my uncles, a short man, remarked, ‘Natalie! I remember when you were smaller than I was,’ and I knew he was gearing up so I tried to change the subject, move away, but he was determined: ‘and now even your boobs are bigger than I am!’ He laughed, ho, ho, ho. We were at my grandmother’s house in the wide, tiled hallway that led to the front door. The floor seemed suddenly too cold; the screen door appeared to darken. There was not enough space between me and my uncle. My cousins were playing in the next room, and I wished I was there. They were making the noises that children do – high-pitched yelps of indignation, giggles, howls of delight and annoyance. At that moment, I felt separated from them by more than the brick wall and the hallway cupboard filled with sheets, large plastic containers of powder and big bottles of Bien-être that are a staple in any Mauritian home.
There were other instances, lots of them, in those years, but it’s hard to recall them in detail. I’m searching through my memories for the concrete events, the things that started me on my path to disappearance. Everything seems mundane: comments made by men, looks that lingered where they shouldn’t have. Catcalls, whistles, smirks. But, slowly, it became clear that how I looked was the most important thing about me; it was the first thing anyone ever mentioned on meeting me. And I felt like these stares and comments hollowed me out, scoop by scoop, until I was all veneer.
Associate Professor Nicole Moulding writes that the emotional abuse that happens in childhood (CEA), the most common form of childhood abuse, is characterised by repeated damaging interactions which leave a child feeling that she, among other things, only has value in ‘meeting someone else’s needs’. She argues that CEA directed at girls often focuses on their appearance, weight and sexuality, and suggests that CEA ‘can be constituted through gender practices that are embedded in a host of gendered discourses about the female body and expectations of women and girls’. Naomi Wolf claims that, in our culture, women’s identity ‘must be premised on our “beauty” so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air’. For academic Chris Weedon, language is ‘the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed’. Meaning that if you hear something often enough, it comes to define you.
It’s hard to think about what happened to me as abuse. In my experience there was no one perpetrator, but rather an endless litany on how I looked and how important this was. It’s also difficult to recognise it as abuse because I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been shaped by it – this discourse of beauty, its centrality to how we are perceived, to how we should perceive ourselves. Perhaps the difference is that I was so young. At nine, I was a full five years away from puberty. But it didn’t matter. These men – men who were supposed to care for me, to protect me – could not help themselves. Their opinions were so important they had to be proclaimed. It didn’t matter who heard them.
Sam Warner, academic and psychologist, writes, ‘feminists argued that sexual abuse is part of women’s “normal” sexual experiences and that women and girls are far more at risk from men they know than from strangers. Sexual violence of this sort was merely an extreme form of the oppression that all women and girls experience.’
Mine was a very ordinary girlhood.
By the time I hit seventeen and developed breasts and hips, beauty no longer felt like a cool thing to own. It wasn’t at all like a Commodore 64 or a great bike. It frightened me. These men frightened me. They could not stop making their comments, or looking at me in that purposeful way which made it clear that I should notice their gazes. And I would shrink back into myself, hoping to somehow make myself invisible. My boobs annoyed me, and I felt that they were the last thing I needed on my young and already too tall body. I hated the way that my boobs and my hips and my bum seemed to operate independently of me. They would enter the room first and I sulkily followed them. I felt as though a neon sign had been placed on my body – ‘Open for Business’ or ‘Look at these tits, please’ – and I didn’t know how to switch it off.
But I learned that there were ways to erase myself, little by little. In high school, while other girls were going out with boys, I avoided them. Sure, I had crushes, but my crushes were mostly unattainable – I spent years pining after a gay boy (though at my school in the early nineties ‘gay’ wasn’t really a thing any of us were allowed to be, but there were signs if I wanted to see them). He was sweet and smart and he ignored me. After that I chose to transfer all my attentions to a boy who was two years older, a footballer, and not very bright. He eventually asked me out and I told him no, that I was busy. I kept all boys at arm’s length (not that there were many), and any time someone asked me out, or tried to kiss me, I would back away. I didn’t trust them; I didn’t trust what they wanted. I went through high school boyfriendless. I regret this now. What I regret is not the fumbling awkwardness that my friends experienced, but my lack of bravery. I regret that I let those men – teachers, uncles, family friends – define me and my body and what we were for. What I was for.
My second, more serious attempt at disappearance came after I left high school. There were other stresses too – my parents were struggling financially with their business, and I had to go out into the world and know who I wanted to be, and I didn’t seem particularly good at much. But I was good at dieting: I could go a day without eating, no sweat. I felt strong when I was able to resist food, and learned to like the empty feeling in my stomach, to welcome it as a sure sign I was losing weight. Through dieting I could control my body – I could make my breasts and hips and bum disappear. This experience is not unique to me. It’s not uncommon for kids who have been sexually abused to develop eating disorders. As Mary Anne Cohen, director of the New York Center for Eating Disorders writes, ‘Many survivors of sexual abuse often work to become very fat or very thin in an attempt to render themselves unattractive. In this way, they try to de-sexualize themselves.’
So I dieted myself away, I did my best to become that head in a jar that I’d so often wished I could be. I lost all the curvy bumpy bits of my body. But I lost other things along the way – my hair, my period, my sense of worth. In wanting to get away from my body, I fixated entirely on it. I put myself under scrutiny every single day. I wouldn’t go to sleep unless I knew exactly what I was eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If something went in my mouth that I did not want to eat – if my parents forced me to eat, for instance – I literally could not chew. I sat there, crying and moving food from one side of my mouth to the other. When I became really skinny, I decided to give modelling a go. This was another thing that tall girls are supposed to do (other than basketball). I modelled to remove myself further from dating and boys and sex – I was always working on the weekends and models are, so the stereotype goes, sexually unattainable, and I wanted that, to be taken away from the economy of desire. If it sounds paradoxical that’s because it was. But the more I appeared on catwalks and in magazines, the further I became from everyone and everything. And I was putting it to good use, my beauty and my eating disorder. I was making them work for me. Of course, modelling only exacerbated my eating disorder, and I went from skinny to very skinny. I was tired all the time, my breath smelled, my skin became sallow. I was taken to the doctor and pronounced to be anorexic – a word that shocked me – surely I was just a very good dieter. I refused to go out with friends because I couldn’t anticipate the food situation – what would be there to eat, what could I get away with. Everyone I knew began to watch me with food, and I felt policed all the time.
Feminism saved me. I studied cultural studies and psychology at university and read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. I learned that beauty is a tool that is wielded against women, that even when women are beautiful they cannot take ownership of that beauty. As I write this essay a part of me is cringing – how can I describe myself as beautiful? Doesn’t that smack of ego? Doesn’t it make me vain and shallow? (These are, of course, the words that are used, often, to describe beautiful women, to put them down, to punish them.) Plus, I can now look at my beauty through a long lens. As an almost middle-aged woman, beauty is not something I possess. My body has become soft from the hard work of pregnancy and from many of years of not giving a fuck; from my active liberation of an ideal of womanhood that is ultimately punishing. As Wolf astutely notes, ‘Aging in women is “unbeautiful” since women grow more powerful with time.’ But back then, giving up on beauty took time. Inch by inch, I began to be critical of the anxiety I was placing myself under. I gave up modelling when a friend of mine asked how I could do it knowing that girls might give themselves eating disorders trying to look like me. I changed how I looked, I stopped wearing pretty clothes and started wearing my dad’s shirts and pants from the seventies. I shopped in the men’s section at op shops, I wore trainers everywhere, I stopped wearing make-up. I found a counsellor at uni who I liked and respected, and she helped me save my own life. I started socialising more, furtively cultivating an interest in independent music and art galleries. I met a boy I liked, who liked me back. It took years and masses of effort, but I finally stopped being anorexic. Being loved for who I was and what I did made so much of a difference to me. However, the harsh critical eye of anorexia has never left me, not completely. And beauty is still a valuable commodity in our culture – one that costs us more and more as time passes.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is supposed to mean that beauty is highly subjective, but now I think it means that the power of beauty lies with those who see it, not those who have it. Women are not allowed to possess their beauty – are not permitted to even acknowledge it. Those who do are thought to be vacuous and egotistical. Men want women who are beautiful and don’t know it, as if that is at all possible in our image-stained world. And women who are not conventionally beautiful are asked, all the time, what they can do to make themselves more pleasing to men’s eyes. As Moulding suggests, ‘positioning women as property and as sexualized objects whose bodies are not their own are common to women’s experiences of sexual abuse’.
I wrote earlier that no one could take my two grandmothers’ beauty away, but this is not true, because their beauty was never really theirs to begin with. Like most women, their beauty was used against them, as it was used against at least one of my great-grandmothers. This woman grew up poor, and caught the eye of a wealthy man, who impregnated her twice and never married her. This was in the late 1800s, in a country ruled by the church. The social shame and isolation she felt found its way into her daughter, my grandmother, who carried her sadness about her mother all through her long, exhausting life. She never once revealed what happened between her mother and her father, but disowned him completely, saying he died when she was two, though he appears solid and fully formed in some of the photos I’ve seen from when she was a young woman. She denied, always, that it was him, though she has his broad face, his light hair, his blue eyes. My other grandmother was raped, so the story goes, by a man much older than she was. Though there is no consensus on the incident, it goes a long way to explaining some of the men in my family, and some of the men who women have chosen to bring into it. That exhausting cycle of perpetrator and victim that many of us have turned ourselves inside-out to break.
If I could do one thing for my child-self, and for my great-grandmother and grandmothers, it would be to blind and mute our beholders, those people who purported to admire us so much. To find a way to keep our beauty for ourselves, to walk through a quiet world, free from stares and calls and whispers. To own ourselves completely, like a cool bike, a video game, a favourite t-shirt.
Jenna Guillaume is a journalist and author who grew up in Wollongong and now lives in Sydney. She has been writing about pop culture, identity, feminism and social media at BuzzFeed for the last five years, and was previously features editor at Girlfriend. Her debut novel What I Like About Me (Pan Macmillan) was published in 2019.
The Lucky Ones
I am one of the lucky ones.
I’m five years old. We’re playing ‘catch and kiss’. We girls are running until our lungs explode to get away from the boys. If they catch us, they get to kiss us. Even if we don’t want it. Even if we cry. Worse, if they catch us and then they kiss us, we’ll be the laughing stock of kindergarten. Because only naughty girls let boys kiss them. There’s one girl who deliberately slows down and lets the boys catch her. Everyone whispers about her. No one wants to be that girl. I’m not very fast. A boy catches me. I yank at his hair to stop him from kissing me. He cries. I get into trouble.
I’m nine years old. My friends have started a club. ‘Like the Baby-Sitters Club?’ I ask, excited. ‘No. That’s for babies. This is the chicken club.’ Chicken is our word for boobs. We’re too young, too immature to call them anything else. But there’s a club dedicated to them, and only girls with the biggest ones are allowed in. They call me ‘pancake’ and I’m excluded. The boys don’t like me, so the girls don’t either. We’re children, but our still-developing bodies are already our social currency.
I’m eleven years old. I have underarm hair. ‘It’s time to start shaving,’ my mum says. I’m ecstatic, especially because it means I can shave my legs, too. I’ve come to believe the fine downy hair there is unsightly, gross. Meanwhile, the boys at school proudly show off the clusters of hairs growing in their pits. On them, body hair is a sign of strength and power. On me – on us – it’s dirty and disgusting. I go to school with cuts covering my legs and my armpits stinging.
