My Body, Female Body, Every Body

I cannot express how deeply I feel the ache in every one of my bones from 27 years of worrying about how the world perceives my body. I am especially exhausted from worrying about wearing the "right" things so that people don't perceive me in a "bad" light. In a world of fashion designed for sticks, curves are unfairly hard to tastefully own. However, I have worked too hard to correct that over too many years, and my style has evolved too much for me to still be getting flack about what I wear from both men and women. I am finally, just now, in my late twenties, proud of how I present myself to the world, because it took many a blunder, and much confusion, to get here, and I am finally comfortable in my skin and confident in my attire. Even more peculiar, I wear the same things as many of my other friends and still it seems I am usually the target of the most objectification and the most discussion on objectification. Thus, the conclusion I have come to is that it is not really my clothes that offend or excite anyone, it is my body, and that is because it is a distinctly, unmistakably, female body.

So this is a public service announcement: I refuse to ever again be ashamed of the clothes I carefully decide to put on my body, because I refuse to ever again be ashamed of having a female body. My vagina is for having sex when I want to and producing children if I ever choose to do so. My breasts are for feeding that offspring. My legs are for getting me places and for granting me the power to do so of my own accord. My butt is for helping those legs function and for giving them a rest. My neck is for giving my eyes a better view of the world and for supporting my heavy human brain, and my back is for bearing the load of whatever I choose to carry with me. My hands and mouth are for expressing the desires of my brain and heart, and for nourishing each day of my existence, and my throat is for giving a voice to my soul.

The common denominator of all of these parts is that they are all MINE, and I alone own the rights to them. My body is shaped the way it is because of those who have come before me and because of the way I choose to live my life. My body is living evidence of “survival of the fittest,” living evidence that humans have fought for a spot on this planet, and a beacon of the possibilities humanity can aspire to. For that reason I absolutely refuse to be ashamed of having a body, and especially for having a distinctly female one.

I refuse to hand over the power my body affords me to people who don’t deserve the honor of such a gift. I refuse to be ashamed of showing off the very mechanism that allows me to move through, and change, this world, and the thing that was so carefully constructed to protect my heart, lungs, brain, and everything in between. I am proud to have a human body, I am proud to have a female body, and I am proud to have my body, and no matter how it changes in my future I will be proud of how far it has gotten me up to this point and of what it has allowed me to do. I refuse to hide my own greatest evidence of the interconnectedness of all forms of humanity for any purposes but my own.

How I choose to show my body to, and interact in, the world is entirely up to me. I have absolutely negative time to worry about how people may perceive that body of their own accord, because humanity is in my debt and in the debt of every other female body around the world for every second of the precious time we have wasted trying to adhere to arbitrary rules that allow the power of our bodies to be hijacked by others. The very fact that the female body is violently and systematically commandeered in so many cultures is all the evidence anyone should need of the power the female body wields, and I'm taking ALL of that power back for myself, right here, right now.

It's time to start a fire.