and we shift each other's body to accept the bullet
“In this way, the girl who develops ahead of time feels like she is being pulled forward, suddenly thrust into the harsh light of the world’s gaze. To awaken into the body of a woman when you are still a girl, to be wearing Playtex eighteen-hour underwires when the girls around you are wearing training bras, is to be a true alien. The big-breasted girl looks like a girl in a pornographic movie, ‘eye candy’ in a school of boys who are just discovering their dad’s basement stash of magazines. The boys looks at her as if she is some sort of demented actress. The girls look at her as if she is an interloper, as if the extra amount of space she takes up is space she is stealing from them. The self-consciousness of such attention can cause fostered alienation so pronounced and deep among the girls I interviewed that I found myself understanding Madeline’s line when she described this strange logic: she suffered for her breasts: ‘My girlfriends have had boob jobs, girls I see out in the clubs. And to me it isn’t fair. These girls have these huge breasts overnight and I suffered. I suffered for years. They don’t deserve those breasts.’” --Emily White, “Fast Girls”