How Do You Feel About...

So here's a little anecdote about Mac's sordid past.

Years ago, as a frequently-drunken undergraduate working too many jobs to pay for my education, I was sitting in a dorm lounge with some friends late one weekend night.

Now, my 19-year-old self knew just exactly how very clever I was, on the one hand--but also, my 19-year-old-self was doing some struggling with gender-identity and feminist issues. I'd been raised in a magnificently repressive fundamentalist Christian home and church-culture. I knew without any discussion or articulation that all queers went straight to hell, do not pass go, do NOT collect two hundred dollars. Queers die, get hauled straight to the basement, and popped in a kind of torpedo tube direct to the underworld, right? So my 19-year-old self had never so much as kissed a girl, and I certainly couldn't directly confront the odd...longings...starting to manifest themselves.

But I could and did approach the snarly problem from a feminist perspective. That approach was, in fact, quite encouraged in this particular little liberal-arts institution. I don't know why it was all right for me to first address the problems of misogyny in fundamentalist Christianity--but I suspect it was because my mother was a sort of underground feminist, in her more lucid and rebellious moments. She'd planted seeds of questions and anger about the injustices of misogyny that were more approachable to me than were questions of personal sexual identity.

So here I was with a group of similarly beginning-to-seek-enlightenment friends--both male* and female--sitting in a dorm late one Friday or Saturday night, probably a bit drunk. So the whole topic of female bodies comes up, and the upshot of the whole discussion leads us to decide we must conduct an impromptu and unscientific survey, right then, of whoever happened to walk through the lounge on their way to their room.

The survey questions were simple: "How do you feel about your breasts? Do you like them? Why or why not?"

This led, quite predictably, to a fairly wide variety of responses. Lots of the young women we asked promptly grabbed their own breasts, and put an exaggeratedly thoughtful look on their faces, and answered with a wide range of mostly very positive observations.

More than one guy grabbed his girlfriend's breasts, then grabbed his own chest in comparison, to offer his input, as well.

A couple of girls just averted their faces and fled for their rooms.

Meanwhile, almost twenty years later, I still recall this episode with disturbing clarity. Because it seems to me what we were really asking is something akin to, "how do you feel about the sex of your body--outside of normal gender conventions, if you can go there; or inside those conventions, if you cannot."

So I want to ask it again. In a more thoughtful and less drunken way, this time. How do you feel about your breasts? (Or your vagina, for that matter--but we just weren't goin' there, that night. We weren't that brave and clever.)

More specifically, how do you feel about the condition of being a woman, in a woman's body? And for the guys out there reading this (you know who you are...) I'd like to broaden that question to include you, as well. How do you feel about your male body? What do you think about the condition of being a man in a man's body?

How does this shape who we are--which is so much more than either just our brains or just our bodies, but seems to me to be a synergistic sum?

Because the harder I look at those questions, the more I realize how right we almost got it, that night so long ago. So very much of our personal identity is wrapped up in our sexual identifiers. Which explains an awful lot about interpersonal dynamics, when we damn well ought to know better by now.

*Interesting side-note: two of the three guys involved in this event later came out gay.