By Shira Glassman (Guest Blogger)
Boobs!
They're
on a lot of people's minds. If I asked you to picture someone who's
into women's breasts, you might picture a straight boy in his early
teens, just discovering that women's bodies can be fun to look at, or
maybe what sprang into your mind is an adult man who can't seem to
resist talking to women's chests instead of respectfully looking at
their faces.
You
wouldn't think of a young woman, right?
The
heroine of my newly released queer feminist fantasy novel, The
Second Mango, is Queen Shulamit, a twenty-year-old with plenty of
reasons to feel different and isolated. Since women of royalty in
fairy tales are often imprisoned in a tower needing to be rescued,
one might say her tower is her isolation--mourning her recently
deceased father, misunderstood and disbelieved about her multiple
food allergies, and alienated from her heterosexual peers as the only
lesbian she knows. One of the ways she's aware she's inconveniently
different from other women is her fascination with breasts.
I was
eight when I can first remember noticing that I liked looking at
boobs. I didn't know what that meant, because, like many queer kids
in the 1980's, my exposure to All Things LGBTQ+ was extremely limited
and biased. I'm fairly sure I'd never encountered the idea of
bisexuality, because as a kid my image of queer people were those who
only liked their own sex 1. to the exclusion of all hetero romance
and 2. to their peril and ruin. I knew not to blame "them"
(us) for it, but I also saw "them" (us) as utterly
doomed and wasn't it sad. Not because we were going to
hell -- that's not a part of my faith tradition -- but because we
would be Shunned. But anyway, since I'd never heard that you could
like men and women, and since I'd had crushes on
older male celebrities since I was six years old, it never occurred
to me that my breast fixation meant that I liked women, too.
I
remember calling them "blossoms" when I had to talk about
them for whatever reason. I remember being fascinated if a woman was
topless on television, and I remember sneaking looks at Playboy when
I saw it in a gas station once. My stepmother, in an attempt to
counteract my mother's second-wave feminism, bought me a Barbie doll
-- I promptly painted the doll's breasts sparkly purple with nail
polish. Why? I wanted to do something with them, but I
didn't know what there was to do.
I was
never so much fixated on growing my own set, and from what I've heard
from friends as an adult, I haven't changed my mind. Between the
backaches and the unwanted attention, they sound more like trouble
than anything else. The only reason I've ever wished for more than
the flat little afterthoughts on my chest is because it would be a
lot easier to shop if I fit into "women's clothes" (ha.
Isn't that all of us, for one reason or another?)
Bodily
autonomy means that our bodies belong to us and us alone, and we
should respect other people's bodies as not being our business unless
they want it to be our business. Lesbian erasure and invisibility had
unintentionally taught me that those who looked at boobs sexually
were often predatory men, and never young women. Imagine how that
made me feel, especially at the age when everyone feels
like they're the only one. Even as an adult, learning to reconcile my
strong belief in bodily autonomy with my attraction to the same body
parts that many invasive men have preyed on was confusing and
difficult.
Shulamit,
in my book, faces these same dilemmas. She's eager to express her
appreciation of a woman's curves, but she's also afraid that
admitting this attraction will somehow rob her of the femininity with
which she so strongly identifies. In a world, much like our own,
where those gazing upon women's bodies with appreciation are assumed
to be male, can we blame her?
She
also strives to find balance between her strong fixation and her
equally strong ethical compunction towards consent and bodily
autonomy. While dusting off a group of imprisoned women who've been
turned to stone, she realizes she's attracted to the woman she's
cleaning and asks Rivka to finish the job.
Shulamit’s
hands were slower and gentler on this one than on the others, and she
couldn’t help wondering what the woman was like. Had she come here
out of deep religious conviction and a desire to serve her fellow
humans? Or was she living within these walls in order to hide from
the outside world? Did she like to read, and if so, did she prefer
stories or lessons? With a rush of heat to her cheeks, Shulamit
realized she couldn’t bring herself to polish the woman’s entire
body—not her bosom. She knew she would enjoy it and couldn’t live
with the guilt of reveling in such a moment at someone else’s
expense. Especially if the woman was awake inside the stone. “Riv?”
“Your
Majesty?”
“We’re
switching.”
We
live in a society that declares that breasts are so inherently sexual
that a parent using them for their biologically intended purpose, to
feed a child, is often asked to cover up because some people consider
it "obscene". Breast cancer activism is often reduced to
"save the ta-ta's". I do want to live in a world where
someone's breasts aren't considered automatically sexual when they
haven't been assigned that function by their owner. But at the same
time, lesbian and other queer woman-on-woman sexuality is silenced
and suppressed and ignored enough, and I also want the next
generation of little me's and little Shulamits to know that their
attraction to breasts, or a woman's tush, or whichever part of women
they like best, doesn't make them a freak or "the only one"
at all. As long as we do so respectfully and without making it a
problem for our partners or whoever we're admiring, our attractions
should be acknowledged as real and valid at least as much as
heterosexual men's are.
The
Second Mango tells the story of a young woman's search for
love, family and her own strength with the assistance of her
dragon-riding bodyguard. If you've ever wished for a fairy tale to
end with a happily ever after for two queer women, or if you like
sexy older men (there is a strong hetero romance subplot as well!) or
just like to read very woman-centered fantasy, check it out. It's
available from Prizm Books in four eBook formats: ePub, mobi, html,
and pdf. It is for sale on Amazon in print and for Kindle, and also
available in print from Wild Iris Books, Florida's only feminist
bookstore. The sequel, Climbing the Date Palm, is
scheduled for publication next July.
Leave a comment with your email, and you'll be entered to win a copy of The Second Mango!
News Flash! Monday 21 October only! Get 10% off all books at Prizm Books (my publisher) and their parent, Torquere Press. Just use discount code fall2013.
http://www.prizmbooks.com
http://www.torquerepress.com
Leave a comment with your email, and you'll be entered to win a copy of The Second Mango!
News Flash! Monday 21 October only! Get 10% off all books at Prizm Books (my publisher) and their parent, Torquere Press. Just use discount code fall2013.
http://www.prizmbooks.com
http://www.torquerepress.com
Find
Shira Glassman on her WordPress blog:
4 comments:
Thank you so much for letting me guest post! Just a quick note that the artwork above is the work of Jane Dominguez and Mina V.
Hello, Shira,
I'm delighted to have you here at Beyond Romance. I absolutely love the art work - as well as your message.
I've always been attracted to both women and men - but I didn't have a label for this confusion until I was well into adulthood.
Wishing you great sales and super reviews.
Great column. Very thought provoking. I can tell you now that you were not the only one who liked looking at women's breasts. I did also growing up and I still do. I find women's bodies beautiful. The older I get the more I realize that I don't have to stay within the boundaries I was taught as a child. I may not look at a woman's body in a sexual context. Sometimes I just think a woman is beautiful. I also am gaining an appreciation for men's bodies as well and not in a sexual way. I like the nude body. I love the beauty of it--the skin, the way the muscles move beneath the skin, the way light and dark play with it. I recently was surprised when for the first time I was sexually attracted to a woman and she was fully clothed but the way she presented herself was so erotic. As I age I realize I have been trapped within the childhood teachings that have no meaning to me now. I am a very late bloomer but I find joy in learning and reteaching myself that it is okay not to follow what is called "the norm."
So I guess you won a copy since you commented--how can I email it to you?
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