women like me

Well, since it's unseasonably warm really stinking hot here today, I thought I would post something I started to draft a couple of months ago:

voyeur

Women's breasts emerge in the heat of the summer.
Big ones and small ones.
Perky ones (I could fit them in my hand).
Breasts nursing babies.
Freckled cleavage.
Wrinkled cleavage.
And breasts that can't possibly be real.
I stare at women's breasts now with great fascination.
And not a little envy.
I have never seen a woman with one breast.
Except in the mirror.

As I have written before, I don't wear a prosthesis, mostly because it's really uncomfortable and I am just not willing to put myself through agony in order to blend in.

I do take great comfort in the knowledge that there are other wonderful women out there with similar experiences.

Brys of Big Grrls DO Cry (Field Notes From a Cancer Battle Ground Where Queer Life Meets Precarious Life Head On) wrote "Breastless in Vancouver":

"I spend countless time here and there scanning the crowd for boob-less chests myself, I must now confess. I want to see more people who look like me. I feel lonely in my state of exception. I keep hoping that I will look out into the crowd at the mall and see an obviously breast-less chest like mine, thrust proudly forward into the flow of life. But I don’t — EVER. In the Cancer Journal, Audrey Lorde talks about the politics of visibility of walking in the world, breast-less. Lorde is very passionate about the politics of visibility for the breast-less and excoriates those who would foist prosthetics or reconstruction on mastectomy patients."

Clearly we've been feeling some of the same things but she says it more brilliantly than I ever could.

Jacqueline of Rebel One in Eight, wrote a piece about her perspective on being known as the "woman with one breast." This is a brilliant piece of writing and a great story that has stayed with me and made me proud and happy since I read it back in July. Called peace. and quiet, it's begins with an anecdote about a woman who undergoes reconstruction because she doesn't "want to be known as the woman with one breast. It ends with a story about an altercation with noisy and grossly inconsiderate neighbours and the reflection:

"i'm just wondering which is worse:

being known as the bitch who should move into a retirement community if she wants peace and quiet.
or
being known as a woman with one breast.
.
.
.
honestly. neither reference seems at all bad to me."