The San Francisco Exploratorium was a beauty that night in 2006, dimly lit by an open exhibit on the solar system. Neon lights streaked across the vaulted ceilings at Michelle Moore’s bat mitzvah while the sweet melodies of Blink-182 blasted from the DJ booth. I wore a dress with a sweetheart neckline and had even shaved the carpet on my legs in preparation for my first kiss. Liam Wood, the love of my life, looked hot, as always. Game on.
Fast song after fast song played all night. When will this end? I thought. No elegant first kiss could happen to the lyrics of “Booty, booty, booty, rockin’ everywhere.” Finally, the smooth melody of “I Swear,” by All-4-One began playing. Liam looked at me just as I dared to look at him, and we merged on the dance floor.
Liam, a good head taller than me, didn’t stop looking down at me for the entirety of that slow song. I was intoxicated by the smell of his Old Spice, so it took me a moment to come to and notice where his eyes were locked—my cleavage. I found out later that he had been dared to dance with me for the sole purpose of getting just such a look. My boobs had, once again, ruined my life.
By age 13, my bra size measured 32G, and as a dressing room assistant helpfully noted to both me and my mother, I could have been a porn star. Everything I tried on transformed me into Marie Antoinette’s voluptuous handmaid. My mom and I silently agreed that I needed to keep covered, not just for modesty, but for protection—the comments were beginning to wear on both of us.
Two years later, at age 15, I was determined to get a breast reduction. Of course, no one wanted to believe that a teenage girl could make that decision, even though I was the one dealing with the realities of living in my body.
There was an extra exoticism to the particular puberty I was experiencing. Not only was I the first girl to blossom, I was also one of three girls of color in my grade, in a primarily white institution in San Francisco. I am Syrian-Palestinian and grew up as part of a conservative Orthodox Christian community, unlike my peers who sometimes scoffed at the idea of religion. But my religious upbringing wasn’t the only factor in my otherness. I intuitively felt that my Arabness, my dark hair and olive skin tone, reinforced how I was being sexualized. Once while walking down the street, I saw two men stop in their tracks and stare. “Damn, look at those titties!” one of them gasped. I noticed these crude comments were rarely pointed toward my white girlfriends who had burgeoning womanly figures of their own.
The author, just trying to survive adolescence.
I believed it was my fault that my body held powers to seduce innocent boys. I was an object for sexual fantasies but not of the quaint crushes I longed for. That night on the dance floor with Liam was the beginning of what would become an unfortunate cycle where boys—and sometimes men—would act as though I somehow had no ears to register what they said or eyes to acknowledge how they stared. I was too young to parse the meaning of the kind of attention I was getting but not obtuse enough that I didn’t notice the difference between how they treated me versus my peers.
Worse, it wasn’t just men and boys who heaped on the shame. I was humiliated by female teachers who believed they had authority over my body. My cross-country coach once pulled my mom aside to tell her I needed to start wearing a sports bra— there was too much bouncing going on for my teammates to handle. My mom assured her that I was wearing not just one but three sports bras on top of each other. Another time, as I sprinted to the bathroom to take care of a period-related accident, I was stopped by my Spanish teacher who, rather than help me as I bled through my khakis, publicly reprimanded me: “Elena! I can see your cleavage,” she shouted. “Boys are distracted.”
I was lucky: My parents were on my side. Still, it took almost two years for us to convince doctors that surgery would be beneficial for my overall health. Every doctor requested I try to lose weight, assuming that my breast problem was an obesity problem. My pediatrician once accused me of being in my second trimester. When I asked her if it was possible to be pregnant if I had not yet kissed a boy, she quickly realized what she was dealing with—a virgin. In those years, I developed eating disorders and attended physical therapy in which PTs told me to lie on my belly, breasts protruding on all sides, and use my back muscles and core to lift my chest and shoulders off the ground. When no amount of Superman postures fixed my aching back and it was clear that my breasts were really breasts, my doctor finally let me schedule the procedure.
In my tight-knit Christian Orthodox community, the priests would tell me in confession that I was a “good girl” for not falling into temptation. But their praise never made me feel any different, any stronger, or more assured. If it wasn’t religious leaders telling me that all was well, it was overbearing aunties who told me to be thankful for God’s gifts, including the gift of my breasts. I began to believe that “be thankful” really just meant “shut up and bear it.”
I was angry with God and everyone who seemed to believe they could act like Him. These boys, these men, even these women who tried to put me in my place, none of them were in my body. They weren’t looked at the way I had been looked at nor were they treated the way I had been treated on the streets, in classrooms, or doctors’ offices.
“You’re punching God in the face” is what I heard over and over again from drooling boys who had heard about my impending surgery. But those comments stopped wearing on me after a while, for I knew the truth—God had been punching me in the face, quite literally, every time I jumped out of bed in the morning without a bra.
The night before my reduction I stood in front of my mirror in just my pajama bottoms. I held each breast, heavy and textured by deep stretch marks, some of which were still purple and fresh. They seemed to still be growing and here I was, about to cut their growth spurt short. This will no longer be a part of you, I thought to myself. I turned closer to the mirror and examined my figure from the side, trying to deduce how far out my new chest would extend.
Five minutes before I was put under for surgery, I grabbed the nurse’s wrist and asked her to take care of me. “I don’t want to be too small. I’d still like to look a bit … womanly.” I didn’t know what I was asking for exactly and I regretted asking almost immediately—the cost of looking womanly seemed to come with additional fees I wasn’t willing to pay.
“Don’t worry, the surgeon will make sure you’re proportional.” She said. Proportional. That’s all I needed. A body proportional to that of my mind, still just 17 years old.
It’s been well over a decade since the surgery and not a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful toward my 15-year-old self for taking my destiny in her hands. I haven’t met one woman who enjoyed their adolescent years free of shame and guilt. It turns out there’s just never quite a right way to be a teenage girl. No way to look, behave, or stand up for yourself that doesn’t invite unwarranted scrutiny and sometimes outright cruelty. In my 30s, I finally look back at my teenage self not in awkward shame or cringe-embarrassment but in awe of how I stood tall, aching back or otherwise, even when almighty powers, including medical and religious ones, tried to stop me.
If my teenage self could boldly fight for her dignity and bodily autonomy, even while living through the misery of puberty, then I surely can keep fighting too. I can keep fighting against the stereotypes my people have been oppressed by. I can keep standing up for myself when I know what’s right for me. I’ll have to keep fighting, if not for the person I am now, at least for the person I’ll be in another 15 years.
I did end up getting that first kiss, exactly four days before my surgery. It was gross—his mouth claimed its territory over half my face, opened so wide and producing so much suction that it felt as if he was trying to drink from a wide-rimmed plastic Gatorade bottle. It ended up being a good story, though, a coming-of-age story about resilience. About how teenage girls are actually the strongest people I have ever known.
Elena Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian-American writer. Her writing seeks to explore the boundaries of generational trauma and what it means to have an identity shaped by political narratives and agendas. She is currently working on a memoir about living in the diaspora as a Palestinian in America.
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Breast Reduction Surgery: My Experience at Age 17 - Cosmopolitan
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