Content warning: r*pe, sexual violence
When I found out that I would develop breasts in fourth grade I started sobbing. My favorite PE activity was running so fast that a newspaper would stick to my chest and run along with me. Once I grew these inconvenient blobs, my favorite activity would be ruined! I was also terrified of the male attention that these blobs might garner.
Prior to fourth grade and moving schools, I never thought of myself as a girl. I was just a kid who liked to balance on fallen tree logs in my pink tutu and watch Lawrence Welk on weekends. At this new school, I needed to shave my legs and wear a training bra and care about what other people thought, so I could be a girl and have friends. I also had to be vigilant of old men who liked to snatch little girls in the middle of the night. All because I was growing breasts that I didn’t want.
Physical education classes seemed to be a recurring reminder of my gender and my breasts. When my male teacher told me that my shorts were too short and tight in sixth grade, I became a girl. When I could feel my chest bounce up and down when I ran the mile, I became a girl. So I looked at the ground and wore too large gym clothes so that my my PE teacher wouldn’t want me. Because when he stroked my arms to show me how to block in volleyball, that wasn’t an accident. And when those boys would touch my body in class, it wasn’t an accident.
The only place I felt safe was with women, and even that was confusing. I took voice lessons and each session would start with breathing exercises, with my teacher holding my waist to make sure I was extending my diaphragm. It was just the two of us in a small room and I was so cognizant of the lack of space between us. She was a woman and I was a girl, but I also didn’t want to be.
I just wanted to exist in a space without the recurring nightmares of being kidnapped and violated. I wanted to live in a world where time didn’t exist, where I wasn’t waiting to become a girl, to become a woman, to grow breasts and pubic hair and bleed once a month and be raped.
In middle school, my friends used to joke and ask which day I was missing class this week. While everyone was in class, I would lay in my backyard and soak up the sun and disappear into nothingness, into a world that wasn’t my own and was just light and warmth. All the grasping hands and leering gazes would evaporate and I was left with me. A person who used to know who they were until my body started changing, until the people around me started labeling body parts and assigning them slurs. Yet I had internalized so much that all I felt was fear, instead of the child I used to be.
These days I take pills to soak up the fear that never goes away. I don’t know if I’ve always been an anxious person or if it’s the world that made me this way. I miss the elation of running with a newspaper stuck to my chest, the pure joy that my body could do something so magical, lift an object out of time and space and keep it afloat.
I’ve taken up running again and my chest feels like it’s collapsing in on itself. I am trapped inside my body and I wonder if that vibrant escape ever existed at all. When I was just a child my body was for other people, and I don’t think I’ve ever got it back.
Ilana Slavit
Hi, I’m Ilana, a 2020 Film and Media Studies graduate of the University of Oregon. I’ve always been passionate about representation of sex and gender in the media through a social justice focused lens. As a survivor, I am grateful to be a member of the Education Team in order to spread awareness of consent and pleasure. I am in the process of becoming an ASSECT certified Sex Educator through the Institute of Sexuality Education and Enlightenment. In my free time, I like to write, make short films, go to (now virtual)
