“Mere, pere, și bretele,” went the old Romanian joke, which loses all its rhyming wordplay in English: “apples, pears, and suspenders.” This was my first exposure to the indignities of female body image, and it came not, as you might imagine, from my mother, but from my dad. A recognized world-class curmudgeon, my father never even tried to reign in his colorful expressions to shelter the budding sensibilities of his daughter and only child. He would repeat this joke with glee, ignoring my mother’s frowns; I would giggle blithely.
If you haven’t realized already, the joke refers to the physical state of a woman’s breasts through life: in her youth, firm apples standing proud on her chest; in her middle age, pears tugged by gravity earthwards; and finally, in late life, suspenders that have entirely given up their shape and the fight with gravity.…
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It always starts with something: that glance across party rooms, an awkward handshake, your mutual friend’s introduction, or, increasingly, some popup on a screen. Those smooth bits of digital code hold out a kind of promise when you’re in a new and unfamiliar place. It says you’ve been noticed, it says you’re all right enough to someone who is willing to take that most human of jumps and spend an evening of their life with you in hope of something greater still.
London: an internship and foundation grant, 10 weeks sharing a Docklands Light Rail car with seemingly half the population of the world and a cramped youth hostel with a group of New Labour professional types. I’d switched over the location on my long-unchecked OkCupid profile for the occasion, telling myself that I didn’t think much of it, but really holding out a weird kind of hope that everything might just work out this time.…
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Life carries us through various stages of maturity like a ship transporting passengers from one location to another. External situations and struggles shape the individual, unearthing truths and revelations about the self in relation to those situations and struggles. Sexuality and physical desire are just two of many other unearthed revelations that can make themselves known throughout our lives, dug up, as it were, as we traverse the overgrown path of life. With these two revelations, others can be planted and given a chance to grow. In Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover, sexuality is used to illustrate the narrator’s journey into adulthood. This journey reveals the narrator’s complex passionate desires and illustrates how her external circumstances unearth deeper, hidden truths about herself and her family.…
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