A sex story to curl your mind
By: Britni Pepper
Tags: Self Improvement, Coming Out, Gender, Non Binary, LGBTQ

Curvy Girl doesn’t make it through to the end of this story, but don’t worry; it’s a happy ending. Stay with me.

I was raised in a tradition that stressed strict gender roles. For we girls, puberty meant modest clothing, long skirts or dresses, arms and shoulders covered.

And becoming the playthings of the older men in the community, as well as being the housework slaves. Arranged marriages to men at least ten years older, to cap off a life of perpetual subordination.

As anybody reading my writing will know, that wasn’t how my life turned out. I escaped all that, but one result was that during my formative years, I had an extremely limited view of gender roles.

The growing influence of LGBT+ folk in Australia was a challenge. We girls had been taught such activities were deviance — tolerated, but still not quite the thing — but when I discovered that these people thought their lives were not only normal but fun, I had to hammer that concept into my mind.

University and exposure to many different views helped. But still, at heart, I was the girl I’d been brought up to be.

Meet Curvy Girl

Curvy Girl was a few years older than me, but for some reason, we shared an elective class. A PhD student, she had travelled, she was very widely read, she was sexually experienced, she drove a car. I’d barely scraped the surface of that list. And she had the most fantastic pair of breasts in the world.

Like someone had stuck a couple of basketballs on her chest, painted them flesh colour, and topped them off with a couple of nipples in proportion. Men on the street — well, men anywhere — would stare at her, their eyes hanging out of their sockets, and their tongues drooling on the cobblestones.

Yes, cobblestones. She kick-started my own love of travel by guiding four of us undergraduates through Europe one summer. Luckily she shared the driving, so she sat in front. There was no room for her, her hips, and her “girls” in the back seat of our rental Mini, let me tell you! The skinniest of we teenagers sat in the back and enjoyed the view.

I fell in love with Curvy Girl. She knew everything. And she could sweet-talk men into doing us favours, just by bending forward a little. We got special rates on rooms, dinners, VIP tours. She was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

In a way, I did. Sex was my adventure, I began reading more than philosophy textbooks, I learnt to drive, I travelled the world, and I grew the most amazing rack.

Like hell I did! My own pair were nicely-shaped and nobody ever complained, but they weren’t that award-winning pair of Golden Globes that Curvy Girl sported.

Curvy Girl was my goddess that summer. She explained the finer points of the Bayeux Tapestry, she stood on an outcrop of rock over a Norwegian fjord like the world’s most impressive figurehead, she found us a restaurant in Barcelona high on Montjuic where we got bubbly on cava and looked out over Sagrada Famillia, and she got her bottom pinched so many times in Milan that she couldn’t sit down.

I had to spread some ointment over those equally fabulous cheeks, and they could have been mounted in the Louvre, so splendidly rounded and multi-coloured they were. Maybe they were; she had disappeared for half an hour with a Parisian boyfriend while we were craning our necks at the Mona Lisa.

Hitting close to home

After university, I stayed in touch. She got her PhD, got married, settled down, and then one day she turned up at my door, crying her heart out. Her husband had kicked her out. On her birthday. For another man.

How any man worth the name could toss out that brilliant mind, that fabulous body, and that loving heart was beyond me, but he had.

Over the next year, Curvy Girl became Curvy Crazy Cat Lady. She stayed in her room, eating slab after slab of chocolate, reading the trashiest of romances, and listening to Michael Bublé. It was a tragedy.

She doubled in size, her snores shook the house, her KFC packages choked our rubbish bin.

I could never ask her to leave, but the atmosphere got a little strained from time to time.

She left after a year. On her birthday. I was worried for her, but she checked in a week later from San Francisco, of all places, where she had found a job teaching at Berkeley.

Well, that was it, I figured. She’d smoke dope, run a boarding house in a muumuu, and develop an American accent. End of the line.

Her Facebook page indicated a certain degree of Californian oddness, but what set the cap on it was her profile shot a couple of years later. There she was in a tight t-shirt — hell, all t-shirts were tight on her — down a dozen sizes apart from her boobs, which had increased in amazingness during the chocolate shop phase. She looked taut, tanned, terrific, pedalling a bike beside the Pacific, Pamela Anderson eat your heart out.

That T-shirt, though. Purple with three words on it. “They. Them. Their.” I thought she was referring to her breasts.

I’ve only just begun asking others to use those pronouns for me, and it just feels so much more me, and better, than she and her. — Curvy Girl

Clearly, this was the beginning of the end. Her mind had gone. This was political correctness gone mad. California was described in some circles as being like breakfast cereal, chock full of fruits, nuts, and flakes.

Here was the proof. There could not be anyone more female than my friend.

I’m non-binary. That means I identify as beyond the two traditional genders. I’m not a woman, and I’m not a man, and I’m not nothing. I’m me!— Curvy Girl

WTAF? I’d seen every millimetre of skin she possessed, and she was definitely gloriously female in every bit of her body. My mind skidded helplessly over the idea that she didn’t consider herself to be a woman. How did that work?

I’ve always been a true feminist and I don’t believe women have to be built in an expected way to be female. — Curvy Girl

That made sense. Men can be feminists too, and body image issues are always problematic. The way I’d been raised gave definite roles to men and women, but also taught us that we were, at heart, not just equal but equivalent. We might look different on the outside, but the light of consciousness was the same for all, just looking out of different eyes in different bodies, as it were.

The body is not the soul. That was clear.

When I discovered the phrase ‘non-binary’ it was like the sun lit up my head. Suddenly, I knew who I really was. I knew why I’d had this unhappiness in my life, my childhood, my adulthood, my relationships, everything. When I came out to my Mum, she said, ‘Yes! That fits perfectly!”. So, even though I’ve only just revealed myself as non-binary, I’ve been non-binary forever. — Curvy Girl

All this was foreign to me, and I struggled a little with the changes in someone I thought I knew very well. But if I was hearing her right, she’d always been this way, hiding it not just from the outside world, but from herself — oops, themselves — and I had to adjust my thinking to meet the reality.

Busted!

But worse was to come. They had put their name down for “top surgery”. Breast surgery with extreme prejudice. Apparently the sight of that inspiring and uplifting chest was making it difficult for people to remember to use the correct pronouns.

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

But surely this was a crime? Burning down your own house is still arson. And that bust could have won a chestful of medals and awards. Don’t do it, I almost said. Think of all the guys — and gals — who look at you with awe in their eyes.

When the doctor was examining me, I realised just how divided I was from my boobs. I didn’t find it a violation of my body to be checked and poked, I felt like I had so little relationship to these bags of meat that just happened to be stuck on my body. That was the moment it resonated with true harmony; it struck me just how divorced I was from my breasts. — Curvy Girl

Now, I’ve heard of something similar. People who amputate a limb because it doesn’t feel right, like a chunk of meat that is inconveniently stuck on their body, like a piece of a stranger. It’s called xenomelia, or body integrity dysphoria. Apparently their brain isn’t wired up to accept the whole body, and it’s easier to slice off the flesh because, well how do you rewire your brain?

But expensive, especially in America. Curvy Girl gasped at the cost, but as they said,

This seemed more important. Why buy your dream house when you can buy your dream body?

And they did it. With full disclosure to friends, family, and workmates, so there was every chance to talk them out of it.