turn, I leaned over his desk to explain the difficulty I was having with a particular equation. Two boys stood behind me. They didn’t even bother to whisper as they discussed my butt, the epic proportions of which they’d never seen elsewhere. It was so big! And round! And I was so flat-chested! Wasn’t my body HILARIOUS!
It took all my self-control not to straighten up immediately, walk to my desk, and hide my ass by sitting on it. Instead I finished discussing my work with my teacher, a rail-thin bachelor in his late 20s, with a kind demeanor and bad skin. We both ignored the boys and resolutely avoided making eye contact during the remainder of our conversation. I don’t think my face stopped burning until school ended and I was home.
When, a few months later, I nearly bled to death from utterly inexplicable intestinal hemorrhaging that doctors said could only be attributed to some sort of profound emotional stress, everyone professed shock that I was so unhappy. What could make a young white girl from a stable, affluent home so miserable that she could lose six pints of blood—half the blood in her body—in a single day?
Not that I had a satisfactory answer. I knew I was unhappy about any number of things, including the condescending, inadequate answers to my questions at church, and of course I hated my hideous, misshapen body. Still, I thought it over-reacted by trying to kill me. The upshot was that I thought bodies should not only be hated, but mistrusted: you never knew when the damn things might betray you.
Worst of all, my way of almost dying involved my ass. I never actually felt the hemorrhaging; the only clue my body gave me at first that I was dying was unrelenting diarrhea. While I could tell that something was really wrong, I had no idea what, because the hemorrhaging had occurred very high in my intestinal tract, meaning the blood had been digested and was no longer red by the time it left my body. Why would I discuss with anyone the particularities of my body’s expression of one of the ass’s most notable and familiar traits, its propensity for producing disgusting smells and substances?
It’s not just excrement that makes butts smell, but apocrine sweat glands, special glands that occur around our orifices and, for some reason, in our armpits. The substances these glands produce react very strongly to bacteria and produce very sharp odors; in other words, butts really stink. Butts are also one of the areas of the body most prone to boils, a painful skin infection often caused by poor hygiene. Who wouldn’t hate realizing that their dirtiest, smelliest, germiest part was also their biggest part?