Storm in a D cup

So I wrote a thing about Sydney Sweeney and genes and it blew up. A load of bald men with beards and MAGA rage started getting angry at me for having thoughts they likely couldn’t understand, and then rating my looks out of ten to feel powerful again.

I’m too old to be really upset about all the comments about my face, but I shoved a picture of me aged 25 on my feed, just to shut them up. I am not particularly fazed by my looks, even as they fade, and I know better than most that they have currency.

Like Sweeney, before childbirth and breastfeeding reshaped me, I used to have great tits. They made me a lot of money (after my dad kicked me out, and I danced for a living to keep food in my mouth). They paid for uni, and then enabled me to buy my first property at 24, a year before I had my son.

He is now irrationally angry at me because he will need to take a student loan for living costs. I lost my job this year, for complex reasons to do with ASD, and am unable, aged 45, apparently to get another one. This, despite covering his tuition fees through my investments and giving him a nest egg with which to buy his own house from any money the government once saw fit to provide in child benefit. It will now get him the deposit on a two bedroom flat. But it’s never enough.

The other reason he is angry, is because I don’t wish to call his gender dysphoric sister by her made-up name (ironically enough, the same word that is used to describe a bird cage).

It’s not what I named her in the seconds after giving birth to her – no painkillers, of course, to give her the best start in life. Surely my (booby?) prize for this (as society sure won’t give me another one) is that I get to choose what I call her. She does not wish to be known by her so-called “dead name”, according to him. Even by me.

They don’t see it like that though. For them, (the trans alliance) it’s all about self-fulfilment, not about recognising and honouring the efforts and care of those who brought them here. And mothers’ opinions have never counted for much, anyway.

To come back to my original point, I’m not railing against Sydney for using her body to generate attention. It’s what women do, always have done and very likely always will. I think it’s likely this same motivation that’s fuelling gender dysphoria in young girls.

Tits, whether too big, too small, too milky, veined, flat, or prone to disease, have always been weaponised by those who basically just hate women, and so monetise the urge for young girls to change themselves. It was the same in my day, when the proliferation of lad culture made a generation seek implants that, in many cases, left them sick and unable to feed their babies, if indeed they had them at all.

Now, aged 45, I’ve been recalled after a mammogram. I’m not too worried. I expect my tits are still too dense to x-ray well, although they do still take a good picture. I can still generate list when I want. It’s all a game really, except when it isn’t.

What worries me more is that one of my kids and my niece are so unhappy with them, egged on by this toxic narrative, that they want to have them removed altogether.

And so my holiday (two weeks in the sun/ our fort fortnight away in a decade!) has soured because I won’t capitulate to a toxic narrative and refer to her, my niece, as him.

Colluding as a threesome, my elder children and their unhappy cousin have conspired to make me the bad guy.

When I explained my valid reasons for this, they bitched about it in the hotel spa. Facing another meal out with them glowering at me behind slapped arse faces because my opinions differ from theirs. I decided to eject myself to buy cigarettes and drink cocktails alone with my newsfeed. Before I left, my erstwhile daughter wailed, “I just want to be me” and I actually wanted to shake her and tell her: no one’s stopping you.

The biggest pressure on anyone is not my opinion, but how economically viable you are in the end. Self fulfillment and hard cash are intrinsically linked (notably, gender dysphoria is a phenomenon almost wholly associated with the wealthy west. The wider world has bigger problems.

Indeed, for many women their bodies are STILL the best route to financial freedom, as the recent documentary about Bonnie Blue attests.

Women’s bodies, however we may feel about them ourselves, are still dissected and politicised, marketed and abused.

Still, people would rather hate on you for objecting to this, rather than dealing with bigger societal issue. Is it any wonder so many of our logical girls would rather just face life as men?

Am I willing to fall out with my family over a pronoun? Probably not, but I sure can’t deal with a toxic narrative that insists the universe bend to accommodate it rather than making life fairer for all women.

After my own digital storm, Sweeney herself is laughing all the way to the bank, but I’ve got puffy eyes from crying myself to sleep.

Self-acceptance is the hardest game, especially for people on the spectrum. Especially for young girls of every stripe. It’s ironic then, that aged 45, I have more body confidence than ever I had as a teen. I just don’t care what anyone sense thinks anymore- a huge relief to anyone who’s not watching me in my bikini by the pool.

Perhaps it would be better for everyone if women after 45 just disappeared rather than making everyone disgusted with their used up bodies and hardening vociferousness and sense of self. It sure is easier to monetise female pliability, to abuse women’s empathy, or to exploit their young and fertile bodies.

When we’re less attractive and more self assured, we’re much harder to manipulate. But society makes sure we become invisible regardless of how we might feel about ourselves.