Member-only story
Awards for the best body parts.
This body part gets a trophy! And this body part gets a trophy!
[insert Oprah gif]
I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed and horrified by all the news out there these days. Sometimes you just want to hide beneath a blanket with your teddy bear and a big bag of spicy tacos. I relate, really I do, but I’m going to need you to forget all of that and allow yourself to get overwhelmed and horrified by this particular news story: HERE.
Because I want to write a funny thing about it. And that is more important than your trauma.
The article summary:
A cheerleading coach thought it would be super fun and not at all emotionally scarring to hand out awards TO TEENAGERS for things like “Big Booty”, “Big Boobie” and “String Bean”. (I know I make a lot of things up for the sake of humor, but I am not making this up. You can tell, because it isn’t funny.)
What is funny is to imagine what would have happened to me if, over the course of my career as a dance teacher, I decided to try this ritual out on my own students. There are a few things I could expect:
- I’d get a lot of therapy bills mailed to me and, to be fair, I’d probably need to pay them.
- However I wouldn’t be able to pay them, because at some point my students’ parents would have murdered me and I’d be nothing more than a little pile of dust with an outdated pair of spectacles sitting on top.
- It would be deserved.
Because us ladies already get chopped up into body parts all the time. Occasionally it’s a serial killer reducing us into piles, but more often it’s cameras or conversations doing the division. Turns out, we mostly don’t enjoy being treated like a puzzle box of pieces where assembly is optional and our entire value could depend on one piece.
It’s especially rough for teenagers who haven’t yet developed the thick layer of cynicism that allows women to exist in the world without setting everything on fire. Part of being a teen is learning to grow that layer, but at that point it isn’t thick enough to keep all the barbs out. The ones that get through can embed themselves in the psyche for years and years.
