Thick

On being a young girl in a "grown" body

Greetings friends,

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here, but I think you guys have gotten used to me posting sporadically. Now that I’ve submitted my book, I have more space to write and I promise to come here more.

Anyway, before we get into this rambling, I want to acknowledge the obvious, which is that this piece could be considered ridiculously irrelevant in light of our devastating political times, and maybe I could be using my time as a writer to take on more urgent matters. To that, I’ll say that I am working on a piece about the election for a publication, but I am also genuinely useless right now, because I don’t have any answers and I’m filled with rage and fear. In other words, I am not the voice you necessarily need at the moment. Follow Brittney Cooper on Instagram, she’s been absolutely brilliant about this whole thing. But I’m weighing in too, just give me another week or so to form some cohesive thoughts.

Anyway,I recently lost 30 pounds, which is not something to be celebrated, even though I did it intentionally. I have a 10-15 pound range that I consider my fighting weight, and I’d gotten about ten pounds above that this Spring. But when I started dropping pounds, I just kept going for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why. I guess I was just curious about how I’d look thinner. “Thinner” has been a lifelong pursuit of mine, although I was very happy with how I looked about 15 pounds heavier.

I’m down to the size I was when I was 14 or 15. I knew what the scale said, but I didn’t believe it until I bought a pair of jeans in the same junior size I wore back then (yes, I still wear junior jeans because I am a bird.) I don’t know how to feel. Part of me wants to gain 10 pounds, but there’s also a voice in my head saying, “Thinner.” I keep thinking about getting off the restrictive diet that took the weight off, but I just don’t feel ready yet. Part of me is afraid that I’ll gain back the 30 and then some.

My internalized fatphobia and years of disordered eating are topics for another day. What I’ve hyper fixated on this week is what it meant to have a body like this when I was just a little girl. I have a more womanly build now but even back then I was thick. I had long shapely legs and big old breasts and I was a child.

I was virtually invisible to my male peers. I got a little attention here and there and talked to a few guys, but in general, teenage boys paid me dust. However, I experienced sexual harassment from grown men nearly every day from the time I was 12.

I am fortunate that no one in my family ever treated me inappropriately, nor was I mistreated by any of my parents’ friends; to be fair, my mother generally kept me far away from men as her way of ensuring that couldn’t happen. But strange men had no problem letting me know of their desire, and many of them were unfazed when I told them my age.

When men in their 20s and 30s hit on me, I rationalized it by telling myself they must’ve thought I was 17 or 18 (I was not wise enough to know then that would still be gross!) But when guys who were 40 or 50 plus bothered me, I was creeped out. These guys were my father’s age, and I struggled to understand how they could see me as anything but a child.

I’m 40 now and men in their late 40s and up still make me feel uncomfortable. I feel like that little girl again when they approach me. I also think it’s weird that older men take for granted that women 10+ years younger than them would want to talk to them. I feel like they should try and feel you out a little bit, see if you’re open to being hit on by an old ass man before they just go for the kill, but maybe that’s just me.

To be completely honest, I am also deeply biased against older men (Gen X and above) because of their politics. Most of them idolize Mike Tyson. They’re LGBTQphobic and misogynistic as fuck. Talking to them is like watching an episode of Martin in 2024—-they didn’t age well.

To this day, I am still so angry about how those men sexualized me and made me feel unsafe and public. It sickens me that little Black girls are not treated as children by members of their own community.

Sexual harassment was a fixture in my life until I moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles 5 years ago. When I lived in Inglewood, I dealt with it occasionally, but I was rarely on foot like I was in New York, DC and Chicago in the past. And even when I did walk the streets, there were rarely other people there.

Now I live in a very “walkable,” largely White area, and though I see men all the time, they don’t bother me at all. I can count on two hands the number of times men have approached me in my neighborhood, and they’ve all been respectful,

White men never really bothered me when I was younger, either. It’s always been (primarily) Black and (also) Latino men who made me uncomfortable in my own skin. I resent that I had to leave a largely Black community with a pedestrian culture to stop being messed with on a daily basis.

My daughter is 11 and I’m both scared for what she may endure on her body journey, but also relieved that she lives somewhere where she won’t be so frequently walking around for men to bother her. She also won’t have the freedom to travel the city alone like I once did (I am not letting her go across town on LA public transit and there will certainly be a limit to how far I’d let her go alone in an Uber when she’s old enough.) What if she moves to an urban area as a young woman? Will she be unprepared to deal with how men can be in public? She witnessed it with me when she was small but it’s been many years since then.

It’s a mindfuck seeing myself with my “old” body, though it looks substantially different on this version of me. I’ll probably go on and thicken up some in the next few months. My butt doesn’t look as big as it was this Summer and that is of grave concern to me.

I’d like to believe young girls aren’t dealing with the level of harassment from grown men that my peers and I faced. When I was a teenager, a tape of R. Kelly raping a 14-year-old girl was for sale in barbershops. Today, there’s a lot more talk about how inappropriate (and illegal!) it is for grown men to have relationships with little girls.

There’s not much data about rates of street harassment, and none that I could find about how it particularly impacts Black girls. I’ve also never seen any study done into the rates of harassment young girls face at the hands of adult men. Maybe that should be my next project.

Anyway, I’m rambling now. Y’all be good to yourselves, and each other.

Jamilah