As a kid, I don’t remember being much into toys, but I do remember seeing my mom’s bras around the house, which were always way more fun for me to play with than My Little Ponys. That said, there was something very morose about these bras. They had giant wires and shiny stretchy lace fabric that went all the way up to the shoulder and not one, not two, but three clasps in the back. It looked less like a bra and more like a harness used for bungee jumping. I was always desperate to make the adults in the house laugh, so I used to put Mom’s bras on and dance around. I’m now ashamed at how juvenile and corny that bit was, but for a six-year-old, it was pretty cutting-edge.
My education about breasts was an episode of Who’s the Boss? where Tony Danza had to buy Alyssa Milano a bra. God, I miss the days when a sitcom title could be a rhetorical question. Anyway, the first breasts I ever saw in person that weren’t mine belonged to Barbie. So when later I first saw my mom’s boobs, I was horrified by how mushy and pendulous they were and that they had two giant moles on them. I later found out these “moles” were nipples and Barbie was the deformed gimp—not my mother. But as I said earlier, I was never too into Barbie. I didn’t even enjoy putting Barbies in microwaves because the aftermath always made my Hot Pockets taste like synthetic chemicaly plastic, and I preferred them to taste like synthetic chemicaly meat and cheese. I hated Barbie’s hard nubby boobs. They seemed so stoic and aloof. They were impossible to play with. They were like the mean girls in middle school who refused to hang out with you. I was more of a Rainbow Brite kind of kid anyway. She was cute but not distractingly sexual. And she had already achieved my dream of having a talking horse.
In terms of other kinds of entertainment, we weren’t a big Disney family. I remember watching The Little Mermaid and Snow White and being very underwhelmed by the whole princess rigmarole. They all seemed whiny and victimish to me, always waiting around to be saved by a handsome white blond guy Hitler would have jerked off to. The princesses always needed men to rescue them even though they seemed to be perfectly fine in their fancy castles and cottages. I felt like they had amazing lives and fake problems. Snow White was living the ultimate fantasy with seven hilarious dwarves who were obsessed with her, but she let some lame Ken doll come along and ruin it. As far as I was concerned she was an ingrate.
I didn’t watch a ton of cartoons, but in retrospect, it’s clear that I gravitated toward the more androgynous characters. I loved the Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and my all-time favorite, albeit short-lived, Animaniacs. Betty Boop always annoyed me: her over-the-top femininity felt forced and desperate. Maybe I was projecting because I myself felt forced and desperate to be feminine. Or maybe I was just pissed because I secretly wanted to be her. Despite her obvious charms, Betty Boop wasn’t for me. Even as a kid I knew there was something dark about a sexy cartoon. To this day I don’t understand why animators would make people want to have intercourse with pixels. That said, I had a pretty serious fascination with Jessica Rabbit. She was more self-possessed, with ample side-eye and an attitude like she would cut a bitch if they acted a fool. Even though her ankles were drawn in a way that made them look broken from her high heels, I saw her as powerful instead of just a sex object. She somehow exuded control of her objectification, even though I’ll bet she was being drawn on a piece of paper by a man who was into that weird porn where people have sex through a pizza.
I also liked that Jessica Rabbit was a grown woman, unlike Boop, who infantilized herself with impish sounds and childish mannerisms. Conversely, Jessica Rabbit seemed very bored of sex. Regardless of my psychoanalysis of them, they inculcated me with one very crucial fact: Boobs mattered. Every story they were in was about men getting hit by cars or their jaws dropping when they walked by, anything to get a glimpse of their impossibly perky breasts. Men were literally dying to see them. My hippocampus took note.
My theory that boobs were the ticket to happiness was confirmed when my dad married his third (I think) wife when I was (I think) ten. I was not thrilled when my dad started bringing his new girlfriend around the house, but I was fascinated by her ethos and body. She drove a tomato-red Mercedes-Benz 450 convertible. I had to Google the model just now, so don’t think I all of a sudden know about cars. I don’t. But this one is burned into my memory because of how sexy it was. It’s the one that has a cherubic front and an almost cartoonish body, just like hers. Her waist was tiny and she was impossibly tan. Not that you would have noticed any of this, given how distractingly bulbous her breasts were. She was part pretty alien, part Dolly Parton. But as a kid, I saw her as a real live Jessica Rabbit.
Since I basically thought she was my cartoon hero in the flesh, let’s just call her Jessica. Jessica was the most confident woman I had ever met. At the time I didn’t understand the concept of having confidence, I just thought she was the bitch trying to replace my mom and ruin my life. By the time Jessica came around, my older sister had started developing boobs. My sister is beautiful and blond, so between her, Jessica, and my mom, I was constantly surrounded by buxom blond women who got a lot of attention. Not sure if my genetics had just taken a couple years off or if my pituitary gland had mono, because I was flat-chested to the point of a possible inversion. I also had a knee condition that made me limp and unable to cross my legs or walk in a ladylike way. Later in life I learned that it’s a pretty common condition called Osgood-Schlatter disease. It’s caused by a growth spurt and probably GMOs or some shit we eat in mass quantity our government refuses to acknowledge or do research on.