Breast Envy

My friend Lisa has this thing where she can’t be in the same room as certain body types without checking out mentally. We’ll be somewhere and a woman with a particular shape will pass, and I watch Lisa’s face close. She’s already decided she doesn’t belong there.

The bad night was when she actually said it out loud: crippled. How do you unsay that about your own body?

There’s a website for it. A whole forum called BreastEnvy where women get together and trade notes on what they don’t have, what they hate about themselves. And yeah, there are guys in there too, except their interest is the jealousy specifically. They get off on women wanting what other women have.

I don’t have a clean thought about this. It’s just something that exists now, something Lisa visits when she’s feeling bad about the thing that makes her feel bad. The weirdness of it. The loneliness in numbers.