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Later in her dorm room among more modern girls, she noticed the pressure to fit in.
“Friends looked me up and down and asked me if I had a credit card. They took me to the mall and I bought a Coach bag. I got a bikini wax. I so desperately wanted to fit in. Glamour was a different universe. Now girls see this as reality, as Disneyland. If you’re looking at an airbrushed magazine, you think that’s reality.”
Body Drama talks about bodily changes and self-image, but it also delves deeper into what our mothers never told us.
“We’ve skipped the ABCs of body education like vaginal discharge because the vagina is about sex,” Nancy acknowledged.
To find a particular issue in the book, she picked the dramas based on what her friends griped about, as well as what conversations happened in chat rooms between teens. She breaks the book into chapters: Skin, Boobs, Down There, Hair Mouth Nails, and Shape, and underneath each chapter, she feeds the reader a line that at some point in time has crossed her own, and perhaps all of our, lips. “My nipples are always hard,” “I need cosmetic surgery BAD,” and “I hate the way I look down there.” Statements that made me want to turn the page to find out why.
Which is how I found the vulva spread.
“These are our issues,” she laughed after I applauded her vulvas. “And if we can just nip this in the bud early on, then we can spend time on more important issues. [Many of us are] completely covered in shame when we could worry about something more important. We are so lucky to have what we’ve got, but we spend so much time on breast implants. We love our vulvas, we love the way it feels, but hate the way they look.”
I wondered if Body Drama could infiltrate our education system to lighten up our schools’ sex education programs, because with Nancy’s heartwarming voice, humor brings light to what has become an epidemic in our society. She agreed.
