Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

(As a teenage girl, you are a world-class expert—a veritable PhD in visual semantics—on the subject of the facial expressions of people who are looking at you.) When you put your violin under your chin, there is a brief moment in which your worth as a human being is not being gauged on a scale of relative beauty (her face is a six, but her ass is a ten). When you play the violin you are able, for a moment, to leave the female body in which you are contained, the body that signals sex, whether you want it to or not, yet is somehow never sexy enough. By putting a violin under your chin—or even carrying a violin case through the puke-green corridors of your high school—it is as if you’re telling the world that you have authority on something, and in having this authority, you are more complex, more consequential than your young female body suggests. For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.