Since then you have begun to learn what it is like to live life in the body. What it’s like to despair so much at the prospect of life in the body that you almost chose to end that life. “Jessica has big lips,” says a boy in your seventh-grade pre-algebra class. “That means she gives good blow jobs.” Life in the body means that no physical part of you—not even the lips that you have no choice but to bring with you into prealgebra class—is left unseen, unremarked upon, uncalculated for sexual potential.
