My full-grown height is about 5’2″ (so, the same height as my mother), but we have completely different body shapes. Mum has always been fairly petite, whereas I’m more like my maternal grandmother – solid, stocky and plump. I have heavier bones than Mum (and larger feet – her feet are size 5, mine are 7.5 – 8), and I have always been a fairly “solid” kid, except for one brief period between the ages of eight and nine, where I rushed through a growth spurt and my body took about a year to catch back up with things. I was never one of the tall kids in the class – heck, the only time I was about middle height for my age was when I was about twelve or thirteen, when I’d had most of my adolescent growth spurt, and some of the taller girls hadn’t really started theirs yet.

I can remember one of my high school peers (who had also gone to the same primary school as me) being treated as a “slut” for no other reason than she appeared to be interested in boys, and she had large breasts. The boys a year or so older than us (and thus experiencing the full hormonal surge of puberty) were, of course, interested in her because she had the large breasts, and the reputation of being a “slut”. Myself, I doubt she was any more a slut than I was – and in my case I was a social outcast because I was “weird” – I suspect she didn’t know how to say “no” when the guys asked her out, or couldn’t think of a socially acceptable means of doing so. She also had bad luck in her particular cronies, who tended to be somewhat bitchy and backbiting, in the way that adolescent girls can be. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a slut when she started out at that high school. I do know that by the end of the first year there, she’d clearly decided if she was going to be labelled a “bad girl” by all and sundry, she was going to be a bad girl. So she was smoking, and wearing her clothes tight and short, mouthing off to teachers, hanging around with the Bad Crowd and similar.

We used to catch the same bus home some days, and one of the things I realised then was that she wasn’t any happier about the whole mess that puberty had become than I was. She’d had the whole parcel of issues that being female involves in our society dumped on her, and she wasn’t equipped (psychologically or sociologically) to deal with them. Looking back, I think I rushed headlong into being “fat” because it was a way of avoiding a lot of the same problems – if I was a fat girl, at least I didn’t have to worry about guys coming on to me. Then again, I was hyper-paranoid about sex from about age nine onwards, for a variety of reasons, and I really did (and still do, to a large extent) have problems handling sexual attention. Then again, I’ve also purposefully forgotten a lot of my high school experience, if only because I figure I don’t need a constant re-run of my time in hell.

I started developing at 9 (which was the same time I started to realise I liked girls), menstruating at 11 and wore a 38H bra by the time I was 14. When puberty began for me, I was 5’2″ and of a fairly average weight for my age and height. I’m only 5’4″ more than a decade later, and have E-cups and a BMI of 26… and am in recovery from bulimia, which curse lasts a lifetime from all accounts and my experience.

I’m on a neuropathic painkiller that causes me to gain weight irregularly around my bosom and waist, and I can’t bear to wear a bikini because I hate my body so much. I haven’t been happy in my own skin in a long, long time, and haven’t dated since I was 20. It doesn’t really help that my stepmother, 20 years older and mother of four, can fit into my school dresses from age 10 (though they are indecently short on her, too). She does her best not to rub it in, but she has her own body dysmorphia problems.

Why can’t society just stop stigmatising people based on our differences anyway? We’re never going to -all- be uniformly the same, in looks or gender or sexuality or any damn thing else. Why not accept it? And I know this sounds strange from what I’ve just said about not being happy with myself, but I’ve been trying to -be- happier with myself for years. Vanity sizing is defeating me.

In 5th or 6th grade I visited a friend who was slower to develop, and had a pool. We went swimming, so I was wearing a bathing suit. Her mom looked at me and asked her daughter why she “didn’t have boobies like sophia’s?” I don’t know if it was the same visit, but her dad told me I had a beautiful figure. Also, come to think of it, her older sister also liked to brush my hair for hours and hours, so maybe they were just a really strange family. And now this friend is a free-lance writer who writes about sex.

Because, as loads of people have mentioned, MAYBE IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAT WE STOP HARRASSING EARLY-MATURING GIRLS INTO DEVELOPING PSYCHIATRIC PROBLEMS.

But also, on the early puberty/height/weight thing, it’s worth noting that there is no gene known that contributes more than 2% of genetic-based variation in height, or more than 4% to genetic variation in weight. So saying the early-puberty genes are next to genes “controlling” height and weight is overstating, since at most you’re going to be dealing with about a 2-4% variation in height (assuming that you have a strongly-acting variant at both loci next to the novel genes) in height, or a 4-8% variation (ditto) in weight. Which is not enough to make someone who was otherwise going to be short tall, or someone who was otherwise going to be thin fat. But since the OBESITY CRISIS BOOGA BOOGA is based on .2% here here and there, I suppose at that level it is a significant impact.

Oh God, mara, you’re bringing back memories for me because I have a photo of me, aged maybe ten, wearing one of my mother’s old bathing suits. It fit me – but the dreadful thing for me, and I remember her mentioning it at the time in a superior kind of way, was that it was the suit she wore when she was pregnant with me. (It was a rather psychedelic late 60s combination of black, white and yellow swirls, and it had those horrible stiff breast cups, which I took the scissors to because they were so uncomfortable.) Way to give me the message that I was impossibly, grossly fat compared to her. Truth was, she was very, very thin anyway, and she was sick as a dog through both her pregnancies so I’m guessing (there are no photos of her at that time) she either didn’t put on much weight or may have even lost some.

Anyway, the vast majority of the time as a teen, I got tutted at because her old clothes, thankfully for me, didn’t fit me – most of them were way too small. In her case, they were neither sexy nor stylish – I’d never have been encouraged to wear them if they were! – and what I wore seemed to be very much less a factor in getting hit on than obvious boobs and equally obvious extreme naivety.

This was about when I started getting strong strong “you are fat” messages from her, too. Well, to a certain degree I’d been getting them all along, but they definitely intensified around then. It wasn’t until I was about 30 years old that my critical thinking kicked in and I realized that, at about 100 pounds – I remember the scale hovering right around 100 that year, when I was in grade 7, so that sometimes I was two digits, sometimes three – and about 5’3, almost my full adult height, I could not possibly have been all that fat. Actually, it was probably the only year of my life that I was, yes, skinny. But with boobs. I guess the boobs were the problem.

‘Problem’ as defined by my mother. She definitely bought into the premature-girl-adolescence-paranoia. Though… mine wasn’t really all that premature. Boobs starting around 11, period at 12/13. I was totally average and didn’t even know it, except through Judy Blume, whom I would have been lost without. My mom, by her own account, was so completely flat as a board till she was 14 that, until then, she used to wear bikini bottoms without a top. This was in Europe, after the war. Maybe they had a shortage of cloth? I don’t know. I take it all with a grain of salt. But, yes, in her own memory, she ‘wins’ because she didn’t need a bikini top, let alone a bra, not because she was slutty – because she was totally childlike and androgynous and, quite possibly, anorexic. And I just never quite managed to live up to that.

Okay, but? Here’s the (other) bizarre part. When I was around that magic age, 12/13 years old, 100 lbs, with boobs, hardly any hips or stomach, and a period, I was about the same height as my mom, but slightly thinner. Except, um, that I was ‘fat’. Oh, I’m getting retroactively confused. But anyway, because she kept herself so artificially skinny (I think her natural healthy weight is more around 140) her clothes sort of fit me at that point. AND SHE MADE ME WEAR THEM. Her clothes. Yes, she did. Instead of buying me my own. I was in private school with a uniform, so I didn’t have to wear her outfits to school. But, other times – particularly for more ‘dressy’ occasions – yes, I did. And her previous-years’ bathing suits. My theory is that she loved seeing her clothes on a slightly-skinnier body. They more or less fit me, as I remember.

The big flaw in this plan? I was wearing, at 12, the slightly-sexy though classy clothes of a stylish almost-40 year old woman. Yes, I’m sure they must have looked ‘good’ on me, in a sense. They also made me look wayyyy older and more hit-on-able than my age. Not hit-on-able by teenage boys, particularly , but by, well, men who were roughly my parents’ age. Surprise surprise.

Oh, my poor mother. It certainly wasn’t that she wanted me to be hit on by older men. She was just … limited, I think, in her ability to keep a grip on reality around issues that were so loaded for her, for her own reasons. Come to think of it, she never knew when she was dressing sexy, either. She would wear these deeply plunging necklines and then be bewildered when the dentist tried to look down her cleavage, and she would say, “but that was an exPENsive dress!”, as if that made it asexual.

I’m sure she just wanted me to wear her clothes because she thought they would look pretty on me. And they did, probably. The sexy factor just wasn’t something she would allow into her conscious mind, though it was always in her fears. She would have been apalled by the older-man factor, if I had told her. I myself wasn’t apalled. I kind of liked the attention, and I must have had a guardian angel or two watching over me, because nothing TOO damagingly sleazy ever happened to me at that early age, which was a minor miracle in itself, as I had many close calls with men following me home from the bus stop and into bushes etc.

But, my poor mom. Yes, she spread rampant confusion in my little mind, which took all clarifying forces of Judy Blume to dispel (and, really, thank GOD I was a reader, or I would have known nothing), but it was only because she was hopelessly confused herself. I know want to reach back in time and give her a big hug.

@volcanista: Absolutely, it’s never a victory to be harrassed or assaulted, and I’m sorry if my comment seemed in any way to imply that. What I was trying to get at, though, is that if a girl doesn’t fully understand the difference between getting a compliment and getting catcalled, it’s possible for her to respond to a catcall by feeling oddly proud that she actually, apparently, for once looked the way she was “supposed” to. I say this as someone who has been fortunate enough not to experience assault in my life so far, but who did experience catcalls at an early age.

Not sure if that made my point more or less clear…