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My obsessive-compulsive disorder latches onto several themes that terrorize me daily, but the main three are dying violently, my boyfriend Mike dying, and breasts. That’s right: Sometime during my 35 years on this planet, I developed a crippling fear of tits.
Anytime Mike and I want to watch a movie, I first have to check it on Common Sense Media, a website I subscribe to that helps parents determine if a movie is appropriate for children. It flags scenes involving drug use, sex, violence, and foul language, and I check it to see if I’ll be subjected to bare breasts. I decided against watching Gangs of New York after I read this comment on Common Sense Media: “Brief nudity: breasts, buttocks. Character in bed with three naked women.”
No.
I’m not afraid of bare breasts all the time. I’m mostly fine with them if I’m alone watching a movie, or if I’m single. After all, they’ve been a part of my life ever since I started taking figure drawing and sculpture classes in high school, which was around the same time I realized that mine wouldn’t be getting any bigger. I saw a diverse array of bodies in those classes, and I understand that, like oranges, water pitchers, and presidents, they can theoretically be art. But people don’t usually want to have sex with art.
People do want to have sex with hot celebrities. A movie star disrobing makes me feel insecure to the point of panic because there’s essentially one reason a woman appears naked on screen—to turn us on. Sure, in some instances there’s a better reason, like when a woman gets murdered and becomes a corpse and we need to watch the forensic pathologist at work. But even then, the characters might marvel at how hot the woman was before a madman turned her into a cadaver, and what a shame that she’s not alive anymore to be ogled.
If, on movie night, I’m feeling casual, and I don’t first search the title on my website, having breasts appear on screen surprises me like having tarantulas in my bed. I stiffen. Should I look at Mike, I might see a boner in his eyes. If I make a joke, it’ll be obvious that I’m uncomfortable. If I ignore it, he’ll know that it’s because I can’t look at him, and he’ll know I can’t look at him because there are thoughts exploding through my head like birdshot. “Is he comparing us? Is he horny now? Does he wish her tits were sitting next to him on the futon instead? Does he grieve that mine don’t move around when I walk or run?”
If Mike is cruel enough to look at me while I spiral in distress, he’ll see me hard at work trying to conceal the horror on my face. I concentrate on keeping my eyebrows horizontal. I tell my jaw to relax. I make sure to keep my eyelids from disappearing into my skull. I sit on my hands so he can’t see my fists. What do normal people do during sex scenes? Do they make comments? Do they leave the room? My brain reacts to the fact that Mike is heterosexual as if it is looking down the barrel of a gun. I am embarrassed to be embarrassed. I am ashamed to be ashamed. Nonetheless, I am what I am, a Victorian woman covering up table legs to discourage impure thoughts.
OCD latches onto what a person cares about the most. For some people, it’s their health, and they wash their hands till their skin turns raw (which is the only way I’ve ever seen OCD represented in the media). For others, it’s the fear of accidentally hurting someone, so they’ll avoid the knives in their own kitchen. Evidently, what I seem to care about most is beauty, and not having enough of it. I fear that not having enough of it means my partners will be secretly unsatisfied.
I’m sure there’s some bizarre way that attachment theory and cultural messaging around sex have intersected to make me anxious, but OCD doesn’t follow too many rules, ironically. Experts aren’t sure what causes it. It’s not always related to trauma. A stressful environment can trigger its onset, but not necessarily, and even then, the person must be genetically predisposed to get it. Research suggests that genetics influence who gets OCD, but I have no way to test that hypothesis because, magically, no one else in my family has any mental illnesses (because they vehemently refuse to get them diagnosed). As far as I know, my OCD just emerged in adolescence, probably when I became aware that boobs were valued by the boys I liked.
I came up with a word to describe my chest that also hurts my feelings: booblets. If, in a movie, a woman has to walk by and make a group of men gawk and stare, she’s not going to look like me. She’s going to look like Emily Ratajkowski. A lifetime of jokes about “flat” chests made directly to me (by men and women), or in media about women like me, the proliferation of breast implants, the padded bras I received from “Santa” on Christmas morning, the Maxim magazines teen boys used to read (knowing what children look at to get off nowadays has terrified me out of motherhood), sexism, patriarchy, blah blah—it all helped fossilize in my brain that not only are bigger breasts better, but small breasts are gross, childlike, not womanly, boring.
I fear that Mike will have a “eureka!” moment after Judy Greer bares her large chest in Adaptation and he’ll think twice about committing to a lifetime of booblets. He, of course, has endlessly reassured me that this is not the case, that he loves me the way that I am, and that not everyone thinks the way that I do.
Even though I believe him, I also know that Mike is an actor. He works in movies and TV. Ever since we got together, I’ve lived in terror that one day he’ll do a sex scene with Jennifer Lopez. Jennifer Lopez was the second woman to ever arouse Mike and, I imagine, has been regularly arousing him since Carlos Balános told him to watch Anaconda in seventh grade. The first woman was Bonnie Hunt.
Of course, there are loads of other celebrities he could pretend to have sex with that would be the extinction event of my self-esteem. Anne Hathaway is a big one. On his list of celebrity crushes, Anne Hathaway is No. 1 and has been ever since he saw Les Miserables, when she played a dirty, starving Fantine.
“She’s just so talented,” he tells me. Give me a break.
Enduring a sex scene while sitting on the same futon is one thing. But the world ends the day I watch Jennifer Lopez or Anne Hathaway or Bonnie Hunt pleasure Mike after what I know to be a lengthy rehearsal process.
Over the past 20 years, my OCD progressively worsened until I was finally diagnosed at 35. I could no longer go on dates with Mike without fear clouding how he’d perceive me. I couldn’t go to weddings without overdrawing my account to look a certain way. I’d have panic attacks while shopping for clothes, during movies, at pools. I developed terrible headaches, I’d withdraw, I couldn’t speak, I sought near-constant reassurance. I avoided certain people and events, manipulating Mike to avoid them too to protect myself, feeling terribly ashamed. Mike mentioning a movie he watched that starred an attractive celebrity became enough to split me open. I’d suddenly disappear inside my head and interpret every meaningless look or glance or phrase as evidence of a meaningful problem that I’d have to solve with urgency. As hard as I tried to couch these moments as “just anxiety,” apologizing for having them and telling him it was my problem and not his, I still managed to ruin a lot of birthdays and anniversaries and Christmases. Mike was as patient as he could be, endlessly reassuring, which always made it worse because I’d find holes in his reassurance, then he’d reassure me about the holes, and then I’d find holes inside the holes. He’d often end up bewildered and we’d fight. My OCD crisscrossed our relationship, the triggers like tripwires that would send us both spinning, the physical and psychological repercussions of my distress lasting days.
“Hmm … I don’t think therapy once a week is gonna be enough for you,” my therapist told me. So, in my last month of grad school, I entered an intensive outpatient program dedicated to exposure and response-prevention therapy, the gold standard for OCD treatment.
The idea is that by exposing myself to what I fear the most three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks, and resisting my compulsions to mitigate my anxiety, I’d desensitize my fear response enough to stop over-responding to my triggers. OCD is called “the doubting disease” because sufferers cannot handle doubt and experience it constantly. Part of ERP therapy is learning to become okay with uncertainty. So, I wrote, recorded, and listened to “coping scripts” to tell myself when “doing exposures,” as it’s called. I have different ones for different themes, but this is basically my coping script for breasts:
Breasts are not bombs. Even if they were, you’d probably be okay if they exploded. Nothing in this life is certain. If Mike jumped through the TV to run away with the busty woman on screen, you’d wake up the next morning.
For the first week of IOP, I Googled images of Emily Ratajkowski’s face to look at until I stopped shaking. Then, my therapist and I would look at her together while she talked shit to me:
“Emily Ratajkowski is very beautiful,” she said. “Sure, Gina, it’s possible that Mike could meet her and run away with her. Anything is possible. Women in movies are absolute knockouts, and Mike could prefer one of those women. He might even be unsatisfied with you. So what?”
It’s fun.
The following week, I looked at Bond girls for three hours a day. Then, I watched all the sex scenes in Game of Thrones. I asked Mike if he’d seen anybody’s breasts on screen lately and I’d view those. I’d search the internet for “best sex scenes,” “most graphic sex scenes” “images of Alexandra Daddario in a pool,” “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit photos,” and “Bonnie Hunt, bikini.”
After each exposure, I’d spiral down an inferno, an incontinent sinner obsessed with breasts and beauty, the imagined secret thoughts of men everywhere intruding into my brain. My head ached from stress, my heart raced, my whole body was heavy enough to fall through the Earth. Thousands of nipples from the internet sat in front of my eyes, which funneled them into my brain, which filled in terrible implications about my body and worth, flooding it to bursting with anxiety.
Once I was good and bloated with fear, I was required to perform a “functional activity” in order to prove to myself that I could continue living. Functional activities are anything from making yourself food to doing homework to washing dishes after an exposure. All I could do the first week of IOP after looking at stills of Penélope Cruz was lie down on the floor and listen to myself insist to myself that I wasn’t going to die.
Nipples are not lasers, though they might attract attention like headlights would for deer. It’s possible Mike could leave you for a pair floating down the street in New York City. You must live with the uncertainty that nipples could come between you and your soulmate.
Some days were impossibly difficult, and I became nearly combative with my therapists. “I’ll never get better!” I’d say. “I don’t think I’m even wrong! I’m healthy, probably!” Then I’d watch Jennifer Lopez’s Super Bowl halftime show on YouTube, my head throbbing in my hands as I screamed “Get fucked!” to Albert, my profoundly infirm, AIDS-positive cat.
I graduated IOP after 60 hours of progressively more difficult exposures. I can finally look at images of nude celebrity enemies on my own and then do laundry. But now the real work begins. Soon, I’ll invite Mike to mutually regard cartoon boobs for three minutes. Then we’ll ogle some art together. Then maybe we’ll observe a Bond girl in a swimsuit. Then a topless woman sporting booblets like me. The future contains my iron maiden filled with boners poking me to shreds, when Mike and I finally survey a naked Emily Ratajkowski. This is our goal once I can guarantee that in doing so, I won’t punish him like it’s his fault that both she and I exist in the same three dimensions. Last week, I was able to screen-share an image of Emily in a nice dress to look at with Mike over Zoom for homework. It’s a start.
In order to live comfortably as myself in a culture that drools over milk glands and coerces women to repurpose and repackage them in order to maximize the drool we can collect as capital, this is what I have to do. Fortunately, between movies, TV, Instagram, billboards, sidewalks, beaches, pools, and every other space on planet Earth, the world is crawling with opportunities to practice. And then maybe one day soon, I’ll be able to attend the world premiere of some movie Mike stars in with Jennifer, Anne, and Bonnie without exploding into mist
My obsessive-compulsive disorder latches onto several themes that terrorize me daily, but the main three are dying violently, my boyfriend Mike dying, and breasts. That’s right: Sometime during my 35 years on this planet, I developed a crippling fear of tits.
Anytime Mike and I want to watch a movie, I first have to check it on Common Sense Media, a website I subscribe to that helps parents determine if a movie is appropriate for children. It flags scenes involving drug use, sex, violence, and foul language, and I check it to see if I’ll be subjected to bare breasts. I decided against watching Gangs of New York after I read this comment on Common Sense Media: “Brief nudity: breasts, buttocks. Character in bed with three naked women.”
No.
I’m not afraid of bare breasts all the time. I’m mostly fine with them if I’m alone watching a movie, or if I’m single. After all, they’ve been a part of my life ever since I started taking figure drawing and sculpture classes in high school, which was around the same time I realized that mine wouldn’t be getting any bigger. I saw a diverse array of bodies in those classes, and I understand that, like oranges, water pitchers, and presidents, they can theoretically be art. But people don’t usually want to have sex with art.
People do want to have sex with hot celebrities. A movie star disrobing makes me feel insecure to the point of panic because there’s essentially one reason a woman appears naked on screen—to turn us on. Sure, in some instances there’s a better reason, like when a woman gets murdered and becomes a corpse and we need to watch the forensic pathologist at work. But even then, the characters might marvel at how hot the woman was before a madman turned her into a cadaver, and what a shame that she’s not alive anymore to be ogled.
If, on movie night, I’m feeling casual, and I don’t first search the title on my website, having breasts appear on screen surprises me like having tarantulas in my bed. I stiffen. Should I look at Mike, I might see a boner in his eyes. If I make a joke, it’ll be obvious that I’m uncomfortable. If I ignore it, he’ll know that it’s because I can’t look at him, and he’ll know I can’t look at him because there are thoughts exploding through my head like birdshot. “Is he comparing us? Is he horny now? Does he wish her tits were sitting next to him on the futon instead? Does he grieve that mine don’t move around when I walk or run?”
If Mike is cruel enough to look at me while I spiral in distress, he’ll see me hard at work trying to conceal the horror on my face. I concentrate on keeping my eyebrows horizontal. I tell my jaw to relax. I make sure to keep my eyelids from disappearing into my skull. I sit on my hands so he can’t see my fists. What do normal people do during sex scenes? Do they make comments? Do they leave the room? My brain reacts to the fact that Mike is heterosexual as if it is looking down the barrel of a gun. I am embarrassed to be embarrassed. I am ashamed to be ashamed. Nonetheless, I am what I am, a Victorian woman covering up table legs to discourage impure thoughts.
OCD latches onto what a person cares about the most. For some people, it’s their health, and they wash their hands till their skin turns raw (which is the only way I’ve ever seen OCD represented in the media). For others, it’s the fear of accidentally hurting someone, so they’ll avoid the knives in their own kitchen. Evidently, what I seem to care about most is beauty, and not having enough of it. I fear that not having enough of it means my partners will be secretly unsatisfied.
I’m sure there’s some bizarre way that attachment theory and cultural messaging around sex have intersected to make me anxious, but OCD doesn’t follow too many rules, ironically. Experts aren’t sure what causes it. It’s not always related to trauma. A stressful environment can trigger its onset, but not necessarily, and even then, the person must be genetically predisposed to get it. Research suggests that genetics influence who gets OCD, but I have no way to test that hypothesis because, magically, no one else in my family has any mental illnesses (because they vehemently refuse to get them diagnosed). As far as I know, my OCD just emerged in adolescence, probably when I became aware that boobs were valued by the boys I liked.
I came up with a word to describe my chest that also hurts my feelings: booblets. If, in a movie, a woman has to walk by and make a group of men gawk and stare, she’s not going to look like me. She’s going to look like Emily Ratajkowski. A lifetime of jokes about “flat” chests made directly to me (by men and women), or in media about women like me, the proliferation of breast implants, the padded bras I received from “Santa” on Christmas morning, the Maxim magazines teen boys used to read (knowing what children look at to get off nowadays has terrified me out of motherhood), sexism, patriarchy, blah blah—it all helped fossilize in my brain that not only are bigger breasts better, but small breasts are gross, childlike, not womanly, boring.
I fear that Mike will have a “eureka!” moment after Judy Greer bares her large chest in Adaptation and he’ll think twice about committing to a lifetime of booblets. He, of course, has endlessly reassured me that this is not the case, that he loves me the way that I am, and that not everyone thinks the way that I do.
Even though I believe him, I also know that Mike is an actor. He works in movies and TV. Ever since we got together, I’ve lived in terror that one day he’ll do a sex scene with Jennifer Lopez. Jennifer Lopez was the second woman to ever arouse Mike and, I imagine, has been regularly arousing him since Carlos Balános told him to watch Anaconda in seventh grade. The first woman was Bonnie Hunt.
Of course, there are loads of other celebrities he could pretend to have sex with that would be the extinction event of my self-esteem. Anne Hathaway is a big one. On his list of celebrity crushes, Anne Hathaway is No. 1 and has been ever since he saw Les Miserables, when she played a dirty, starving Fantine.
“She’s just so talented,” he tells me. Give me a break.
Enduring a sex scene while sitting on the same futon is one thing. But the world ends the day I watch Jennifer Lopez or Anne Hathaway or Bonnie Hunt pleasure Mike after what I know to be a lengthy rehearsal process.
Over the past 20 years, my OCD progressively worsened until I was finally diagnosed at 35. I could no longer go on dates with Mike without fear clouding how he’d perceive me. I couldn’t go to weddings without overdrawing my account to look a certain way. I’d have panic attacks while shopping for clothes, during movies, at pools. I developed terrible headaches, I’d withdraw, I couldn’t speak, I sought near-constant reassurance. I avoided certain people and events, manipulating Mike to avoid them too to protect myself, feeling terribly ashamed. Mike mentioning a movie he watched that starred an attractive celebrity became enough to split me open. I’d suddenly disappear inside my head and interpret every meaningless look or glance or phrase as evidence of a meaningful problem that I’d have to solve with urgency. As hard as I tried to couch these moments as “just anxiety,” apologizing for having them and telling him it was my problem and not his, I still managed to ruin a lot of birthdays and anniversaries and Christmases. Mike was as patient as he could be, endlessly reassuring, which always made it worse because I’d find holes in his reassurance, then he’d reassure me about the holes, and then I’d find holes inside the holes. He’d often end up bewildered and we’d fight. My OCD crisscrossed our relationship, the triggers like tripwires that would send us both spinning, the physical and psychological repercussions of my distress lasting days.
“Hmm … I don’t think therapy once a week is gonna be enough for you,” my therapist told me. So, in my last month of grad school, I entered an intensive outpatient program dedicated to exposure and response-prevention therapy, the gold standard for OCD treatment.
The idea is that by exposing myself to what I fear the most three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks, and resisting my compulsions to mitigate my anxiety, I’d desensitize my fear response enough to stop over-responding to my triggers. OCD is called “the doubting disease” because sufferers cannot handle doubt and experience it constantly. Part of ERP therapy is learning to become okay with uncertainty. So, I wrote, recorded, and listened to “coping scripts” to tell myself when “doing exposures,” as it’s called. I have different ones for different themes, but this is basically my coping script for breasts:
Breasts are not bombs. Even if they were, you’d probably be okay if they exploded. Nothing in this life is certain. If Mike jumped through the TV to run away with the busty woman on screen, you’d wake up the next morning.
For the first week of IOP, I Googled images of Emily Ratajkowski’s face to look at until I stopped shaking. Then, my therapist and I would look at her together while she talked shit to me:
“Emily Ratajkowski is very beautiful,” she said. “Sure, Gina, it’s possible that Mike could meet her and run away with her. Anything is possible. Women in movies are absolute knockouts, and Mike could prefer one of those women. He might even be unsatisfied with you. So what?”
It’s fun.
The following week, I looked at Bond girls for three hours a day. Then, I watched all the sex scenes in Game of Thrones. I asked Mike if he’d seen anybody’s breasts on screen lately and I’d view those. I’d search the internet for “best sex scenes,” “most graphic sex scenes” “images of Alexandra Daddario in a pool,” “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit photos,” and “Bonnie Hunt, bikini.”
After each exposure, I’d spiral down an inferno, an incontinent sinner obsessed with breasts and beauty, the imagined secret thoughts of men everywhere intruding into my brain. My head ached from stress, my heart raced, my whole body was heavy enough to fall through the Earth. Thousands of nipples from the internet sat in front of my eyes, which funneled them into my brain, which filled in terrible implications about my body and worth, flooding it to bursting with anxiety.
Once I was good and bloated with fear, I was required to perform a “functional activity” in order to prove to myself that I could continue living. Functional activities are anything from making yourself food to doing homework to washing dishes after an exposure. All I could do the first week of IOP after looking at stills of Penélope Cruz was lie down on the floor and listen to myself insist to myself that I wasn’t going to die.
Nipples are not lasers, though they might attract attention like headlights would for deer. It’s possible Mike could leave you for a pair floating down the street in New York City. You must live with the uncertainty that nipples could come between you and your soulmate.
Some days were impossibly difficult, and I became nearly combative with my therapists. “I’ll never get better!” I’d say. “I don’t think I’m even wrong! I’m healthy, probably!” Then I’d watch Jennifer Lopez’s Super Bowl halftime show on YouTube, my head throbbing in my hands as I screamed “Get fucked!” to Albert, my profoundly infirm, AIDS-positive cat.
I graduated IOP after 60 hours of progressively more difficult exposures. I can finally look at images of nude celebrity enemies on my own and then do laundry. But now the real work begins. Soon, I’ll invite Mike to mutually regard cartoon boobs for three minutes. Then we’ll ogle some art together. Then maybe we’ll observe a Bond girl in a swimsuit. Then a topless woman sporting booblets like me. The future contains my iron maiden filled with boners poking me to shreds, when Mike and I finally survey a naked Emily Ratajkowski. This is our goal once I can guarantee that in doing so, I won’t punish him like it’s his fault that both she and I exist in the same three dimensions. Last week, I was able to screen-share an image of Emily in a nice dress to look at with Mike over Zoom for homework. It’s a start.
In order to live comfortably as myself in a culture that drools over milk glands and coerces women to repurpose and repackage them in order to maximize the drool we can collect as capital, this is what I have to do. Fortunately, between movies, TV, Instagram, billboards, sidewalks, beaches, pools, and every other space on planet Earth, the world is crawling with opportunities to practice. And then maybe one day soon, I’ll be able to attend the world premiere of some movie Mike stars in with Jennifer, Anne, and Bonnie without exploding into mist
