We weren’t two students any longer; we weren’t two minds looking for common thoughts. We were two bodies. Bodies don’t talk about Irish penitentials.

Note carefully, by the way, that I wasn’t the only woman in that incident to feel the sickening grunch. The woman I was talking with did, too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other women walking near us did as well, to a somewhat lesser extent; I have certainly felt grunched when women near me were the overt grunchees. Judging one woman that way turns every woman in earshot into a body.…

Multiple experiences of the sickening grunch—not just once, not just twice, but over and over again, as grunchee and as witness—is what makes it so damned hard to take when “sexy” and similar social constructions of femininity haul my body unceremoniously into the conversation when it is utterly irrelevant to what’s going on. And whether I want it to be or not. I don’t control the conversation about my body. I can’t.