Page 3 Newspaper Clippings
The story of a bias, one of the consequences of which was I only being aroused and attracted by fair skinned, skinny women, girls with big breasts
This is a story that I originally wrote using the new medium series feature. But it didn’t get many reads, probably because series is not as widely read as fully formed articles yet (which I might be completely wrong about in this assumption). Also series is a feature only for mobile native apps and not for the web (which could mean medium is getting its majority traffic from mobile apps). Hence I’m reproducing it in the page format.
This share is very vulnerable in that it’s something I’ve never told to anyone before. But I felt a responsibility to do so. Hence this. I hope you won’t mind your judgements if they arise at all.
After Iswarya Rajagopal’s What’s Behind The Blouse and Avleen Kaur Lamba’s I’m Beautiful
I was in 1st grade, when I started cutting paper clippings of models and actresses in bikinis from page 3 of newspapers.
Hid them in the damp, dark spaces under the water pump just outside the house.
I’d stealthily go there, every chance I’d get, cautious of any eyes around.
And try to drool over those models’ busty breasts
But my salivary glands hadn’t hit puberty yet.
Fifth grade, I drained my side-eye at pretty thighs
and dreamt of bare bodies only of girls in my class,
whose flesh reflected sun like snow and ice,
Ignorant to not see the magic of the light
on all pigments and the resultant hues.
7th grade, I remember sitting in a bus,
constantly checking on my mother
to see if she had gone to sleep,
so that I could turn my head around
to see a dark line between two greens
of a woman of North East Indian Origin.
I was like a baser warrior, devoid of truth so beautiful and simple
that it could come in any size of cup and still be loved like made free throws.
Some went in at high arcs some at low,
some were thrown with short finger grips, some with palm’s
10th grade and I had befriended many brown girls.
But every night, in the habit of fantasising, lying down with every pretty girl
I knew that fairer breasts came first, brown later,
unaware of the bias that had creeped deep inside my neural networks,
like a pattern learnt, of catastrophic dopamine proportions.
Watch Your Brain vs Porn from BuzzFeed and The Science of Pornography Addiction (SFW) from AsapScience (better video)
College, and I had my room all to myself.
My hand jerking in and out of rhythms of “Hardcore Porn”.
My bent, towards the page 3 fair breasts,
still abreast, like zombie virus.
You do not know your mistake until you realise out of it,
like with The Truman Show’s Jim Carrey
I read these two poems, and I forced myself to question the authority of existence of some of my habits,
Why I fancied green and blue eyes behind white more than black and brown behind swarthy.
Is there a stare so innocent, complimented by the most decent smile, to tell a woman how beautiful her breasts and butt, lips and teeth are, whole body is, instead of obliquely objectifying full of life subjects?
Subjects subjected to silent subjugation by eyes
that imagine their hands full of breasts, gauging size.
That peep shamelessly to catch a glimpse of a topological shapes
between reproductive organs, as if they were newly discovered elements.
I started rising in love with poetry.
For every verse of story told, I couldn’t help falling in love
with a human being
devoid of gender, height, colour, religion, stigma lies.
And like breaths have the power to control mind,
poetry killed the prejudice of lust of 3rd page newspaper clippings,
For life.
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