’s reality, the only logical explanation for my body odor was that I was an orphan whose parents’ death in some freak accident had led to my subsequent neglect. He replied, “Well, then, tell your mother to buy you deodorant.” Confused, but ever cheery, I informed him that they were not. , pulled me aside during gym class to ask me if my parents were dead. The most memorable conversation about my stinkiness was when my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. One issue for a stinky middle schooler is that people will actually remark on your scent. Not to point any fingers, but my mother refused to buy me products that acknowledged that I had hit puberty, and instead told me to scrub my armpits harder. For some reason, it had never been explained to me. However, when I was a child, I was unfamiliar with the concept of deodorant. As an adult, I am known for smelling as fresh as a tropical beach after a rainstorm, because I surround myself with candles and fragrances. Years later, this discoloration would make it appear as if I always had on wispy eyeshadow, but at twelve years old I resembled King Julien, the lemur in “Madagascar.” I also had discolored rings around my eyes.

I looked like I had a Steve Harvey mustache that was impossible to shave. The skin above my upper lip had darkened with scarring from a bad habit of nervously licking my lips. When I used it, my hair became too flat and delicate to support hats, which might have been the best remedy for my shame. Worst of all, my hair looked nothing like that of the beaming child on the box, which makes sense-according to a recently trending topic on Twitter, the kids on the boxes did not use the product. Where my natural hair would leave combs broken in its wake-there is a reason Lil Wayne rapped “tougher than Nigerian hair” in “A Milli”-my relaxed hair would break if a breeze hit it wrong. Every six to eight weeks, she would slather my head in Just for Me No-Lye Conditioning Crème Relaxer, which burned my scalp. As a kid, my hair, which my mother insisted that I chemically straighten, was dry and brittle. It didn’t help that I was an ugly duckling. Since birth, every piece of media I have encountered has socialized me to hate all of my body parts. I am very self-conscious about the way that I look, in part because I am a woman who happens to be conscious. This may seem like an irrational reaction, but you are wrong and stupid, and also, shut up!

But, though it’s fine for me to have disdain for my extremities, for strangers to rate my ten toes as anything other than “perfect,” “beautiful,” or possibly “dainty” is a hate crime that should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. In my humble opinion, feet are just ugly hands, and hands are not that cute to begin with. To my horror, I learned that I had a wikiFeet rating of two stars, categorized as “okay feet.” While “okay” is technically not an insult, it is not a compliment, either. But, personally, my sexual proclivity is that no one look at my feet, ever. I do not judge the sexual proclivities of members of the wikiFeet community. A friend forwarded my rating to me, insisting that I had “made it.” The idea that anyone would invest time and energy ogling my feet was beyond my comprehension, but it was true-I was featured on a Web site that averaged more than ten million visitors a month. I found out that I was on it in 2019, at a time when I would not have described myself as a celebrity. For those who do not know, wikiFeet is a photo-sharing foot-fetish site dedicated to celebrities’ feet.

Girl oops meme