Tina and Me

Some of you might recall that a little while back, I said I had been passed along a bootleg PDF of a book. It was written in the 1980s, and is attributed to a woman named Tina Small; an obscure blonde, exceptionally British mini-icon who did a lot of photosets back in the film days, a couple of absurd softcore porn/sci-fi movies, made a couple of books, and seemingly, faded into oblivion. 

I’ve chatted with a number of you about Tina Small, so I guess she’s pretty popular with the boob lovers out there. Though I gather she’s a bit of a divisive subject. As for me, I don’t know an awful lot about how marketing for soft-fetish porn was conducted in the print industry back in the 1980s, but my argument rests in the fact that she has to be real. It just seems like an awful lot of work to write a memoir-style book and and profit, unless you didn’t really care if you break even. The woman had a story to tell, and she told it. She just didn’t have the internet (jeez, can you imagine?).

So, that leaves this book, Big Girls Don’t Cry. Which I will review, because I honestly really enjoyed this thing.

A lot of what she wrote really resonated with me. She and I are about the same size, boob-wise. She developed a lot earlier than I did. But she and I have encountered a lot of the same kinds of people, and have had a lot of the same experiences and reactions. The book was a one-hit reminder that the world sees women with breasts this size differently, and this gal knows it too. That’s why it was fun watching Tina let loose in this story, from time to time... It reminds me of learning the same thing. 

The story is pretty chronological once she introduces herself. Having to go to a specialist doctor in London; falling in love with a blind man who lives close by; shitty experiences with bosses; working in the countryside, and befriending a rich Saudi man… It’s a pretty crazy story, yo. I guess all of our stories are pretty crazy if we isolate the most memorable things. And in the case of this book, Tina is laying out her whole story.

I’m sure nobody here wants to read a book report, so since I have a little weed in my system, let’s just turn this post into a listicle called  “The Top-Five Moments While Reading Big Girls Don’t Cry That Made Heather Say, ‘Same’.” 

Like…

She falls in love with a blind artist in her town, and he wants to sculpt her face in clay. They develop an appreciation for each other, and after knowing each other for awhile, things get a little heavy one night. He’s never seen her before, of course, and when he moves in, his hands grope around in disbelief and (yeah, it happens) disgust.

Most of us don’t have the convenience of falling in love with a blind artist who is perpetually at arms length. But one time, I went on a date. This was a couple of years ago, when I had just gotten to the size I am now. My friend convinced me to meet a friend of hers; she’d been talking me up, and all that. One thing led to another, and when he realized that I wasn’t just fat underneath that super-flowy hippy muumuu, he kind of short-circuited a little. 

This was at a weird transitional time for me… I was somewhere on the fine line between “I wish a guy would just notice me for something besides my breasts” and “I would be absolutely retarded to think that my breasts aren’t going to play some part in this…” 

Anyway, things went well. By the time we got back to my place, we finally play around a little, which I had been missing — dryspell for ol’ Heather. But then, the moment he sees my breasts (if I decide to let him that far), it’s like a switch got flicked. Face kinda sullen, you can tell the jaw is tight, a few stifled syllables, just a change of personality and a keen interest to change the direction from the (sexy) one it was going into… 

And yes, that only happened a couple of times — usually, it’s actually kinda amusing to be with a man or a woman and watch as they try to figure out what the hell to do with them (I don’t even know the answer to that most days). But in the case of this guy? Those were deformities, and he had some savage morbid curiosity to settle.

It stung, for a while. I’m better now. 

At one point, she’s like, 15. And she ends up at a discotheque, by herself. She’s determined to have a good time, and since she’s pretty developed by then, she doesn’t have any problems with the bartender about getting a couple of drinks. She ends up out on the dance floor, dancing to ABBA, content in the knowledge that her awkward new boobs are just flopping around, and who gives a fuck, she’s enjoying herself.

Damn right, sister. You do you. I dance like a weirdo, but there is a bar where the karaoke guy refers to me getting up on stage as K-cup Karaoke with Heather. But that’s usually when I’m just wearing a snug t-shirt anyway, and don’t really mind showing them off. That bar is comfy, all my friends are there, and there, I’m the karaoke singer with the giant tits, and I’m okay with that because *I* still think that I do a damned good drunken rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” thank-you-very-much. (turn around…)

In other words, it’s the sketchy little five where everybody knows your name, and where you can minimize guys buying you drinks when you’re just in the mood to chill out. But, it takes going to that place the first time, doesn’t it. And realising that you kinda like being the 80s Diva with giant boobies. 

When that blind guy dumps her, Tina has some effed-up dreams. She hates her boobs, because they cost her the guy who she was really falling for, and she has this dream where she’s lying in a forest on her back, and that her breasts are growing to the point where they cover her mouth and muffle her screams. 

Dude! I’ve totally had this dream too! Mine was in my old car… I was in the passenger seat, the doors were locked, and I couldn’t get out. I remember these weird snippets… not memories from the dream, but I knew how I felt when I envisioned certain flickers. Like being terrified, and having this gut feeling that the dream really involved what would happen if I couldn’t get out of the car, and wouldn’t stop growing. Like, imagining that I would get stuck in there and eventually crushed by my own breasts. 

I’m not going to say that “OHMYGODTHEYWONTSTOP” dreams are particularly common among the largest breasted. Maybe they are? Maybe I’m just weird? But it is nice to see that I’m not the first. 

So, she befriends this mega-wealthy Saudi guy who lives near the horse stables where she works. He invites her over to his house, she’s 16 (which used to be age of consent in the UK; I looked it up), so her boss says sure. She goes, hangs out with odd socialites, smokes some of the devil’s grass and generally has a nice time. She goes back for a second party, when a couple of red flags go up. Turns out, she realizes before it’s too late, that he was trying to lure her to Saudi Arabia in order to sell her on the sex trade! Wooooah! Twiiiist tuuuurn, bro!

I’ve never been sold into sex slavery. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. But I have, I think, found myself in the company of odd eccentrics who I wouldn’t have otherwise had the pleasure of knowing over the last few years, were it not for the boobs. So that’s nice too.

I used to work at a magazine, and sometimes, we’d get access to some crazy party, restaurant or gallery opening, some pretty swell invites. I’m inherantly a “wanna go home and curl up with Netflix” kind of girl, but there was this party with this really big band playing, and my friend wanted me to snag her an invite, so I got on the list too because it would have been awkward if I wouldn’t have gone, and there you have it, Heather goes out. 

That night was a blast. We ended up hanging out with these New York socialites at Waffle House, then we go to their crazy-expensive hotel room to hang out and fool around. I kinda had my eye on the guy, but he passed out before he could make it too long. His sister and I, however, had some fun (would never have pegged her). 

But nope. So sex trafficking for me.

At the end of the story, she wraps things up pretty quickly, like she ran out of juice and promised herself she would come back to it. And that’s cool. I get it. She left it at a good spot. 

Except that one of the things she mentions only for a second is the fact that she was a part of a cult, at one point. What kind of cult? Jim Jones? Sex cult? Just a buncha hippies? We need to know! 

She didn’t tell us. I’ve never been a part of a cult, but I was actually invited once! I was in a TJMaxx and this really weird woman came up to me and started making conversation about the wonders of nature, and this group of pagans she belonged to, and They would love to meet me, because I have this really positive, fertile energy. 

But who knows. Maybe I should have taken her up on it. Then I would be living on a well-armed commune of apocalypse-fearing devotees of Anubus. Knowing my luck, it would be a fertility cult, and my name would be changed to Honey Dove-Raven, and I’d have a brood of screaming children who are named after the directions of the wind in Greek mythology. 

They never talk about food in a cult… I imagine cult food would be pretty tasty… Maybe that’s how cultists do it. Great cafeteria.