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From the New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, loss and redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakrabardi.

Me Too

Over the past several weeks, millions of women have revealed that they too have been victims of sexual harassment or abuse.

In today's episode, we bring you another Me Too from graduate student Heather Bertman.

Cleopatra Coleman stars in Fox's The Last Man on Earth and Showtime's White Famous.

She reads Heather's essay, My Body Doesn't Belong To You.

When the stranger yelled at me from his car window, I was carrying my Zamiocalkus Zamiopholia, a large tropical plant I had just bought at a greenhouse.

I couldn't hear what he said, but I don't think he was complimenting my plant.

His words, whatever they were, brought to mind all of the derogatory comments and crude propositions I had heard before.

From different car windows and different men, all of the comments about my body and suggestions for what I could do with it.

It was as if once I turned 16, my body no longer belonged to me, but to the world at large, and to certain men who drove their cars past it.

When I was a little girl, playing shuttles in my family's garden, my body felt as if it belonged only to me.

We had a rectangle-shaped yard out of which we would dig a smaller rectangle, and this dark patch of soil would become our garden.

At five, six, and seven years old, my siblings and I laughed as we shook out fat chunks of grass and produced a shower of dirt that went up our noses and down our chests.

I liked the way the dirt felt, all freshly dug against my skin, and I asked my mother to bury me in it the way she sometimes did at the beach.

She buried me halfway, and I smiled and posed for a picture.

I liked being that way. A bare muddy torso with a handful of seeds that I thought might grow carrots and yield a future in which my body was my body.

And your body was your body.

During my senior year of high school, I went in for my second bra fitting at J.C. Penny, where the fitters sniffed a little in disapproval when telling me my cup size as if she were thinking, how dare you grow those?

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