Breasts. Boobs. Funbags. Knockers. Tetons. The emblem of womanhood, the piece de resistance of the female figure, the glands that launch a thousand stares. Music celebrates them. Artwork mimics them. Poets laud them. Men throughout the globe worship them. Oh, Diana of Ephesus, you many-breasted wonder! Sing, Muses, of those lustrous Twin Peaks! Draw us to your melodic bosoms!
And inspire us of the not-so-fully ripened melons to look down at our meager offerings, yet not in mourning.
Weep not, ye sisters of the kiddie-sized milkshakes! Mourn not, you bearers of the B-cup, hope may yet be found in this narrow cleft, in the shallow valley of this land. Hail, you, the miracles of the WonderBra, the marvels of the Implant, the wonders of the push-up, the padded, the silicone and saline!
Or better yet, turn your peepers to a new horizon, where you may accept your miniature hooters as natural beauties, revel in your little lady lumps with joie de vivre and brandish your humble rack with pride. A new day is coming.
My lovely lady lumps?
“The female breasts have received more erotic attention from males than any other part of the body.” – The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body by Desmond Morris.
I am sitting in the tiny living room of my coworker’s shotgun house in Houma, watching an awards show on television. Not sure which one, because no one is really paying attention. Most of my fellow newspaper hacks are drinking beer, laughing, and gabbing about nothing. One of my fellow journalists, my latest crush, sits on a nearby sofa studying his iPhone, intent on winning another game of Connect Four. I am studying him, intent on gaining his attention. This crush is intelligent, sweet, liberal, progressive, fun, cool. His interests reach beyond fishing, he reads, and he voted for Barack Obama: winner!
“Whoa!” he shouts, jerking up from his game, his entire upper half rocking forward so that he nearly falls off the sofa. I look at the television screen to see what miracle has broken the spell of Connect Four: a big-breasted woman. Some of my other male friends, all intellectuals, smile and nod in brotherhood. They have seen them, too.
So have I. And they look nothing like the two inconspicuous lumps hiding beneath my T-shirt. My poor little boobs sit neglected on my chest. If even these well-evolved men still pound their chests for large breasts, I am fighting a losing battle. These are the kinds of guys who say they love smart women with dark hair and glasses and little boobs and curvy hips, but then gawk at the loud blonde with the huge breasts and high heels and stick figure. Personally, I consider my boobs kind of cute, but cute boobs don’t enjoy the instinctive acclaim of large ones, even from non-Neanderthals. I sink lower into the couch, defeated.
Average bra size of the American woman 15 years ago: 34B.
Average bra size of the American woman today: 36C.
Angelina Jolie’s bra size: 36C
Halle Berry’s bra size: 36C
My bra size: 36B
Most of my friends love their large boobs. They take pride in their coveted C-cups, their awe-inspiring D-cups, brandishing their giant bosoms with stylish, fitted clothing. My friend from Austin wears a T-shirt proclaiming, “Everything is Bigger in Texas!” stretched across her C-cups. Another friend shows her D-cups off with chic, swooping necklines. She and my friend, Lauren, agree: “There’s nothing not fun about big boobs.” They look at me with smiling pity.
Because in this world ruled by “tits on sticks,” where boobs reign and size matters, my humble bust line places me in serf status. A hefty rack signals femininity, sex appeal, instinctive attraction. It announces: I am woman.
It wasn’t always this way. American definitions of what makes a woman beautiful – and therefore, valuable – change rapidly and usually involve the kind of conflicting demands more appropriate for a sci-fi horror creature than an actual human being: For example, current trends favor looking like a Praying Mantis with Dolly Parton boobs and a Jennifer Lopez rear-end. There’s no way evolution can keep up with that. Comedian Maria Bamford describes our beauty standards succinctly: “Pretty soon I bet it’s going to be almost impossible. You’re gonna have to be morbidly obese while maintaining tiny little tweety bird ankles; and a wandering eye.”
Boobs attract such close scrutiny that men have developed detailed systems of classification and printed them onto T-shirts as guides. Beestings, cupcakes, buttons, pumpkins, Montezumas. Not women, but men have analyzed, categorized, deconstructed our lactation devices into types, kinds, strata, genres and sub-genres. I know of no similar classifications for male parts, no organized set of nicknames for penises or scrota. These devices stay more hidden from the public eye, their stature usually rendered mysterious by pants.
At the top of the boob hierarchy reside the mammoth breasts. In our culture, large breasts are celebrated, small ones ignored, making me a little self-conscious when a guy unsnaps my bra, a little apologetic: Sorry, I know they’re not the knockers of your dreams. They’re cute, maybe even underrated. But still, they’re not the boobs you fantasize about.
Even worse, I’m getting shown up from all directions. There are 9-year-olds with bigger busts, men dressed as women with bigger busts, men dressed as men with bigger busts. Can people even tell I’m female? Maybe more mascara would help. A skirt could also be a good clue.
Get a load of those knockers
“If you know a straight man that claims he is not fascinated with breasts, you know a man who is lying. Very few guys will pass a large-bosomed woman without taking at least a short look,” – from the What Men Are Really Thinking Project website.
I understand guys’ fascination with big breasts. I am fascinated, too. I sometimes catch myself gaping at some woman’s chest, wondering what it’s like to walk around bearing two huge emblems of femininity directly below your face. A male friend tells me he loves boobs because they are something he doesn’t have. I joke that I can relate. Well, half-joke. Boobs are so uniquely woman, so defining of femininity, I can see why guys adore them. I try to imagine what it’s like to feel that womanly, to prominently display your sexuality, to properly fill out a trendy shirt or tailored jacket or bikini top. I wonder if they’re as heavy as they look.
Lauren’s boobs look heavy. She gets upset one night when G-Ratt mentions them. G-Ratt is wild, alcoholic, and married. He is the only person I’ve ever seen asked to leave Rene’s Bar in Thibodaux. He’s a skinny little man with big blue eyes set in a childlike face, which makes his expandable beer belly and full facial hair a little unsettling. He’s now missing the first joint of an index finger, the result of “playing around” with a crane. He address his female friends as “Sugar Tits.”
One night, we are sitting around a table at Rene’s playing board games when he makes a glancing reference to Lauren’s giant chest. “Fuck you, G-Ratt!” she yells,
I also tend to grab them, to make sure they’re real slamming her drink onto the table. She rushes out of the bar, leaving behind a coat, an alarmed husband, and a stupefied crowd of board-game players.
But Lauren insists behemoth boobs are great.
Once a month, I get a small taste of grand gland magic. During a certain point in the feminine cycle, a surge of hormones makes me lustful, homicidal, prone to tears and strange leaps of logic – and miraculously swollen-breasted. Sometimes, I catch myself ogling my own chest in wonder. Look at them! They fill out this bra like nobody’s business. The ladies are back! And boy do they make this T-shirt look hotter. Once, while washing my hands in the work bathroom, I caught sight of my enlarged boobs in the mirror and grabbed one in each hand, as if unsure they were really there. I turned to the side to see how they looked in profile. Hmmm…hot. I made sassy faces in the mirror, my hands still fondling my own breasts. Then someone walked in, and I flung my arms down and walked out. Proudly.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Laura, the flat-chested girl in Thibodaux. You know where. Oh, you don’t? Too far into the swamp, you say?
As a young girl, I was no girly girl. I clawed my way up trees, built creations from mud, and reveled in swampy ditches. Yet I wasn’t a gold-star tomboy either. I didn’t know the rules of football, and I was terrified of snakes and neighborhood bullies. I was a strange, in-between creature, a Late Bloomer who would never blossom into the kind of woman who obsesses with home décor, experiences shoe-gasms, or plans her wedding day to the detail.
As I entered junior-high school, I resisted most womanization processes. I fought shaving my legs, I fought carrying a purse, and I avoided makeup. By the time I started seventh grade, my mom had won the leg-shaving and purse-carrying battles. She had also mandated deodorant and training bras, little cloth contraptions featuring a pair of pink triangles in the front. The tiny, flat triangles even had lace around their edges. They seemed about as necessary as putting a bikini top on a dog.
Still, I wore them, strapping the delicate things on each morning to cover the miniscule bumps on my chest. And I still remember in detail the day I forgot to wear a training bra to seventh grade. I was already awkward enough: pale, skinny, nerdy, shy, unkempt. I realized my oversight on the school bus and wanted to cry. Would people be able to tell I wore no bra? What kind of attention would this bring? I hunched my shoulders on the bus, making my Arkansas Razorbacks T-shirt billow out in the front, and vowed to maintain this posture until the ride home. I dreaded gym class, when I would need to beat everyone to the locker room to change shirts before anyone could discover my secret. Even more so, I dreaded percussion class, filled with boys. Loud, cruel boys. I bent so far over, I must have looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame playing the marimba. It worked. I remained under the radar all day.
In high school, there came formal dances, always preceded by tricky missions to find the few dresses that fit both my upper and lower halves. Prom, homecoming – always the scene of my mother and I studying dresses that fit perfectly on my torso, my waist, my derriere, my thighs but with the tops sinking in like deflated balloons. So much for the magic.
“Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where. I want to be like everyone else.” – Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume.
Like Margaret, I prayed to God for larger boobs. It didn’t work.
I have never had Joggers Nipple
“I like being small – I’ve known so many women with big boobs who feel overweight or end up with back problems.” – Eva Longoria, actress.
Our flag-football team is in the midst of an intense game in a large grassy space on campus. The energy is high when my friend, Trisha, shuttles down the field to make an important catch. Our quarterback beams the ball, which slams into Trisha’s chest as she wraps her arms around it. The group along the sidelines cheers, and Trisha yells, “That’s why it’s good to have a flat chest!”
At no time do I feel more comfortable with my chest size than when in action: walking, running, kicking, jumping, catching a football, digging a volleyball, diving onto a martial-arts mat unencumbered by jiggling, swinging glands. I am free to move in space unfettered. I am so unburdened I can almost fly. My bra straps leave no welts on my shoulders. My back contends with no extra weight from the front. In movement, suddenly the scales shift, and my breast deficits become an asset. My small breasts can still suffer injury, such as a terrible-sounding condition known as Joggers Nipple. I have never experienced Joggers Nipple. The fact that I almost never jog could have something to do with this, but I credit my little boobs.
Boobs tend to attract boobs
“Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: a woman having large breasts makes men stupid.” – Rita Rudner, comedian.
The benefits of small boobs reach beyond my enhanced ability to jog if I ever chose to do so; little breasts also serve as safety nets, little jerk filters. They weed out certain types of guys, saving me the trouble. In this case, stereotypes work in my favor, because large boobs equal ditzy, easy, shallow, at least to ditzy, easy, shallow men. Small boobs equal nerdy, prudish, high-minded. My breasts are like natural camouflage from sleaze balls on the prowl. Predatory stares slide right past me to bigger-bosomed prey.
My inconspicuous boobs rarely draw unwanted attention: not in foreign countries, not in male-dominated places, not in the French Quarter. I can walk along Bourbon Street at the height of Mardi Gras, safe from grasping hands.
No one dates me for my big boobs. Or pays attention to me for my big boobs. Or likes my writing for my big boobs.
Another plus: I do not need the T-shirt that says “Look Up Here!” with an arrow pointing to my face.
At some point, my boobs become funny to me – even trendy, in an ironic T-shirt sort of way. I could wear the shirt that says “Actual Size” or “Yes, they’re real.” I get very tempted to buy and wear these shirts, but even now, I’m not sure I can take people looking at my chest and then laughing.
Number of times I have caught men staring at my chest: Approximately 2-3
Number of times I have been asked to show my breasts during Mardi Gras: 0
Number of times I have been asked to show my breasts during the Grand Isle International Tarpon Rodeo: 1
It’s Halloween night, and I am strolling New Orleans’ French Quarter streets dressed as a transvestite. That’s right: I am trying to look like a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman. But I probably look more like a hooker hired by American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman or an extra for a John Waters film. I wear a short, tight, pink leopard-print dress; high-heeled black sneakers with hot-pink accents; and a messy dull-blonde wig. I’ve coated my lids with dark blue eye-shadow, ringed my mouth with a thick pink outline, and spread gray makeup onto my upper lip and chin to resemble five-oh-clock shadow. I’ve stuffed the bosom of my dress with white gym socks.
Men stare as I pass them, and I know I could not handle this kind of attention on a regular basis. A drunken guy in camouflage points and calls out costumes as people walk past. “Robot! Vampire!Strawberry Shortcake!” And so on. As I walk by, he yells “Gorgeous Girl!”
Really? So this is the look that earns me the adjective “gorgeous.” Is it the big blonde hair? The short skirt? Or perhaps the gym socks. This “gorgeous” look attracts that guy.
I think I’ll leave my faux bosom in my sock drawer.
But Mother Nature never had to wear an A Cup!
“Everybody’s got a dream inside, you know? And it’s good when you can make your dream come true.” – 28-year-old Sheyla Hershey of Brazil, owner of the world’s largest breasts, a size 38KKK, according to The Huffington Post.
“It has been calculated that, by the year 2002, more than 1 million American women had had their breasts enhanced by surgery. This is a staggering figure for any kind of cosmetic surgery and reveals the deep-seated need many women have to display this primeval female signal.” –The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body by Desmond Morris.
Number of women receiving breast implants in 2010 in the U.S.: Nearly 300,0001
Number of times I’ve fleetingly considered breast implants: dozens
Number of times I’ve seriously considered breast implants: 0
It’s 2005 when I sit in a wooden chair in the office of Dr. Mark Peters, the hottest cosmetic surgeon in Houma, a small oilfield city in southeast Louisiana. Dr. Peters has billboards throughout town that feature a sultry woman with parted lips and a low-cut top revealing two large, perfectly shaped breasts. “Putting the hot back in Mama,” the billboards read. I am about to interview Dr. Peters for a business news story on local cosmetic surgery. I expect to meet a flashy, superficial man, but instead I am treated to a warm, fatherly presence. Peters’s chipmunk cheeks are just pudgy enough to completely disarm my preconceptions. I feel comfortable instantly. I even forget to wonder whether he is secretly surveying my potential as a prospective patient.
My ease soon turns to astonishment: Peters says he performs cosmetic procedures on 20 to 25 patients each month. He and another local surgeon, Dr. O’Neil Engeron, say breast augmentation, which includes enlarging or re-structuring the breasts, tops their lists of most common surgical procedures. “They’re going larger,” Peters tells me. I am fascinated by the idea that women I see at Rouses Supermarket, the Thibodeauxville Fall Festival, Bilello’s Café, may have had their breasts enhanced. It seems so Hollywood, so out of character for small-town Cajun country.
I am getting better at recognizing implants – their unnatural bouncy-ball shape, their gigantic spheres often mismatched with waiflike figures – but it sometimes takes me a while. Yet I noticed my cousin’s immediately. I spent much of my childhood and young teen years envying and admiring this cousin. I coveted her naturally tan complexion, giant green-blue eyes, and Texas twang. But I never envied her chest. Her boobs rivaled mine in smallness. Then my uncle died, splitting our family apart with a quibble over his estate. Within a year of his death, I found my cousin online and saw where she invested her inheritance: her chest.
It’s not OK to be OK with your small boobs
“We are supplying sexy, chic lingerie for grown-up women, not teenagers, who are proud of what they have and not worried about trying to look bigger,” Fiona Goad, managing director of LittleWomen.com, an English lingerie business, in an article in The New York Times.
I’m making a social statement by keeping my boobs little. But the bra designers aren’t hearing me. Even though I just say “no” to silicone and saline, I still get the pressure – from undergarment stores. Each shopping trip requires a hunt for B-cup bras minus the padding that designers assume I need or want. Rows of A and B cups strive to reinforce my insecurity with their thick embellishments. I grow annoyed as I am forced to glean the few un-enhanced B-cup bras from hordes of padding and pushing.
In places like Victoria’s Secret, I can feel my chest shrinking as I pass the giant posters flanking the entrance, the ones displaying blown-up photos of skinny women with large breasts, mammary-gland goddesses inviting me into their temple. I eventually learn to skip Victoria’s Secret altogether for $10 Wal-Mart bras. They’re beige and homely. But at least they’re honest.
Number of padded bras I own: 1
Number of padded bras I wear: 0
Botticelli saves the day
“Curve: The loveliest distance between two points.” – Mae West, actress.
“Women were often nude on top and robed on the bottom or completely nude. They had soft round abdomens, full hips and legs and small breasts.” – From “Classical Greek Art Characteristics,” eHow.com.
I minored in fine arts in college, so I spent a lot of time roaming the art building. While scuttling around, I noticed a trend in the student art posted along the hallways and started playing a game: guess whether a male or female artist depicted a particular female nude. The breasts were usually a dead giveaway. Male students could never get them right. The drawings and paintings would be perfect – except for the artificially rounded, porn-star breasts.
Yet artwork, mostly male-produced classical artwork, proved the turning point in my ongoing salvation from glandular insecurities. I’m not sure when, but one day I was breezing through a lavishly-illustrated art-history book, when I noticed something odd about the female figures in Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and classic Greek and Roman statues: these icons of beauty have small boobs.
Despite Botticelli’s uplifting brilliance, I continue to question my chest. I discuss this with an older friend, self-proclaimed expert on everything. This friend is a 40-plus weathered New Orleanian who dresses in black and gray, his head topped with a rowdy frizz of dry gray-brown hair. He looks like a walking corpse and calls me “darlin.” “Breasts have nothing to do with looking like a woman,” he tells me.
I think of his wife, who sits in the next room. A former stripper, she is petite with wavy black hair, dark eyes, golden skin, a small waist, full behind, and small breasts. Much later, I notice a photograph of her taken in her stripping days. She is posed next to a pole, her back arched to display her nude torso to the crowd. Her upper body and part of her face are sheathed in gauzy material. The photo shows nothing of her breasts. Yet there is no question, from the mere sight of her torso’s curves, that she is female.
Cupcakes are sweet
“Cupcake Breasts: Breasts that well may not be incredibly large…are perky, suckable and delicious, like a cupcake.” – UrbanDictionary.com.
My crush’s fascination with large breasts apparently does not render me unappealing. Just before he moves across the country, I discover that the crush I have on him has been secretly reciprocated, and we enjoy this mutual affection while we can. My modest size does not stop him from paying attention to my breasts, but I’m not sure if he really likes them. I don’t feel totally insecure, but I wish I could see my breasts the way my New Orleanian friend does, the way Boticelli might, the way G-Ratt?…would…?
Lauren and G-Ratt have made up over barbecue. Maybe he will be more careful with his words, I think.
But G-Ratt remains unreformed.
“What’s up, Sugar Tits?” he asks the next time he sees me.
Maybe I should be offended, but it’s G-Ratt.
Maybe I should slam down a drink, but “Sugar Tits” is kind of cute.
Maybe I should stomp out of the bar. Instead, I just grin.
Gold Room 