BOOB NATION
BIG, SMALL, SAGGY, FL AT... BAZOOKAS, BAPS, BOSOMS… WHATEVER THEIR SIZE, SHAPE OR NICKNAME, WOMEN HAVE WILDLY DIFFERENT RELATIONSHIPS WITH THEIR BREASTS. PANDORA SYKES EXPLORES HOW THE BODY- POSITIVE MOVEMENT WENT TITS-UP
Could your relationship with your breasts be better?
RECENTLY, I SENT MY FIRST EVER TOPLESS SELFIE.
This was no saucy pic, intended for titillation. Its recipient was a woman I had never met: Emma Low, an artist and ceramicist based in the UK who operates via Instagram as @potyertitsawayluv. A month later, having parted with $70, I received delivery of a small pot featuring an exact replica of my boobs – right down to the four freckles sprinkled across my chest.
Like many women, I have a complicated relationship with my boobs. As a teen, I hated them. They weren’t jaw-droppingly enormous: an E cup. But on my size 8 frame they made me feel too visible. Exposed. Anyone who proclaimed me to have “great tits” (or similar) would incite wrath or tears. I love boobs – big ones you could sling over a shoulder; tiny ones that are barely more than a nipple – I just couldn’t reconcile myself with my own. Aged 20, after years of minimiser bras and hunching over to hide my chest, I underwent a long-dreamed-of breast reduction.
Surgery changed the size of my boobs, but only partially my relationship with them. I retained low-level antipathy towards them. It is only after having my child last year – and watching them soar to truly comic proportions before flattening to the gentle tea bags they are now – that I feel able to see them for what they are. And not because they have “actualised their purpose” and provided milk for my infant (to hell with the school of thought that thinks the sole purpose of a woman’s body is based around motherhood), but because breastfeeding meant I was no longer able to separate myself from my boobs or dismiss them. Ghosting them, as I had done for almost two decades, was no longer an option. I had to accept them as all mine.
Funbags. Bazookas. Bosoms. Knockers. Honkers. Melons. Jugs. Mammaries. Titties. Cans. Baps. There are myriad words for boobs – and myriad breasts to match. Yet so few are
included in the cultural conversation. On the one hand, you have artfully lit, pert fashion tits. On the other hand, there are the jiggly, Betty Boop honk-honk pin-up boobies. They are the public boobs. Private tits – mine, and probably yours – don’t fit this narrow binary. Pendulous, saggy or non-white tits have historically been sneered at.
But change is afoot. (Or should that be abreast?) In response to this body shaming, blogger and author of What
A Time To Be Alone, Chidera Eggerue, aka The Slumflower, launched #saggyboobsmatter in 2017. “How to style saggy boobs: a tutorial. Step 1: wear the damn outfit. Step 2: remember not to care,” wrote Eggerue on Instagram with a picture of herself, bra-less. The movement quickly went viral and cemented Eggerue’s voice as a body-positive activist. “I became bored of disliking myself, tired of finding a reason to condemn myself, and I grew exhausted of avoiding certain outfits that would reveal the posture of my boobs,” Eggerue told ELLE. “At the age of 19, I began by making small decisions, like choosing not to wear a bra. That then developed into me refusing to feel intimidated by deep-plunge dresses or tops.” Search the hashtag on Instagram and you’ll find thousands of joyous images of women around the world celebrating their boobs.
In her speech at Variety’s Power of Women ceremony in October last year, Natalie Portman name-dropped boobs. “The most remarkable thing about our whole type of animal is our boobs,” she said. “We know that, men know that, and babies definitely know that. In fact, at our first Time’s Up meeting, I was breastfeeding my daughter in a room that not only allowed it but welcomed it and applauded it. Our boobs are amazing and there is a message in our mammary glands.” (The message being: “The more milk you give, the more milk you make”, in relation to gender equanimity.) Then there’s #Freethenipple – a viral campaign that intensified after the 2014 release of a film of the same name – in response to Facebook and Instagram’s ban on female nipples (though it has been criticised as Insta-feminism, narrow in scope and including primarily skinny cisgender white women with bullet-nipples).
In contrast with #Freethenipple, today’s movement is characterised by its inclusivity. Where body positivity and other forms of feminism often excludes women of colour, Eggerue’s hashtag is specifically intended for “fat, darkskinned black women”. “Historically, there has been a discourse that either hypersexualises the black woman’s body or treats it like this transgressive thing,” notes ELLE UK’S deputy editor Kenya Hunt, who snapped up her very own boob pot after I introduced her to Low’s work.
US journalist Mara Altman, the author behind the brilliantly body-positive collection of essays Gross Anatomy:
My Curious Relationship With The Female Body, is also fighting a crusade to reject accepted beauty standards in boobs. “My breasts have always been for someone else,” she tells me. “In high school, I wanted them to grow so I’d be attractive to guys. For doctors, my breasts are a part of my body that can go wrong. For my offspring, they are a food source. For fashion, they are a way to accessorise.” Altman whipped off her bra and joined hundreds of other women on a topless bike ride through New York City back in 2016. “That day, for the first time, I got to enjoy my body parts on my own terms, and for nothing other than to feel the wind and sun on my skin. I was exposing myself to a city of 8 million people when my breasts felt more mine than ever.” Emma Low of @potyertitsawayluv estimates she’s made 1,000 pots in the past year. “My work will never be done,” she tells me. “I’ve only just scratched the surface of normalising boobs.” She initially made a pot featuring her own boobs for her boyfriend, before friends started asking for their own. Her youngest customer is 18, her oldest midsixties, and she reckons she’s seen every possible configuration of boobs (including the post-operative mastectomy), in every conceivable skin shade.
When my booby pot arrived, I unwrapped it very, very slowly. Holding it in my hand felt therapeutic and freeing and rather emotional. Because this pot wasn’t an erotic gift for someone else (though my husband did pronounce it quite natty), it was for me. So that I may survey my boobs objectively. They weren’t tentacled or fanged or furious. Neither were they despondent or sad or lonely. They were just… there. Completely and utterly normal. Minding their own business. Hardly worthy of all the internal wrangling I’d wasted on them over the years.
I don’t know if I felt the way I did about my boobs because male attention during puberty caused me to loathe their existence. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the male gaze at all and I was just never destined to have a great relationship with my boobs. Either way, as society ever so slowly rejects the idea that a woman is the mere sum of her parts (and rated accordingly for the calibre of each part), I seem to have entered a place of acceptance of mine. Sometimes I put my hands on my boobs and rest them there. It’s a strange habit learnt from an older sister, who would cover her boobs, reflexively, when relaxing. I still feel a flash of fear, followed immediately by a new sense of relief. I don’t think I’ll ever love my boobs, but I’m beginning to cultivate a fondness for them. Especially now they’re filled with my favourite pens.
“I REFUSED to feel intimidated by DEEPPLUNGE dresses and tops”