In the first place, CHH, you are very funny. I'm still chuckling at the recepit with the nipples drawn on the zeroes.
In the second place, it's kind of a running joke that men trying to write women will write women thinking about their breasts in ways that feel, well, wrong, basically like a woman thinking about her breasts, but very much from the perspective of the male gaze. And so it's fascinating to read an introspective piece about a woman thinking about her breasts and how they present in a way that feels absolutely nothing like the way that men write women thinking about their breasts and how they present.
It shouldn't be that difficult! But it's almost always, "She looked at her perky breasts in the mirror, thinking about how supple they were and about how arousing men found them. But since all women are just two drinks away from bisexuality, she felt a sapphic longing stirring within her as she gazed at her reflection..."
Because men write women as experiencing emotion in their breasts! It'll be like "her shirt became taut in response to the question, her breasts swelling with panic" like.. what?!?
The era of the boob fixation was so unpleasant to grow up in for everyone, whether you had them naturally (too much attention) or didn't, or landed somewhere in the middle. I don't think any woman had a good time with it. I've been asked whether I have implants more times than I can count on two hands, and I can attest it's a horrible and invasive question. My sister (fraught relationship) said, "well, you have to expect that people will have questions," as though I picked 30G breasts out like a tattoo or a funny hat and they're not just part of my literal body like an arm or a leg!
gurl! I had a guest in my home (partner of husband's coworker we invited to thanksgiving when they couldn't travel home) ask while I was taking dinner out of the oven. She explained that she was planning on getting hers done and wanted to know about what the surgery/recovery was like. I just had to be like, well I wouldn't know, sorry. Fortunately the rest of the party was in the other room and didn't hear but I was mortified
I would not be flattered because I would assume she thought my boobs looked obviously fake, i.e. bad, and that she knew perfectly well that they weren't fake, but was doing some kind of weird female status thing
I just think it's beyond rude to comment on someone's body unless you know them well or they've made some sort of visible change in the time you've known them (like, i don't think it's inherently rude to note that someone who used to be bigger lost a lot of weight and looks good, but only if you know them and are aware that they've been working hard at it). Random commenting on my boobs by what was basically a stranger, and her asking about the surgery like they were a dress she wanted to know the brand of really threw me for a loop. Like cosmetic surgery is fine but I thought we all had an agreement not to discuss it with strangers.
Rude it may very well be, but coming from a presumably straight woman who is essentially saying “I want mine to look like yours”, I’m leaning towards assuming some degree of good faith.
Wow, two of my favorite things, excellent writing and small-to-average boobs!
I remember the push-up craze of the aughts. My wife, a tall and slender wider-spaced 36A at the time, had a bra like that back then. When worn with a tank top it prompted a first-time-in-her-life "I'm up here!" demand for eye contact in a discussion with a male co-worker.
Just want to say I grew in one of those places that DID idolize stick thin, prepubescent bodies. My hometown is a super WASPy rich town in Connecticut, and I hit puberty sometime in 5th grade which was absolutely awful in that environment. And it wasn’t like, ooh now I have a butt and boobs and look too sexualized — I was chubby, so every part of me was too big. And I stopped being flat chested pretty early on even before puberty because of my chub, so by the time I was in middle school I would have given anything to be flat chested and skinny. Push up bras were never in the equation for me lol. Instead it was sweaters and anything I could do to create some optical illusion that I was smaller than I actually was, even in hot summer weather (thankfully this is no longer the relationship I have with my body!!)
It's funny because (tbf as a guy) I feel like I saw plenty of both sorts of judgement cast on girls growing up
I think it's more of an issue today, but in general there's gotta be some way we can better understand that multiple "mainstream narratives" can be in effect at one time, even in one place or one person! Not picking on CHH bc "this is often said to be the narrative but this is my exp" is like the most obvious way to try to do this.
It's especially the case here because like, people who are insulting the bodies of elementary/middle schoolers are usually not being analytically or ideologically rigorous, they're just saying whatever is insulting and proximate to how the child looks
So were we all told we had the body of a prepubescent boy unless we were built like, Christina Hendricks? Because it took me a long time to realize I was a pear shape and not a stick shape because I was told repeatedly I was flat, skinny, no curves, etc.
That was basically my experience. I always had butt/thighs (for my overall body size) but nobody seemed to notice because I got made fun of for being flat all over. It's probably why I never succumbed to panic about my weight, even when girls smaller than me were anxious about not being a size 00.
I remember feeling shocked when I found out the Victoria Secret Angels by and large (with a few notable exceptions e.g. Kate Upton) had fairly small breasts. Push-up bras are an incredible invention.
Real! When I was in middle school, a lot of people‘s bra of choice was a push-up bra. I never bought into the idea, because I went through puberty before everybody else, and faced accusations of/a surprisingly long-lasting rumor that my parents let me have a boob job in fifth grade (absurd!!)
Such a great experience for me psychologically and socially 🫠 Anyways, to this day I am still anti-push up bra.
The busty girls at my school growing up also faced rumors of breast implants. People were really convinced there were plastic surgeons performing breast augmentation on underage girls everywhere.
See, I was an A cup until I got pregnant and I never wanted bigger breasts. My image of myself wasn’t as a specifically-gendered person – obviously, I knew I was female, but I “felt female” the way I felt blue-eyed. Was it true? Yes. Was I discontented with it? No. Did it feel like some essential part of who I was as a person? No. I liked being able to pass as a boy from a distance if my hair was short. I didn’t want to wear feminine clothes like a woman, I wanted to wear feminine clothes like a drag queen.
(I should add that I was single-sex educated in middle school, high school, and college, so I didn’t spend a lot of time around boys who were always reminding me, directly or indirectly, that I was a girl.)
Now I gained a cup size plus some extra weight and my waistcoat-and-trousers look resembles a woman dressed like a man for a humorous skit, not an Edwardian woman disguising herself as a teenage boy. I’ve had Gen Z people be like, “ooooh, maybe you’re nonbinary,” and I’m like, no, I am in fact a woman. Women can like dressing like Edwardian teenage boys and like having small breasts. As the Barbie ads of the ‘80s told us, girls can do anything.
Oh man, I remember these days. I had such a complex you probably could've come up with a new DSM diagnostic category for it. After I got over my issue with padded/push up bras being cheating and just decided to be a cheater, you could not have torn those bras out of my cold dead hands, and there was a good decade where I would've been truly mortified to leave the house without it. I also got over this in my 30s though somehow I always attributed it to my boobs actually growing more finally in my 30s and not to the fact that culture became way less boob obsessed!
Same. If I put one on now with a low cut shirt it just has such a boob-job type BEHOLD MY CLEAVAGE look to it that it embarrasses me for the opposite reason, though I spent my teens and twenties mortified by my lack of cleavage without it. Wideset armpit boob girls are definitely a thing! Even now my husband is sort of amazed at how different tops can make me look either almost totally flat or like I have "massive tits" (his words) depending on the cut and fit, bc unless a shirt is really tight onto my ribcage they're not very apparent lol. So weird though how I don't care now when this took up truly incredible amounts of my mental space at one time.
I was speechless for around 2 paragraphs in and then I just started laughing and couldn't stop. Hilarious!
Now that I have read this, I am tempted to take off my top and look in the mirror to see what kind of boobs I have. Do they hide under my armpit? Are they too far apart? These are thoughts I have never had in almost 28 years of boobage. Sometimes it feels like you are experiencing your body like you are on the outside of it, which IDK how does one even have that perspective? Could this be about anxiety again I wonder? Because again I see the similarity with my mom. She was more upset that my boobs looked "too big" than I ever was as a teenager. She thought people would think she was a bad mom (how??)
I mean, that’s more true in some regions than others is the thing. I grew up in a working-class Rust Belt city (albeit from a middle class family myself) and while kids there could be as mean as they are anywhere else, accusing teenage girls of being surgically enhanced in any way was not part of it. That possibility wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Nobody was rich enough to be doing that kind of thing, nor did we even know anybody who was. It was what celebrities did, not normal people.
Then when I was in college, I taught at a summer program in Connecticut and had teenage girls from wealthy tristate area counties who were recovering from the nose jobs they’d gotten for the 16th birthdays and…it was a culture shock. Now as an adult, I have worked with teens in areas all over several major metros, ranging from very poor to very rich and everything in between. I’ve definitely noticed that the extent to which cosmetic surgery is in people’s universe of possibilities—whether getting it for themselves or speculating about it in others etc.—strongly correlates to class. Wealthy areas also have much higher standards of physical perfection for young girls too, not surprisingly.
I was on birth control pills for like 6 months when I was 23 and the same thing happened to me, basically! I went from a B to a C practically overnight. Then a couple years ago I lost a bunch of weight and now it sounds too daunting to try to figure out my new size, so I'm just wearing these bralette things again, lol. I miss my ass most of all, though. This post inspired me to do more squats at the gym later today.
Maaaan do I remember those Miraculous bra days. I like my breasts a lot (now) but they're definitely petite, always have been. And I definitely thought for a long time that to be feminine I needed a much more pronounced bustline. So just like you, for years and years, I never went without a bra, and it was almost always an extremely padded push-up. I used to joke that it wouldn't matter if someone tried to cop a feel--they were only gonna get padding.
In my late 20's something shifted in my mind (thank the Lord!) and I haven't ever worn bras since, unless it's specifically for fashion, like under a sheer shirt. I do think it can be rather damaging for ourselves to constantly see part of our body in a very altered way. I think of it as similarly to corsets or shapewear. Would anyone like their natural waist if they were putting it into a corset every day? Probably not. I can look back and understand how, in addition to the culture, of course it was hard for me to love my breasts when I refused to ever just let them be as they were.
So I've heard many women talk about how uncomfortable they are with their bodies being seen as attractive to men, often talking about the negative impact on their mental health this mindset creates. However, you seem to have a relatively healthy relationship with your body and how it's perceived by others.
Have you written about women who dislike being viewed through a male gaze vs those who actively try to dress or look a certain way to attract men? I feel like you've written something similar to this and just forgetting that article.
I’ve written a decent amount on this topic but often indirectly. Idk if my attitude is any healthier, there is probably a good middle ground lol. I do have something coming more specific on this soon.
Whenever I wear a push up or padded bra I want to crawl into a hole and never see anyone, I find it so hard to weather the attention. This is hard for my psyche, which wants to feel attractive, yet is simultaneously repulsed by direct male sexual attention. I need to find some kind of slutty median guaranteed to get me mild flirting.
Submitting my completed CHH bingo card with this post.
In the first place, CHH, you are very funny. I'm still chuckling at the recepit with the nipples drawn on the zeroes.
In the second place, it's kind of a running joke that men trying to write women will write women thinking about their breasts in ways that feel, well, wrong, basically like a woman thinking about her breasts, but very much from the perspective of the male gaze. And so it's fascinating to read an introspective piece about a woman thinking about her breasts and how they present in a way that feels absolutely nothing like the way that men write women thinking about their breasts and how they present.
Male writers, take note!
It shouldn't be that difficult! But it's almost always, "She looked at her perky breasts in the mirror, thinking about how supple they were and about how arousing men found them. But since all women are just two drinks away from bisexuality, she felt a sapphic longing stirring within her as she gazed at her reflection..."
Because men write women as experiencing emotion in their breasts! It'll be like "her shirt became taut in response to the question, her breasts swelling with panic" like.. what?!?
The era of the boob fixation was so unpleasant to grow up in for everyone, whether you had them naturally (too much attention) or didn't, or landed somewhere in the middle. I don't think any woman had a good time with it. I've been asked whether I have implants more times than I can count on two hands, and I can attest it's a horrible and invasive question. My sister (fraught relationship) said, "well, you have to expect that people will have questions," as though I picked 30G breasts out like a tattoo or a funny hat and they're not just part of my literal body like an arm or a leg!
I can't understand why anyone would ever *ask* that! I certainly wouldn't, even if I was curious.
gurl! I had a guest in my home (partner of husband's coworker we invited to thanksgiving when they couldn't travel home) ask while I was taking dinner out of the oven. She explained that she was planning on getting hers done and wanted to know about what the surgery/recovery was like. I just had to be like, well I wouldn't know, sorry. Fortunately the rest of the party was in the other room and didn't hear but I was mortified
I don’t know, I think if somebody just assumed that I’ve had some sort of penis enlargement procedure, I’d be flattered!
When people said this about me, I was flattered, but I still didn’t want them to think it and it was annoying if they didn’t believe me!
I hear ya. “That thing is large” = yay, “you look like the kind of guy who would get a penis enlargement procedure” = boo.
(note: these quotes are entirely hypothetical)
I would not be flattered because I would assume she thought my boobs looked obviously fake, i.e. bad, and that she knew perfectly well that they weren't fake, but was doing some kind of weird female status thing
That is so beyond convoluted, but I believe you that it’s a real thing that happens.
overthinking is the lot of the median woman
I just think it's beyond rude to comment on someone's body unless you know them well or they've made some sort of visible change in the time you've known them (like, i don't think it's inherently rude to note that someone who used to be bigger lost a lot of weight and looks good, but only if you know them and are aware that they've been working hard at it). Random commenting on my boobs by what was basically a stranger, and her asking about the surgery like they were a dress she wanted to know the brand of really threw me for a loop. Like cosmetic surgery is fine but I thought we all had an agreement not to discuss it with strangers.
Rude it may very well be, but coming from a presumably straight woman who is essentially saying “I want mine to look like yours”, I’m leaning towards assuming some degree of good faith.
Wow, two of my favorite things, excellent writing and small-to-average boobs!
I remember the push-up craze of the aughts. My wife, a tall and slender wider-spaced 36A at the time, had a bra like that back then. When worn with a tank top it prompted a first-time-in-her-life "I'm up here!" demand for eye contact in a discussion with a male co-worker.
Just want to say I grew in one of those places that DID idolize stick thin, prepubescent bodies. My hometown is a super WASPy rich town in Connecticut, and I hit puberty sometime in 5th grade which was absolutely awful in that environment. And it wasn’t like, ooh now I have a butt and boobs and look too sexualized — I was chubby, so every part of me was too big. And I stopped being flat chested pretty early on even before puberty because of my chub, so by the time I was in middle school I would have given anything to be flat chested and skinny. Push up bras were never in the equation for me lol. Instead it was sweaters and anything I could do to create some optical illusion that I was smaller than I actually was, even in hot summer weather (thankfully this is no longer the relationship I have with my body!!)
It's funny because (tbf as a guy) I feel like I saw plenty of both sorts of judgement cast on girls growing up
I think it's more of an issue today, but in general there's gotta be some way we can better understand that multiple "mainstream narratives" can be in effect at one time, even in one place or one person! Not picking on CHH bc "this is often said to be the narrative but this is my exp" is like the most obvious way to try to do this.
It's especially the case here because like, people who are insulting the bodies of elementary/middle schoolers are usually not being analytically or ideologically rigorous, they're just saying whatever is insulting and proximate to how the child looks
It looks more and more like we were all told our bodies were "wrong" in some way, no matter what 😔
So were we all told we had the body of a prepubescent boy unless we were built like, Christina Hendricks? Because it took me a long time to realize I was a pear shape and not a stick shape because I was told repeatedly I was flat, skinny, no curves, etc.
That was basically my experience. I always had butt/thighs (for my overall body size) but nobody seemed to notice because I got made fun of for being flat all over. It's probably why I never succumbed to panic about my weight, even when girls smaller than me were anxious about not being a size 00.
I remember feeling shocked when I found out the Victoria Secret Angels by and large (with a few notable exceptions e.g. Kate Upton) had fairly small breasts. Push-up bras are an incredible invention.
Real! When I was in middle school, a lot of people‘s bra of choice was a push-up bra. I never bought into the idea, because I went through puberty before everybody else, and faced accusations of/a surprisingly long-lasting rumor that my parents let me have a boob job in fifth grade (absurd!!)
Such a great experience for me psychologically and socially 🫠 Anyways, to this day I am still anti-push up bra.
The busty girls at my school growing up also faced rumors of breast implants. People were really convinced there were plastic surgeons performing breast augmentation on underage girls everywhere.
See, I was an A cup until I got pregnant and I never wanted bigger breasts. My image of myself wasn’t as a specifically-gendered person – obviously, I knew I was female, but I “felt female” the way I felt blue-eyed. Was it true? Yes. Was I discontented with it? No. Did it feel like some essential part of who I was as a person? No. I liked being able to pass as a boy from a distance if my hair was short. I didn’t want to wear feminine clothes like a woman, I wanted to wear feminine clothes like a drag queen.
(I should add that I was single-sex educated in middle school, high school, and college, so I didn’t spend a lot of time around boys who were always reminding me, directly or indirectly, that I was a girl.)
Now I gained a cup size plus some extra weight and my waistcoat-and-trousers look resembles a woman dressed like a man for a humorous skit, not an Edwardian woman disguising herself as a teenage boy. I’ve had Gen Z people be like, “ooooh, maybe you’re nonbinary,” and I’m like, no, I am in fact a woman. Women can like dressing like Edwardian teenage boys and like having small breasts. As the Barbie ads of the ‘80s told us, girls can do anything.
Oh man, I remember these days. I had such a complex you probably could've come up with a new DSM diagnostic category for it. After I got over my issue with padded/push up bras being cheating and just decided to be a cheater, you could not have torn those bras out of my cold dead hands, and there was a good decade where I would've been truly mortified to leave the house without it. I also got over this in my 30s though somehow I always attributed it to my boobs actually growing more finally in my 30s and not to the fact that culture became way less boob obsessed!
It's funny how we get used to these things. one of the new bras I got on Amazon is *barely* a pushup, and yet I feel ridiculous when I wear it!
Same. If I put one on now with a low cut shirt it just has such a boob-job type BEHOLD MY CLEAVAGE look to it that it embarrasses me for the opposite reason, though I spent my teens and twenties mortified by my lack of cleavage without it. Wideset armpit boob girls are definitely a thing! Even now my husband is sort of amazed at how different tops can make me look either almost totally flat or like I have "massive tits" (his words) depending on the cut and fit, bc unless a shirt is really tight onto my ribcage they're not very apparent lol. So weird though how I don't care now when this took up truly incredible amounts of my mental space at one time.
There are dozens of us!!! Finally someone else with the same EXACT issue
I was speechless for around 2 paragraphs in and then I just started laughing and couldn't stop. Hilarious!
Now that I have read this, I am tempted to take off my top and look in the mirror to see what kind of boobs I have. Do they hide under my armpit? Are they too far apart? These are thoughts I have never had in almost 28 years of boobage. Sometimes it feels like you are experiencing your body like you are on the outside of it, which IDK how does one even have that perspective? Could this be about anxiety again I wonder? Because again I see the similarity with my mom. She was more upset that my boobs looked "too big" than I ever was as a teenager. She thought people would think she was a bad mom (how??)
I mean, that’s more true in some regions than others is the thing. I grew up in a working-class Rust Belt city (albeit from a middle class family myself) and while kids there could be as mean as they are anywhere else, accusing teenage girls of being surgically enhanced in any way was not part of it. That possibility wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Nobody was rich enough to be doing that kind of thing, nor did we even know anybody who was. It was what celebrities did, not normal people.
Then when I was in college, I taught at a summer program in Connecticut and had teenage girls from wealthy tristate area counties who were recovering from the nose jobs they’d gotten for the 16th birthdays and…it was a culture shock. Now as an adult, I have worked with teens in areas all over several major metros, ranging from very poor to very rich and everything in between. I’ve definitely noticed that the extent to which cosmetic surgery is in people’s universe of possibilities—whether getting it for themselves or speculating about it in others etc.—strongly correlates to class. Wealthy areas also have much higher standards of physical perfection for young girls too, not surprisingly.
I was on birth control pills for like 6 months when I was 23 and the same thing happened to me, basically! I went from a B to a C practically overnight. Then a couple years ago I lost a bunch of weight and now it sounds too daunting to try to figure out my new size, so I'm just wearing these bralette things again, lol. I miss my ass most of all, though. This post inspired me to do more squats at the gym later today.
Interesting, bc never changed my ass!
It didn't change mine, either. That came from the weight loss, which I wrote unclearly!
Ahhh okay. At least that can be fixed!
Maaaan do I remember those Miraculous bra days. I like my breasts a lot (now) but they're definitely petite, always have been. And I definitely thought for a long time that to be feminine I needed a much more pronounced bustline. So just like you, for years and years, I never went without a bra, and it was almost always an extremely padded push-up. I used to joke that it wouldn't matter if someone tried to cop a feel--they were only gonna get padding.
In my late 20's something shifted in my mind (thank the Lord!) and I haven't ever worn bras since, unless it's specifically for fashion, like under a sheer shirt. I do think it can be rather damaging for ourselves to constantly see part of our body in a very altered way. I think of it as similarly to corsets or shapewear. Would anyone like their natural waist if they were putting it into a corset every day? Probably not. I can look back and understand how, in addition to the culture, of course it was hard for me to love my breasts when I refused to ever just let them be as they were.
So I've heard many women talk about how uncomfortable they are with their bodies being seen as attractive to men, often talking about the negative impact on their mental health this mindset creates. However, you seem to have a relatively healthy relationship with your body and how it's perceived by others.
Have you written about women who dislike being viewed through a male gaze vs those who actively try to dress or look a certain way to attract men? I feel like you've written something similar to this and just forgetting that article.
I’ve written a decent amount on this topic but often indirectly. Idk if my attitude is any healthier, there is probably a good middle ground lol. I do have something coming more specific on this soon.
Whenever I wear a push up or padded bra I want to crawl into a hole and never see anyone, I find it so hard to weather the attention. This is hard for my psyche, which wants to feel attractive, yet is simultaneously repulsed by direct male sexual attention. I need to find some kind of slutty median guaranteed to get me mild flirting.