They belong to women, but everywhere they are annexed – as a symbol of strength, as a symbol of weakness, by the artist, by the pornographer, by the advertiser, for sex, for nourishment. What is the significance of breasts? Libby Brooks reclaims the personal and the tactile from the political and the commercial
At the back of the bus we sang a song my mother taught me. “Do your tits hang low, can you swing them to and fro, can you tie them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow? Can you swing them over your shoulder like a regimental soldier, do your tits hang low?”
On the Junior Six trip to Ayr, I drank bright-coloured pop and tied the ends of my turquoise blouse high up round my midriff. The fabric ballooned about my upper torso, creating an illusion of something. Dylan said he could see my cleavage. I barely had one but, later that year, I read in a magazine that you should use blusher between your bosoms for emphasis. I staggered to discos in orange tights with a rash of sparkly pink across my chest.
Breasts are powerfully symbolic, devastatingly real. A paradigm of potency and vulnerability, they mark the confluence of the maternal and the erotic, of lawless nature and the nurturer. And in the end they can play traitor.
During puberty, the ache for first blood is a private feral desire. But those tingling bumps are a noisy, public heralding of womanhood that invite comment and require commitment to a life you have yet to reckon with. Under the sidelong gaze of the changing room you are separated from your flat-fronted sister, lonely, with only a ribald promise of what nature tends for comfort. But the separation of adolescence is brief. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the breast is conceived from a male-centred, outsider’s perspective, defining it as a child’s first erotogenic zone, and identifying the mother as the child’s first seducer. But he ignored the adult-bound significance of breast development for young women.
As feminist historian Marilyn Yalom notes: “He never fully valued the significance of the breast from the point of view of the person who begins life by nursing at the breast of another female, and subsequently, in maturity, becomes a breast-bearer herself.”
My mother’s breasts are pale and blue- veined. They are where I rest my head. They smell of the mysteries of womanhood, and of the scarves that I dressed up in when I was small, in her dark, high bedroom. I measured my growth by how I fitted my body around them; first under, next between, then old but never too old for cuddles. My mother was a woman. I wanted to be a woman soon.
I badgered her to buy me a bra. We went to British Home Stores. 30AA. “Duh-bul-aay.” The tags were aqua and shaped like tears. Now I swell and soften with hormones natural or out of a packet; now I take a D cup and my 11-year-old self does cartwheels. But corsetry is another country. Should I lift and separate or create the ultimate cleavage? When my breasts are pushed together or set comfortably apart, what image am I constructing for myself? Breast size and display speaks its own language: young, old, shy, available, confident, serious.
I cruise the lingerie department. Who shall I be today? Light control, plunge, Wonderbra, basque. T-shirt, training, minimiser, maternity. Front-fastening, balcony, underwire, Ultrabra. Strapless, sports, padded, conical, Cross Your Heart. As cup size increases, the names become more mumsy. Some ranges don’t extend beyond a C. There is a mild outsize-oriented snottiness about bigger girls that sits oddly alongside our pneumatic bra advertising. Hello Boys, at least I’m not a heifer. Half of this is padding, don’t you see?
I love my body, but sometimes it lets me down. Never my breasts. I don’t blame them for inches, headaches, other people’s comments. I feel tender towards them.
I am a Breast Woman. I am their owner, protector, displayer, voyeur. They let me get away with it. There is an old joke that goes something like “if men had breasts they’d never leave the house”. I empathise.
These are our breasts, but do they belong to us? Or do they belong to the surgeon with his faceless aesthetic, to the baby with her hungry mouth, to the eyes on the street, to the artist or to the pornographer, to the advertiser selling cars and kitchens, to greedy cancer cells, to the analyst who ponders: “Were you breastfed?” What is their meaning?
Breasts are wanton. Compare the fiercely fecund twin peaks of Jayne Russell with the bee-stung sophistication of her contemporary Audrey Hepburn. Early Christian art depicts the nursing of the Madonna, exposing a single, unrealistic orb on her otherwise shrouded, shapeless form. She is the image of female divinity and servitude, suckling the infant Jesus with beatific indulgence. But consider clever, seducing Eve; murderously ambitious Lady Macbeth, who urged the spirits to take her milk for gall; the hapless eccentric burned at the stake because of her “witch’s teat”, often a mole or supernumerary nipple identified by witchfinders as evidence of a woman giving suck to the Devil. The harlot, the witch and the bitch have consistently been portrayed as full breasted, signalling abandonment, danger and dark pleasures.
Breasts are strength. The iconography of the French Revolution offered many bare- breasted female fighters, including the instantly recognisable Eugne Delacroix image of Liberty Leading the People. Prior to 1789, wet-nursing had become increasingly popular in France. A wet-nurse bureau was established in Paris in 1769, where as few as 10% of babies were nursed by their own mothers. But a philosophical trend towards all things natural, championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, combined with a superstitious concern that infants might imbibe the values of the lower classes, caused a backlash. At a moment when history called on the nation to nurse its citizens, women were offered a patriotic choice between wet nursing, and its association with establishment decadence, or virtuous, Republican maternal nursing.
Breasts are weakness. Thus argued notoriously bra-less Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch. “A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck; it endears her to men … but she is never allowed to think that their popping eyes actually see her. Her breasts are only to be admired for as long as they show no signs of their function: once darkened, stretched or withered they are objects of revulsion.” Men stare at breasts with the rapt attention and unsophisticated pleasure of a baby offered its first rattle. What do they see? Who are they expecting?
Breasts are sex. How do I look under cotton or wool; when I walk, when I’m dancing, when I’m still. How do they look when I lean down to kiss my lover’s mouth? How do they feel against your chest?
Most keenly, breasts are sexuality. What does a vagina look like? Is it imperial red, or pink plush inside? It is hidden, its voice is low, it cannot – physically – be exposed. A woman naked from the waist up is vulnerable in a way that a man is not. Because female genitalia are physically concealed, breasts necessarily correspond to the penis in terms of outward sexual significance. But sexual imagery is consistently censored to protect men and expose women: tits with everything from furniture ads to art films, but the mighty phallus must remain coyly hidden. The law interprets obscenity as the presence of male genitalia: women’s breasts are not even granted the power to corrupt.
What should a woman’s body look like? Our culture fetishises the female form across the continuum from bud-breasted Kate Moss to the HH assets of the latest identikit porn queen. But a standard has emerged via the Pamela Anderson-a-likes of tight, pert, hemispheres grafted on to a hip-less boy’s body. It is cut-and-paste womanhood at the extreme, a parody of vapid and vanquished sexuality. Melinda Messenger, our page three girl for the Thrillenium, is a clone of a clone, the logical conclusion of the relentless commodification of the female form. These standardised orbs become symbolic beyond themselves, beyond the women who at least should have rights to their currency. They are separated from their essence, and we have less choice in their meaning than ever before.
A few months ago, I met Melinda Messenger. She was a tiny, charming doll of a woman, and entirely the sum of her parts. She looked and behaved exactly as she did in her photographs, as though her cheerful ubiquity had traduced her need to exist in three dimensions. The explanations that she offered for her breast enlargement and her topless modelling were coherent and comforting. She enjoyed looking at men’s bare chests, so why deny men the similar gentle joy of looking at hers? The operation was a personal choice, and it had given her more confidence. Arguments around Page Three and the depiction of women as constantly sexually available were mainly, she said, rooted in snobbery. “If people like the way I look then I take that as a compliment.”
I met her on one of the last hot days of August, and I was wearing a cotton vest. On my way home, I walked past a group of boys playing football in the evening sunshine. They were barely teenagers. They stopped and stared, and shouted about my breasts. They were lairy and foul and embarrassing in that peculiarly dehumanising way that leaves you little option but to swear back and walk on fast. It didn’t feel like a compliment.
Was that Melinda’s fault? Had these children become so inured to the image of woman that they understood my body as just another flash to comment on and joke about? The way to instil social values, writes historian Susan G Cole, is to eroticise them. Does the increasing sexualisation of our culture necessitate the increased objectification of women? Pornography is so powerful, so pervasive, melting effortlessly into the advertising of a new car, that we begin to believe that the sexually invasive image is the only image. What does that do to a woman’s self-image?
“The debate continues about whether classic pornography makes men violent towards women,” writes Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth. “But beauty pornography is clearly making women violent towards ourselves. The evidence surrounds us. Here, a surgeon stretches the slit skin of the breast. There, a surgeon presses with all his weight on a woman’s chest to break up lumps of silicone with his bare hands. There is the walking corpse. There is the woman vomiting blood.”
The Official Breast, as Wolf calls it, bears no resemblance to what we see in shop changing rooms, in bars, or in the bedroom. Its meaning, she argues, is about control. “The breast that is high but also large and firm is most likely to belong to a teenager. In a culture which fears the price of women’s sexual self-confidence, that breast is the reassuring guarantee of extreme youth – sexual ignorance and infertility.”
Modelling agencies report that more, and younger, women are having surgery on their breasts than ever before. The lure to alter rather than accept is endemic and epidemic. Silicone culture has so permeated our perception that it is now the natural breast that seems alien, rather than the freakish Lola Ferrani, who enjoys a regular slot on Channel 4’s Eurotrash where she undertakes some simple task rendered unfeasibly complex by her inability to touch her elbows together. (Paolo Pellegrin’s portrait of Ferrani is one of the first in Aperture’s new book, Master Breasts, devoted to photographs of women and their breasts, some of them reproduced here, by Cindy Sherman, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe and many others.)
But if the breast becomes our enemy when rigidified in plastic, how much more so when it is rendered the site of disease and death? Breast cancer is a modern horror. Amid the conflation of conflicting information on risk and survival rates, environmental factors and lifestyle influences, Marilyn Yalom suggests that the tragic reality of breast cancer may at last bring women into full possession of their breasts.
The photographer Matuschka, whose portraits of her post-mastectomy scar are searing in their raw pain (included in Master Breasts), writes “A woman can still be beautiful, and can wear her scars as a symbol of strength.”
Writer and activist Audre Lorde, who died in 1992, wrote with passion and pity about the loss of her breast: “I looked at the large gentle curve my left breast made under the pyjama top. A curve that seemed even larger now that it stood by itself. I looked strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself, and therefore so much more acceptable, than I looked with that thing stuck inside my clothes. For not even the most skilful prosthesis in the world could undo that reality, or feel the way my breast had felt, and either I would love my body one-breasted now, or remain forever alien to myself.”
My mother wanted something special for her birthday. I bought her a white, lacy Lejaby bra. She tells me that, when she was breastfeeding me, I would play with a small mole by her left breast. I was dressing a few weeks ago and discovered a similar mole just below my left armpit. I ran my fingers over it. n
The photographs reproduced here come from Master Breasts: Objectified, Aestheticised, Fantasised, Eroticised, Feminised By
Photography’s Most Titillating Masters . . . introduced by Francine Prose, to be published by Aperture, at 29, later this month. The book can be ordered through the Guardian at the special price of 25 (inc UK p&p) by ringing our credit-card hotline, 0500 600102;
e-mailing [email protected]; or by sending a cheque made payable to Cultureshop, to 250 Western Avenue, London W3 6EE.