Women Have Boobs -- Get Over It

By Samara Ginsberg, RH Reality Check. Posted February 4, 2009.

My youth orchestra held an annual awards ceremony, one of the awards being the "Mammoth Melons Award," for which the girl with the biggest breasts would be presented with two enormous watermelons, and everybody would have a good laugh about it. Every year, I would spend the morning of the awards ceremony hiding in the bathroom hyperventilating at the prospect of being so humiliated (I never got the award -- either I wasn’t popular enough or one of my friends tipped off the organizers about how upset I’d be).

When I look back on this now, I’m completely appalled that it was allowed to happen. Making fun of a teenage girl’s breasts in an official awards ceremony approved by the teachers is just not cool.

Something else that made me feel very uncomfortable about my new assets was the extent to which I was stared at, not just by sleazy men, but by other women. My breasts were given disparaging stares, envious stares and stares whose motivation I couldn’t work out at all. I was also given some very unpleasant verbal abuse by other women. I very rarely received compliments about my breasts from anyone other than close friends -- whenever anyone made a comment, it was nasty.

Unsolicited comments I’ve received from other women include "That’s so not attractive," "You do realize they’ll be down to your ankles by the time you’re 30" and, "You think you’re something really special, don’t you?" And, of course, apart from the unpleasant comments themselves, a lengthy disparaging stare speaks a thousand vitriolic words.

I believe that the reason that so many women feel that it’s acceptable to mock large breasts is that there is an underlying assumption that all women want larger breasts. Women’s magazines are full of tips on how to "make the most of your assets." In trashy chick-lit novels, the protagonist with whom we are supposed to identify always has small ones.

Because there is an assumption that all women want bigger breasts, women who actually do have big breasts are assumed to be in a state of extreme smugness. And because it’s entirely unacceptable for a woman to be happy with her appearance, anyone with big tits needs taking down a peg or two, the conceited bitch.

Therein lies the sting in the tail. As the girl with the oh-so-envious figure, you will receive no sympathy. If you ever, ever express any discontent with the unwanted attention and discrimination you receive as a result of looking like the "ideal woman," or if you ever express a dislike of the aesthetic appearance of that part of your anatomy, you will be shot down with cries of, "You BITCH" (this is a compliment -- confusing, I know). You will be cheerfully informed that you ought to be glad of the attention. And people will say charming things like: "It’s a good thing you’ve got big boobs, because otherwise nobody would like you."

It’s as if women’s breasts are public property -- the bigger they are, the less they belong to the person to whom they are attached, and the more it is seen as acceptable to stare, make comments and to dehumanize their owner. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I finally started coming 'round to the idea that my breasts were my own, not just unwanted appendages attached to my body.

Until then I hadn’t seen them as a part of me at all. I had thought of them almost as a deformity. They didn’t seem like mine. I fantasized that one day I would wake up and they would be gone, and I’d go back to being treated as a human being.

Nowadays things are much better. I’ve gotten better at dressing to make my breasts look smaller (not that I should have to, although I would choose to anyway), and looking older means that I get less unwanted attention (not that I should have received unwanted attention when I was younger either, and not that I am exactly geriatric at 25). I no longer feel like a sex object every waking moment. I no longer hate my breasts and I no longer feel that they’re unwanted appendages.

I would definitely like them to be smaller, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but they feel like part of me, rather than the disembodied udders that they used to feel like. I’m still not happy though. Why should I ever have felt that way? Why should I have had to have struggled so hard to be respected and taken seriously?

It’s incredible to me that any woman would want large breasts when they examine what the media at large seems to think of women so afflicted. Just take a look at FHM. They’re all "hot and ready" bimbos presented as receptacles existing solely for male entertainment.

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