Boob Nation: Exploring How The Body Positive Movement Went Tits-Up
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: an artist and ceramicist based in Leeds who operates via Instagram as @potyertitsawayluv.
A month later, having parted with £35, 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. 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. They weren’t jaw-droppingly enormous: an E, on my size 8 frame. But they made me feel too visible. Exposed.
Aged 20, after years of minimiser bras and hunching over to hide my chest, I underwent a long-dreamed-of breast reduction at a Harley Street surgery that resembled a drawing room from the Seventies.
Breast surgery changed the size of my boobs, but only partially my relationship with them.
They were smaller, but 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 (sod 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. Norks. 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 fashiontits (boobs are rarely accommodated in designer collections, and bras even less so – something that infuriates many women).
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 tits, saggy tits and tits that aren’t white have historically been sneered at.
But change is afoot. Or should that be abreast? It is in response to this body shaming that 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. We are all dying,’ wrote Chidera on Instagram underneath a picture of herself, bra-less.
The movement quickly went viral and cemented Chidera’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,’ Chidera 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 from all around the world celebrating their boobs, whatever the shape and whatever the size.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen movements attempt to liberate breasts from the male gaze. After all, we’ve come a long way since a breastfeeding woman was asked to cover up at Claridge’s in 2014, and Kate Quilton’s Breastfeeding Uncovered documentary on Channel 4 in July went some way to de- stigmatise public breastfeeding.
In her speech at Variety’s Power of Women ceremony in October, Natalie Portman even 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. But anyway, 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, which first emerged in 2012 in response to Instagram’s ban on female nipples – though that has been criticised as Insta-feminism, narrow in scope and including primarily skinny cis white women who sport bullet-nipples on Instagram like some kind of fashion accessory.
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, Chidera’s hashtag is specifically intended for ‘fat, dark-skinned black women’.
‘Historically, there has been a discourse that either hyper-sexualises the black woman’s body or treats it like this transgressive thing,’ notes ELLE’s deputy editor Kenya Hunt, who snapped up her very own boob pot after I introduced her to Emma’s work.
In the US, journalist Mara Altman, the author behind the brilliantly body-positive collection of essays Gross Anatomy: Dispatches From the Front (And Back), is also fighting acrusade that rejects accepted beauty standards when it comes to boobs.
‘My breasts have always been for someone else,’ she tells me. ‘In highschool, 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.’
It was one of the reasons she had previously whipped off her bra and hopped on her bike, joining 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, the 28-year-old artist behind @potyertitsawayluv, estimates to have made 1,OOO 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. Now, she says, ‘I want everyone to be included in my work, and that’s still quite unusual for the world we live in.’
Her youngest customer is 18, her oldest mid-60s, and she reckons she’s seen every possible configuration of boobs (including the post-operative mastectomy), in every conceivable skin shade. Emma’s pot isn’t the only boobular ornament I own: I have a vase by the fine jeweller Anissa Kermiche, and if getting your own boobs preserved in pottery is too nerve-racking, you can buy a bikini-wearing boob pot by Brooklyn ceramicist Isaac Nichols of Group Partner.
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.
This article appears in the January 2019 edition of ELLE UK. Subscribe here to make sure you never miss an issue.
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