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I.
How many clothes you have to take off
before you can make love.
This I think is important:
the undoing of buttons, the gradual shedding
of one color after another. It leads
to the belief that what you see is not
what you get.
--Margaret Atwood, excerpted from "How to Tell One Country from Another"
How many clothes do you have to take off before you can reveal your breasts?
To whom do you (would you) reveal your breasts, and why?
Who has commented on your breasts? In what contexts?
In what ways do you discipline your breasts? Bras? Surgery? Pads to soak up breastmilk?
In what ways have your breasts disciplined you? Cancer? Low self-esteem? Popping out of your clothes? Hindering exercise?
In what ways have your culture's views on breasts limited or empowered you?
II.
Having been raised in the U.S., I don't think much about breasts. I'm puritanical that way. My breasts are my business, not yours.
Having been raised in the U.S., I think a lot about breasts. I'm puritanical that way. I worry about the message my women students are sending when they wear low-cut shirts that accidentally bare a nipple. At the same time, I worry about people sending my women students the message that they need to dress with someone else in mind.
The poet John Keats came up with the idea of "negative capability." Brilliant people, he wrote, are "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." In the U.S., we have negative capability of the breast.
After all, aren't breasts in American culture all about uncertainty, mystery, and doubt? And don't we think about them without resorting to fact or reason?
III.
I will someday be a breast cancer survivor.
I'm pretty certain of that. It's what women in my family do: survive breast cancer and then heart disease and heartbreak and whatever else fate throws at our chests.
My grandmother has been a survivor for more than twenty years. A few years back, when she was in her late seventies, she was having some heart trouble, and I rushed her to the emergency room.
They admitted her immediately, and as the nurses were applying the EKG sensors, one noticed one of the tiny blue dots my grandmother bears on her chest. They're the souvenirs of her radiation treatment, those tattoos.
"Are you a breast cancer survivor?" the nurse asked.
"Yes," Grandma said, trying to smile despite her anxiety about her chest pain. "They removed quite a lump."
"Did you have reconstruction?"
"Yes." Grandma looked at me nervously.
The nurse peered back down Grandma's hospital shirt and then turned to me.
"Have you seen these? They did a great job. They're fantastic!"
I smiled.
"No, seriously--have you seen these?"
Grandma laughed.
IV.
We've all heard straight men say it: They can't help but stare at breasts. It's a testosterone thing, they swear.
Perhaps hormones are partly to blame, but cultural attitudes about the breast are also very much in play.
Nili Sachs, the author of Booby-Trapped, How to Feel Normal in a Breast-Obsessed World, explains that the obsession with disciplining and manipulating breasts is but a recent manifestation of the human desire to mark or otherwise discipline our bodies:
In the big picture there is certain logic to our need to manipulate or modify the shape of our breasts. The human body has continually been put to use as a medium for the expression of cultural, tribal, or genealogical needs. There is a tendency for nations, tribes, and other groups to demand that their members reflect a uniformity—a sameness, an ideal—in their physical appearance. Extreme exceptions in individual appearances are looked down upon; the “different one†can be forced to alter his or her appearance or even be expelled from the group. Many civilizations had attempted, at one time or another, to force some form of body manipulation or shape alteration on some of its members, often at a heavy price. There are health and psychological consequences to using our bodies to express fashion trends or project cultural messages. Using the breasts of the human female to express a fashion and a cultural statement is a new twist—not even a hundred years old—to an ancient ritual.
In an fascinating essay published in the book American Artifacts, Shannon Miller deconstructs the corset's discipline and punishment:
No matter what else a woman wore, the basic fact remained that the corset's shape was always
