Tits

On Pride and the human chest

San Francisco, 1984. Via the GLBT Historical Society.

A girl is born and her whole world revolves around breasts. The breast is there to feed her, to shut her up, to nourish her, to teach her lessons about hunger and want, and then one day, the breast is no longer allowed. It is tucked away inside of a bulky beige contraption stitched from industrial-strength elastic, designed specifically to reign in the breast, to make it less visible, less distracting.

Historical bra via the University of Innsbruck

She reaches adolescence and is taken on the ritual trip to be measured, and then she, too, is bound up in elastic and hook and eye closures until her breasts are determined to be useful to someone, usually as an object of fetishization, or, more often, self-loathing. Too big, too small, one hanging lower than the other, nipples the “wrong” color, nipples too big, too small, pointing in the wrong directions, it’s just all wrong, and maybe she’ll run across porn and see not breasts but tits: spherical rather than teardrop-shaped, so inflated that the skin holding them in becomes nearly translucent. Sometime in her teens, doctors will begin squeezing and crushing her breasts which she now thinks of as tits, boobs, or what her first boyfriend will jokingly refer to as “funbags,” a term that makes her recoil but she laughs each time he says it because if you don’t laugh at a guy’s jokes, he’ll hit you or dump you for someone with better tits or both. Eventually the tits will either nurse babies or they won’t, but eventually techs will compress them between sheets of glass and metal, crushing them down into wafers.

Or maybe the girl goes to the doctor and the doctor says “you’re a boy,” and she goes home and puts socks into her bra just like the other girls, but nobody buys the bra for her and she has to sneak it out of her mother or sister’s drawers. Probably the bra smells a little yeasty, a little rank, even after washing, because synthetic fabrics trap bacteria and breed them into tiny colonies but that’s what bras are made of, and the girl puts it on and stuffs it and looks and sees herself.

Or maybe the boy grows breasts and learns to strap them down with a binder, maybe this starts playing soccer or volleyball and there’s something about it that feels right, looking down and seeing the flat plane of the men the boy admires, the men who work out and develop a chest a woman might like to run her hands over, or maybe the lithe chest of a 1970s rock star or Timothee Chalmet, or maybe it’s a soft hairy chest. But it’s a chest that doesn’t have breasts.

Around the age of thirteen, my chest followed the lead set by generations of women in my family and rapidly expanded. A friend’s mother took us to the beach in Santa Cruz and one of my breasts fell out of the bikini suit that no longer fit but swimming away, I didn’t realize it until a surfer floated by, pointed, and laughed. What a joke. A child with enormous breasts. I laughed, too, because what else do you do.

In high school a group of us went to Spain for study abroad. Packs of men would follow us wherever we went, shouting, drunkenly weeping, running after us down alleys. We laughed, because what else do you do. My blonde friend would incite them to shout “rubias, me encanta las rubias.” As for me, they just pointed and said “tetas.”

They just kept growing. C, D, DD, DDD, E, F, G. By the time they found a tumor in one of them my bra was a 36K. Bras would rip and tear within months of buying them. In the summer there was a lake of sweat pooling under them and running in rivulets over my belly. In my childhood years there was a store in downtown Oakland that sold bras and had a comically massive bra in the window. It was meant to be comical, stretching ten feet across. You laughed because what a joke, who would ever have tits that big?

World’s largest chain of bras, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 2019

Kristi Noem’s husband was the butt of jokes for putting balloons in his t shirt and slathering on pink lipstick and thinking that this was somehow sexy. But have you seen Barbie dolls, the cast of Love Island, porn? Have you ever been in a plastic surgeon’s office when they hand you a series of silicone breast forms to try and approximate the breasts you’re about to lose to cancer, have you ever rolled one in your hand while the surgeon talks about inserting wire cages into your chest to stretch it out and make room for those forms, followed by surgery every ten years to replace the forms which can rupture and poison you at any time. Or you can have a surgery that takes up to ten hours where your stomach is slit and the fat removed and molded into the shape of breasts, a surgery so invasive I watched YouTube videos of women who’d had it in the ICU, intubated, going home where they could not even sit up on their own for weeks, rolling on walkers into the toilet to shit for months on end. All for the sake of replicating the very thing trying to kill them. You laugh when the plastic surgeon draws a patchworked image of what your reconstructed breast would look like, a true Frankentit, because what else do you do.

Men run in my neighborhood with no shirts on, regardless of whether their chests are something I do or don’t want to see. And lately I’ve taken to lifting my own shirt in response. Force me to look at your chest? Fine, take a look at mine. I don’t wear a bra any more, so, see? No nipples. Massive, arcing scars. Radiation burns that never went away. No breasts. Nothing. Men used to push me to the ground so they could feel my tits. Now they cringe and look away. Because what else do you do.

At the head of the Pride parade in San Francisco every June are hundreds of Dykes on Bikes, many topless, some of them not even dykes but nonbinary folks, trans men who’ve had top surgery, all of that imperfect, puckered, glorious flesh on display, gunning motorcycles as if to say “don’t look away because this is what it means to have a body you earned.” And you have to look harder to find it, but they are out there, too: photos of women without breasts, with single breasts, with reconstructed breasts, breasts they sacrificed to stay alive, no longer tits, no longer someone else’s property, no longer dangerous, no longer there. A body they too have earned.

Louise Butcher, a British woman who runs marathons topless. “"If you see a lady running past with no breasts it gets talked about."