a rumination on my breasts
Do you hyperfixate on your breasts? I’ve been reading, well, listening, to the book you recommended - Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami. I wasn’t expecting, well, anything about its contents. I trust you enough that a recommendation is sufficient, and I check neither the description nor the reviews. But mostly, I wasn’t expecting its approach to talking about breasts, how its relayed as incessant, looping circles of thought and confusion. I see myself in the narrator — I wonder if you do as well? Her confusion about her sister’s obsession, her ambivalence about breasts, her own and others. About their shape and color. I wasn’t allowed to see naked people, as a child in my parents’ house, and thus had, have, little experience with other breasts. (I don’t know if I’ve told you, but my father took away my bestiary to draw sharpie bikinis over the harpies and sirens — it filled me with shame and embarrassment at the time, when friends commented on it, and I was mad even as it was happening.)
I don’t think it would be accurate, at this present time, to say I hate my breasts. On their own, divorced from any context, I feel ambivalent about them. With context, they are too large, and inconvenient. They are painful on my shoulders and my back, and when I am engaging in physical activity. At times, they make me feel sick on a physical level — I described it to you once as feeling “almost out of proportion, like a funhouse of myself.” I meant to write “funhouse mirror,” but the message resonated all the same.
And if it were just the breasts, that would be one thing. But it is not, and I am forced time and again to confront what is nothing less than my nemesis, the antithesis of my being: bras. The shape they give, how none of them fit right, how nothing gives support and structure without causing pain. This hatred sometimes spills over onto my body — if only my breasts were smaller, everything would fit ok, look ok, feel ok. I would get a reduction in a heartbeat, if I could afford it. Both because of the bras, and because my breasts don’t feel like they fit my body. I mean, when my shirt size is a medium, but I have to buy a large, because the size that fits my torso doesn’t fit my breasts? What kind of world is that, really?
This could easily segue into a critique and a rant about clothing and the fashion industry, but that isn’t what I’m writing about today.
I try to love my breasts, if for no other reason than its no one’s fault and I’m stuck with them. And it is easy, or perhaps I should say easier, when I’m naked. When all the skin and the curves are on display, when everything moves in one contiguous organism, when the stretch marks shine and shimmer in the angle of the light. And they are beautiful in their swell, and in their curve, and in the way they hang heavy in teardrops from my chest. When I am naked, they are beautiful, because they are a part of a body. My body.
But then I put on clothes, and… well, you know the rest.
Do I hyperfixate on them? I don’t know. I sure do spend an awful lot of time thinking about them.
I think I used to, though, for sure. Fixate on them, I mean. In high school, I was horrified that someone might notice them, or even know I had them. I was ashamed, and terrified that someone would stare at them, or snap my bra straps from the desk behind me. I hated that they seemed like sexual objects, invitations that I couldn’t escape. You were also raised conservative, Christian — I’m sure you have similar stories, similar feelings.
They’re so… gendered, in a way I feel I can’t properly describe, even more so than a vulva or a uterus. In a way that doesn’t feel harmonious with the rest of me — shaved head, broad shoulders, thin hips, no ass. I feel androgynous, internally and externally, in a way that puts me at odds with how large my breasts are. Even in high school, when they were just B cups, I wanted to cut them off entirely — though, whether that was because of the shame or the physical discomfort, I can’t say. Now, sitting somewhere between a D and a DD, they feel almost suffocating.
And I wonder if I would feel the same way if there was more even representation. If there were options beyond so tiny they’re barely there and “perfectly,” for lack of better phrasing, sized for the person’s frame. Hell, I can barely wear an underwire without feeling like some bawdy, buxom whore in a bad western — you know, the ones with the big hips and corsets striped in black and white. I wish I felt comfortable like that, especially when I find the women playing them to be so fun and beautiful themselves. But how can I, when I feel top-heavy and unbalanced, and trapped inside my body?