No matter what your breasts look like, they are not good enough.
It’s the late 1960s. I am at the movie theater with a bunch of my straight school chums, none of whom are aware of my disinterest in women’s bits and all of whom are breast-obsessed. We are here to see Performance, a trendy, louche movie starring Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and Michele Breton as three drug-addled funsters who while away their bohemian Notting Hill lives in various sexual triangulations. There is no shortage of nudity. At one point Mick and his two playthings splash about in the bath. While I try desperately to catch a glimpse of Mick’s bottie, my pals focus on the chests of the two ladies. Later, at the pub, my dude pals kvelled enthusiastically about Pallenberg’s modest knockers. Special praise was reserved for Breton’s pert, little, no-brassiere-needed appendages. As far as my pals were concerned, boulder boobs were for barmaids and strippers. Cool girls like Twiggy, Ali McGraw, Mia Farrow, and the above-mentioned degenerates were all highly desirable, despite being small of tit.
Images of Mademoiselle Breton’s boobies came flooding back on a recent trip to the cinema. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as those of you have seen it will be painfully aware, intermittently enlivened with startling bursts of no-holds-barred sado-masochistic porn. Whenever the narrative starts flagging, off come the clothes, and here come Rooney Mara’s modest, well-shaped natural chests.
During the non-porn, fully clothed segments of the movie, I found myself speculating as to whether the ferociously compelling Miss Mara, with her uninflated mammaries, might possess the power to usher out the era of the porno-hooter? Can she put the natural knocker back up where it belongs? Might The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo repopularize the smaller breast, or Bristol, as it is known in the Cockney rhyming slang of my homeland? (Bristol City = tittie.)
It’s a funny thing, what Simon Doonan is doing here: He’s arguing from the basic assumption that among straight men today, small breasts are universally deemed unattractive. And large breasts are fake. And back in the day, small breasts were attractive because they were class markers of the “cool girls” who you wanted to hang out with, not the “barmaids and strippers” who you undoubtedly fucked but probably didn’t want to be seen in public with.
I realize that, as far as red-blooded heterosexuals are concerned, there is no issue here. Straight dudes are too busy enjoying the current era of the mega-boob to give a thought to any alternative. In this regard, they are most selfish. After all, lots of women lust after men with tight soccer-player buns, but how many of you pudgy straight guys would willingly undergo surgery to achieve this effect for your lady’s delectation?
At the end of the day, health concerns may well cut the cackle. The New York Times recently ran a story about the recall of thousands of dodgy, leaky implants. French health authorities have advised 30,000 women to explant those suspect implants ASAP. Similar warnings have followed in Germany and the Netherlands.
Ah yes, it’s just that he’s concerned for your health, really. Because women just wouldn’t have large breasts without implants, right? And women who do have implants are shallow silly sluts (he won’t say that, of course).
There is of course something to be said about beauty culture, and the lengths women (to a much greater degree than men) are willing to go (and are expected to go) to fit a fairly narrow model of attractiveness. And there is something to be said about the normalization of large breasts when, as I’m writing this post, I am about to call myself “small of tit” and then I remember that I’m between a B and a C-cup and in what universe that is abnormally, notably “small” is beyond me. And there is something to be said about the assumption that larger (but not too large!) breasts are assumed to be more attractive when I assume that saying I am “small of tit” will be understood as an admission of less-than-attractiveness.
But really, what the Doonan article comes down to is who is considered a “woman” in his estimation. Because he’s not talking about women generally — he’s talking about women who are stereotypically bangable. Women who are thin and white and young and able-bodied and have big tits but otherwise might have small tits. Not women who are fat, or who are old, or whose big breasts aren’t at a right angle from their rib cages, or whose “mega-breasts” aren’t DD cups but are F or G or H cups or larger, or who just aren’t “hot” for whatever reason. I’m pretty sure women like that aren’t even on the radar screen here.
Or whatever, just read Kate.