In 1998, the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act (WHCRA) was passed in the United States.
This federal law mandated that most group health plans covering mastectomies must also cover breast reconstruction surgery and related benefits, including prostheses. No such protections have come, for example, to public breastfeeding.
In this way, American women got the right to fake tits but not a fundamental human act.
That’s from “Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation”, a new book from sociologist Sarah Thornton. Using an array of settings where women’s breasts are on display (from a strip club to milk banks to a plastic surgeon), the writer gives an approachable journey through the cultural invention of the “erotic breast” and the especially American complex relationship with women’s breasts: We love them but must control them.
It’s the patriarchy’s fault, she argues, but mistakes have been made too. As she wrote: “American feminism has foregrounded the right not to have children, rather than the rights of women once they’ve had them.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “The erotic breast developed alongside the popularity of wet nursing in France during the Renaissance, about 600 years ago.”
- Not all cultures sexualized breasts.
- In Kinsey’s 1948 “Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” he reported that 82% of college educated men made “mouth contact” with their wife’s breasts during foreplay, but only 33% of men without high school diplomas did the same. When lesbians were surveyed in a related report a year later, 24% reported caressing their partners breast and yet 95% of this female homosexual group achieved orgasm– a much higher proportion than the women engaged in heterosexual activity. These data suggest that breast related sexual activity is a learned behavior of greater appeal to men”
- In the 1940s, the marketing of sex icon Betty Graber was focused on her legs, then Marilyn Monroe and Playboy made it all about breasts
- Hundred of terms for breasts, many from the male gaze, but white culture’s “boob” and black culture’s “titty” can be endearing, author writes
- As one told her: prostitution is a private performance
- Physical sex and social gender being overturned lets us return to why breasts
- Essentialist feminists rejected focusing on women differences but proclaim power over what women can do — create life, give birth and breastfeed
- “Biological sex is related to an anarchy of about 60 genes scattered haphazardly throughout the genome.”
- Kate Millet in 1970 Sexual Politics: monolithic focus on woman’s suffrage from 1848 to 1920 means the movement collapsed in exhaustion. Was the second wave focus on abortion similar
- “Strippers, as professional manipulators of male desire, are acutely aware of the dynamics of patriarchy”
- Gypsy Rose Lee: I wasn’t naked, I was completely covered in a blue spotlight
- Dirty Martini burlesque performer: breasts are ”a gateway drug to body positivity”
- Annie Sprinkle, Post Porn Modernist and Bosom Ballet and Public Cerix Announcement and Tit Prints and Pleasure Activist Playing Cards
- Each book’s chapter has a different setting: This one based in The Condor, which in 1964 had Carol Doda doing the first sanctioned topless dance.
- Carol Leigh , Scarlot Harlot, coined “sex work”: her breast freedom became “free the nipple” where women should be able to bare chest wherever men can
- “Decrim “ sex work
- Sex work is to sexual trafficking as marriage is to domestic violence
- Burlesque
- Ladyboy as a third gender in Thailand (tolerance, not acceptance)
- In 2020 Bea Cordelia Chicago court case: nipple discriminatory because trans inconsistency
- “If some women can’t sell their bodies then none of us actually own our bodies”
- Redbone (a source for the book) says a lap dance is a “situationship,” starts hot then awkward climax and “then you break up”
- Allomothers
- In California the top reason women go into poverty is because they have a child
- Norway hospitals are very anti formula and pro breast feeding
- Nazi opened first milk banks
- Target 1-2 years of breastfeeding but this varies a lot. When duration is longer some racial disparities between kid outcomes lessen
- AIDS changed public health: most milk banks closed, San Jose became longest continuously operating and Norway lady of Europe still doing raw unpasteurized milk
- Gaps In supporting breastfeeding: “Do these blind spots have anything to do with the many donations that formula manufacturers make to university medical department and hospital wards?”
- Dr Pitabguay likely influenced Brazil having so much cosmetic surgery— he didn’t draw line between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery
- Brazilian joke: difference between psychoanalyst and plastic surgeon: one knows everything but changes nothing, the other knows nothing but changes everything
- Plastic surgery: I want to look “natural” means I want to look the way it’s trending now
- Breast are just sisters but everybody wants identical twins, says Ryan Gourley (the nurse in the author’s chapter on plastic surgery)
- Naomi Wolf in her influential 1990 book “The Beauty Myth” calls breast surgery “socially approved self injury”
- Society judged differently— reductions to remove pain, reconstructions after surgery and even lifts seen less bad as augmentation
- Beauty is neither only submission nor only resistance
- Rita Felski: balance the political costs and emotional benefits of being beautiful
- Author identified her post mastectomy breast reconstruction as gender re affirmation surgery and sees more alignment with trans people
- After her unilateral mastectomy, poet Deena Metzger and others explored displaying their boidies and using tattoos. Alongside an iconic photo, Metzger wrote: “I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound.”
- DIEP flap surgery: using body fat for more permanent breast augmentation (rather than implants that need to be replaced 10-15 years)
- Cyrus Grace Dunham: “a choice to sacrifice nuance for legibility”
- The 1968 Miss America protest did not involve the actual burning of bras. While a “Freedom Trash Can” was used to collect symbolic items of oppression like bras, girdles, and high heels, the protesters were not permitted to set the trash can on fire due to safety concerns about the wooden boardwalk. The myth of bra-burning was a later fabrication, fueled by media reports and a desire to mock the feminist movement.
- Annette Kellerman championed the idea of a one-piece swimsuit for women. In 1907, she was arrested on Revere Beach in Boston for wearing her form-fitting, one-piece swimsuit, which ended above her knees. She was charged with indecency for displaying her legs
- Nudist magazine “Sunshine & Health” faced challenges from the US Post Office, which considered its content “nonmailable” due to nudity. The ACLU defended the magazine, arguing that the display of naked individuals, including women and children, did not constitute commercial sexual display. Contrast with National Geographic, which has portrayed indigenous communities naked. This paved the way for Playboy’s nudity
- The Comstock Laws (postal code from the 1870s) and the Hays Code (among motion pictures in the 1930s) are two distinct historical efforts in the United States to regulate and censor content deemed obscene or immoral, but they operated in different spheres and eras.
- Artist Micol Hebron made “male nipple” pasties for women to use on social media posting
- Men wore swim wear covering their nipples until the 1930s, when the movie Tarzan (1932) and film star Clark Gamble bared his in It Happened One Night (1934), led to bareback bathing in 1935 in Atlantic City
- “Top free vs topless”
- Sports bra as feminist bra: the bra she wears when she burns the others
- Bloomers named for an editor who popularized it; bras came to replace the corset as reform wear
- Londa Schiebinger’s work focuses on the gender politics embedded within the classification of Mammalia by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century. She argues that Linnaeus’s choice of the term Mammalia, derived from the Latin word for breast, mamma, reinforced social hierarchies and gender roles of the time. Schiebinger highlights how this classification emphasized the female’s role in reproduction (breastfeeding) and simultaneously contributed to restricting women’s public power and confining them to the domestic sphere.
- Linnaeus in 1758 introduced both mammal and Homo sapiens, separating women to the animal and men to Enlightenment
- Self labeling with slur terms
- Lucy Cooke: Eve wasn’t made of Adam’s rib but the other way around; women are XX and men XY is the change of the variation
- “American feminism has foregrounded the right not to have children, rather than the rights of women once they’ve had them.”
- In 1998 U.S. got the right to fake tits after mastectomy but not breastfeeding