Look at my Tits

I am 40. My boobs, however, are yet to turn 25. Honestly. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I taken out the chest of a much younger woman on loan.

I do not make this claim, by the way, without recourse to science. Each booz has been verified as medically young.
A Total Bettie

A year or two ago, just about everyone I knew seemed to be diagnosed with illness. It was a confusing case of me-too-ism that took my tits to the radiology department of a hospital. I was convinced my tits had cancer.

Anyhow. They didn’t. Not only did the man with the sonograph pronounce me cancer-free; he looked at his monitor and told me I had, “very young looking breast tissue.” That was a good day.

My breasts are not only youthful. They are if you don’t mind me saying, pretty fucking shapely. They are not, by any means, enormous; each cup hovers modestly, and symmetrically, between a B and a C. But, damn if this isn’t an arresting pair of cans.

A boy I once went out with used to describe them as, “fat”. He’d say, “You’ve got fat tits, Helen”and seemed to love nothing more than performing Jackson Pollock art upon their surface.

Expressionist filth aside, the “fat” descriptor works well to describe these spherical tar-tars which are yet to sag and each have a cheery looking nipple at their center; these the approximate color of the good bits of raspberry trifle.

Plainly, I could go on and interminably on about my tits. As I age and the day that they will sink like over-sifted sponge-cake approaches, I tend to talk about them a lot. I’m going to miss them when they shrivel and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about showing them to people.

Why do I want to show you my tits?

Back when I was very young, I showed my norks to no one. I was morally opposed to cleavage. Then, I used words like, “phallocracy” in everyday speech and, for a brief spell in London, I joined a “collective” called Women Against Violence Against Women. At WAVAW, we sought to rid the world of smutty books and films. We also drank dandelion tea.

We did Important Work. On Saturdays, I would go to a WH Smith in Hackney and take a dozen or so lads’ mags to the counter. When the clerk had totaled my purchase, I’d say, “I will not pay for the systematic oppression of my sisters” or something similar from the feminist book of Common Prayer.

Every now and then, I would sneak a peek at the knockers of the ladies on the magazines and reflexively think, “cor!”. Drenched in the sort of guilt only a Catholic education and a feminist adolescence could upchuck, I told Janice, a progressive school teacher from Islington and the WAVAW mother-duck, that I sometimes looked twice at the funbags. She explained to me that this was, “internalized misogyny” and was exactly the sort of self-loathing that she, being one eighth Jewish, could easily understand.

It was not much later that I read works by the writer Andrea Dworkin and came to the unanticipated conclusion that I really liked porn. And I did so not because I hated my gender but because I liked to masturbate.

Let it be said: I will not crap on the memory of radical feminism. Dworkin offered some useful rage. But the book Pornography which is the sine qua non of joyless folk like WAVAW or those Stop Porn gals in Boston, is totally full of shit.

According to Dworkin, any depiction of sticking things in ladies is bad. Further, no lady really wants things stuck in her. Having something stuck in you and enjoying it is, in fact, “internalized misogyny” at its most extreme. Anyhoo. Back to me and my porn: Dworkin offers us her reading of literary works in which ladies have things stuck in them. This includes the work of Georges Bataille.

So, here I was with my (fabulous) tits hidden underneath a coverall reading about this “oppressive” literature and trying not to rub one out. God. I was supposed to be nauseated. Instead, I was deeply aroused.

I have since read The Story of the Eye and found it interesting but not really reliable as a tool for tossing. If you haven’t ever seen it, you can download a copy here. (Do take note: the act of reading this 1928 text may constitute a criminal act as the great literary figure Bataille describes sexual acts conducted by a sixteen-year-old person.) Anyhoo. Young Marcelle and the strange things she does with eggs aside, I was led to porn.

Even though I enjoyed the consumption of porn, I continued to be troubled, like a good Marxist-Feminist, by its production. This is to say, I worried for the working conditions of the women within it. Actually, sometimes, I still do. No. Let’s amend that. I worry that anyone involved in the production of porn might confront industrial accident, unfair dismissal or unflattering camera angles.

It didn’t occur to me for many years that some women might have elected to do this sort of work; it certainly never occurred to me that some of them might even enjoy it.

And then, at about 37, I began to want to show everyone my tits and understood for the first time that it was possible that these women might have some volition.

Of course, there’s a gulf that separates the idle desire to flash your whamdanglers and signing on to star in The DaVinci Load. (Yes. It’s real.) As an acquaintance of mine likes to say, “There’s a big difference between scratching your butt and tearing your ass to shreds.”

And, of course, I don’t buy the crap that public sexuality is necessarily wonderful. Bugger me: I lived through the nineties. I remember all that shit. When Madonna grabbed her crotch and declared that she was “expressing” herself, nearly everyone believed her. When a celebrity declared that she found the experience of appearing in Playboy “empowering”, no one questioned her motives. And maybe we should have. The You Go Girl!™ din that greeted any muff-baring became, in short, really fucking annoying.

I don’t by any means wish to suggest that exhibitionism is liberating or therapeutic. I just mean that I have begun to understand why it might be fun.

And I mean to suggest, I suppose, that I, although a porn consumer, remain a little ambivalent about the entire va-va-voom thing. The WAVAW Spinsters and their pro-porn descendants each have a point. Yes, in one reading, porn is revolting. In a cultural economy driven by images, it hardly seems reasonable that there are so many pictures of bored-looking chicks lounging about in nothing but an airbrush. Then again, why do the elder defenders of the gender have to go about in dungarees equating representations of sex with threat and ugliness?

And I mean to suggest that my palookas are fucking excellent. At least, for the next five minutes. Why didn’t I get them out long ago?

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