Breasts of Burden
Don’t get excited, there’s no titillation here
CW: extended discussion of body image, brief nongraphic example of child abuse
There’s a show on Netflix that I like called Firefly Lane, which is one of those series (like This Is Us) that examines the relationships between its characters thematically rather than chronologically, jumping around in time during the course of each episode. The main relationship in Firefly Lane is the friendship between two women, Kate and Tully, across something like thirty-odd years.
The episode I watched last night was about breasts.
Specifically, it’s about Kate’s feelings about her own breasts, which change from decade to decade but are never anything other than unhappy. In her late forties, she gets breast cancer. Of her impending mastectomy, she says to her doctor, “Honestly I’m just looking forward to being done with it. I mean, they were never that special anyway.”
Later, alone with Tully, she gets more specific. “They’re assholes,” she says.
“Your breasts are assholes?” Tully asks.
“They were too small in high school when all I wanted was bigger boobs. And then they finally sprouted in college right when I took up jogging. I realized why actual boobs are a problem. Then they would not feed Marah, no matter how hard I tried. And now they are literally attempting to murder me.”
I never needed to breastfeed, and (so far) I don’t have cancer, but I do have a lot of very similar feelings. Breasts have been nothing but a burr under my saddle since I was twelve years old.
I can only hope that it’s better for today’s kids, but when and where I grew up, anyone who didn’t fall in the middle of the bell curve, puberty-wise, was subject to intense attacking and shaming. There was one girl in my fifth grade class who already had fully-developed breasts; the other kids, both boys and girls, called her a “slut” and ostracized her for that reason alone.[1]
By the beginning of seventh grade — age twelve — a majority of my female peers sported some visible signs of puberty. I did not; I remained tiny and childlike for several more years.
My classmates ridiculed me relentlessly for my flat chest, until I finally begged my mother to buy me what is euphemistically called a ‘training bra’ — actually just a heavily-padded garment whose sole purpose is to make a prepubescent child appear to have at least minimal breasts. The only ‘training’ involved is ‘training young girls to endure a lifetime of physical torture in order to conform to societal expectations’.
And I do mean torture. Not only the straps and the constriction, but the way the padded interior was made of this horribly scratchy polyester fabric, with seams cutting horizontally right across my nipples. My (undiagnosed) Sensory Processing Disorder meant all of these sensations were dialed up to thirteen, and I was in constant misery. I tried to moderate the sensations slightly by wearing the bra inside out; the nylon exterior still bothered me a lot, but it was better than the rough polyester.
As usual, my mother had zero sympathy for any of my distress, and would physically punish me if she caught me wearing my bra inside out. Same when I put carefully folded tissues in the cups to protect my sensitive nipples, except then the punishment would come with ridicule as cutting as anything I endured at school. Furthermore, it was at around that age that she started accusing me of trying to seduce my father (with my still-childlike body), and a whole new set of clothing restrictions were enacted within the house, including wearing the tortuous ‘training bra’ at home as well as at school.
The worst part is that the padded bra only slightly diminished the mockery from my peers; the boys may have jeered less often, but the other girls all knew that I was ‘faking’ breasts and didn’t have real ones, so their abuse continued.
Then, when I was fourteen, I finally started to grow a breast.
Yep, just one breast, singular. A hard lump slightly larger than my areola appeared under my left nipple, while my right side remained as flat as ever.
I’d never touched a breast myself, but I was working under the impression that they were supposed to be uniformly soft; I’d also seen various PSAs warning women to palpate their breasts for hard lumps in order to identify cancer.
What I hadn’t ever heard of was ‘breast buds’, and there were no kind adults in my life that I could talk to about such things. So I spent most of the next year in a state of ironic fatalism, fully believing that I was going to die of breast cancer before I’d actually grown any breasts. (I had other reasons at that point to believe that I wasn’t going to live for many more years, and my experience of life to date had been pretty terrible, so the feeling really was not so much panic or horror as cynical despair.)
I spent most of the next year in a state of ironic fatalism, fully believing that I was going to die of breast cancer before I’d actually grown any breasts.
Eventually the right side of my body got the puberty memo, and developed its own small hard nodule — also directly beneath the right areola, which I realized was too coincidental and therefore must not be cancer after all. Not that my boobs ever got less lumpy — I ended up in the tiny percentage of women with ‘fibrocystic’ breasts, dense and heavy for their size and full of (noncancerous) adenomas and ropy tissue. (None of that is visible from the outside, though — unless you squeeze them, you’d never know.)
Although the two sides of my body entered puberty almost a year apart, they decided to stop developing in tandem, which meant that my breasts forever remained wildly asymmetrical — think of it as having an orange on one side and a grapefruit on the other — and became a lifelong source of both sartorial difficulty and private embarrassment. The fact that only perfectly symmetrical breasts are ever shown in media meant that I assumed mine were a rare freak of nature. I will never forget the first time I had any hint that I wasn’t alone in this; it was a single line in a short story about a man who missed his dead wife, and the description mentioned her uneven breasts. I was in my early twenties.
Practically speaking, I couldn’t buy a bra that fit both sides; I always had gappy extra fabric on the small side even while I was spilling out on the large side. Fitting the large side and padding the small side never worked right either — the real breast hung too differently from the padded one. So many styles of clothing were off the table for me because they drew attention to my mismatched boobs.
Then of course, anytime the clothes came off, so did the illusions. I called my breasts out as weird before anyone else did; I named my left boob ‘Droopy’ and my right one ‘Perky’ and made jokes about them, trying to fake a comfort with the situation that I did not at all feel.
And that was only the beginning. Because as soon as I became sexual with anyone, I had to have the Nipple Conversation.
Nearly every sexual partner I ever had wanted to suck, lick, rub, or otherwise handle my nipples, and also expected that I would enthusiastically welcome any such attentions. After a few years, I settled on a pre-sex spiel for new partners, which went approximately like this:
“My body’s nerves are wired up weirdly in a lot of ways, which means that many things that feel good to most people feel awful to me. High on the list is that I don’t like to have my nipples touched. At all, in any way. A light touch feels a lot like ‘hitting your funny bone’, or like a tactile version of what fingernails on a chalkboard feel like to your ears. A firm touch causes actual pain.”[2]
There were times I didn’t have the Nipple Conversation. When I was young and new to anything sexual, I was too confused and embarrassed to know what to say. Later, during the year I supported myself with sex work, I often felt I had no choice but to grit my teeth and bear the pain, in that and other ways.
Having the Nipple Conversation was preferable to not having it, but it was still something I dreaded, both because I was never able to fully shed the sense of embarrassment, and I never knew how the other person was going to react. Best were the ones who accepted this new information without disbelief or (visible) disappointment, and scrupulously observed the requested boundary. Worst were the ones who were sure that their ministrations would somehow be the magical exception.
(As you can perhaps imagine, the thought of breastfeeding gives me the screaming horrors. Fortunately I never wanted to be pregnant, either, so it didn’t come up.)
It wasn’t just other humans that I had to contend with: my nipples were so sensitive that even the slightest movement of fabric across them triggered the nails-on-chalkboard feeling. I also spent a number of years enduring full-breast aches and pains for half of my menstrual cycle, brought on by contraceptive hormones — until I did my own hunt through the medical research and figured out that changing the relative percentages of estrogen and progestin would stop the pain cycle, and showed up at my doctor’s office with a list of alternate brands of pills that had the formulation I needed.
Then there’s just the sheer annoyance of having floppy flesh bags attached to your chest. For years I wore thin cotton bras because they bothered my nipples least, but they also provided very little support or constraint. It would be worse if I’d ever been the voluntarily athletic sort, but even jogging to catch a bus meant my larger breast would go flapping up and down against my chest. I don’t know if people without Sensory Processing Disorder experience this, but I am constantly annoyed by the way that when I lie on my back, my unbound boobs fall to either side of my chest, tickling my upper arms and vice versa. This got worse during my perimenopausal years, when my body decided to pile on enough additional weight that my orange became a grapefruit and my grapefruit became a pomelo.
Breasts make hot weather much more uncomfortable — larger, droopy breasts create a swamp of underboob sweat, which for me not uncommonly turns into a rash; in these post-menopausal days even my ‘perky’ side is sagging enough to do the same. Bras trap more sweat everywhere and make everything worse, and of course breasted people are never allowed to go shirtless in public, no matter the weather.
So I look at things like Elliot Page’s recent photo of his post-surgery chest and feel a certain amount of envy, despite neither wanting to look ‘like a man’ nor feeling comfortable now — after living almost four decades in a breasted body — with the idea of being completely androgynously breastless. I might have been happy to yeet the teats altogether if I’d had that option in early adulthood; it’s impossible to say.
Not my early teens, though, because of course I started off (like I suspect a majority of teenage girls did, and likely still do) wishing for bigger breasts. The message we soak up from literally everywhere is “achieve this physical ideal of womanhood if you want anyone to love you”; big breasts (but not too big!) were top of the list. And I was desperate to be loved.
But even by my senior year of high school I was already side-eyeing the cultural glorification of large breasts, and by the time I turned twenty — though I still wanted my boobs to match, dammit — I had completely flipped from wishing I could increase the orange to wishing I could reduce the grapefruit.
Today I would be thrilled to have, say, a matched pair of limes. My financial situation has always been precarious enough that I can’t justify spending any money on elective body modification.[3] But if I were wealthy enough not to have to worry about my future subsistence? I would absolutely have had breast-reduction surgery decades ago.
For all my complaints, I know that many other women have it worse in many ways. My breasts, dense as they are, have never been so large or heavy that they give me back pain, or cause bra straps to cut permanent grooves into my shoulders trying to hold them up, or make it difficult to sleep on my stomach — all complaints I’ve heard from larger-breasted friends. And the objectification and unwanted attention I’ve received from men over the years, while plenty awful, would doubtless have been a great deal worse if I had larger-than-average breasts.
At least menopause itself has some upsides where my breasts are concerned. Yes, my skin is less elastic and saggier everywhere, which is both annoying and sad. But exiting perimenopause caused all that extra weight to drop off again, and then some; I’m now thinner than I’ve been since high school, which means that my breasts are also at their smallest.[4]
I stopped wearing bras altogether more than three years ago, one of several lifestyle changes I made after I learned about SPD and realized that most people were not walking around in a constant state of sensory misery. This was only possible because the extreme nipple sensitivity also turns out to have been at least partially hormone-mediated; while intentional touches to my nipples are still unpleasant-to-painful, somewhere in the middle of perimenopause, a light brush of fabric stopped feeling like ulnar nerve compression.
And yes, going braless means that my severe asymmetry is readily apparent, but I’ve decided to stop giving a fuck what other people think about that. Which, like all such recent decisions, is more of an ongoing active process than a fait accompli — but is also only possible because (thanks largely to a supportive spouse) I no longer work in a job where people make daily demands on my personal appearance, with a loss of livelihood hanging over my head if I don’t conform. That’s not a very common circumstance for people who aren’t cis men.
I’m sure there are women out there who genuinely love their breasts, and more power to them. For me, they’ve been nothing but inconvenience.
But writing out my entire history with breasts has made me recognize how much less problematic they are now compared with literally any other point in the last forty years. Hopefully that perspective will help mellow me out the next time I find myself thinking my boobs are assholes and wishing I could just be done with them. Which, honestly, will probably be … later today.
I did not participate in this shaming and name-calling, but neither did I make a particular attempt to befriend her, nor call anyone out for their bullying. I was ten, an outcast myself for other reasons, and had not yet found my bravery (or learned that outcasts are often the best people). ↩︎
To this day, I don’t know if this phenomenon is part of my sensory processing disorder, or part of the congenital neuronal hyperplasia that also causes my vestibulodynia (subject for another day), or whether possibly all of it is interrelated. ↩︎
Okay, technically, I did spend twenty bucks or something to get my ears pierced in my late teens. ↩︎
The exception is one very, very bad year in my mid-twenties when (not at all on purpose) I dropped to a shocking and deeply unhealthy weight, with a BMI of about 16 — also a story for another day. ↩︎
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