If you are a boob man…god we know you love them.
But I am curious if you have ever really thought about what it costs us to have them?
For one thing…. breasts are heavy.
And not just metaphorically ( but I will be getting into that in a bit ), but also physically.
A pair of D cup breasts weighs between 15 and 23 pounds in total. Imagine a lifetime of carrying them… on a daily basis between 15 and 23 pounds sitting on your chest, pulling at your shoulders, changing the way you sleep, the way you run, the way your back feels at the end of the day. Women with larger breasts even develop grooves in their shoulders from bra straps. Like actual grooves. Permanent indentations in the body from the infrastructure required to manage the weight of what they were born with.
And nobody talks about this as a cost. It is just…. Tuesday. Just the body we have and just something else on the list to sort out. What we pay for you to enjoy them !!
Aside from the sparkly fun bags that dangle into your eyes and fill your heart with boyish joy, I want to go back to the beginning. Because the cost for us women having breasts starts a hell of a lot earlier than most men would even think about or consider.
Just for a moment imagine this in your mind…you are about eleven or twelve. Something is happening to your chest, nothing you chose or asked for nor are prepared for, and it is absolutely not something that stays private.
Your mother notices.
Your aunties notice.
And you know Uncles and the neighbours husband notices as well…
Suddenly you are being looked at differently. There are comments at family gatherings that are said to your face and behind your back. Sometimes warm and knowing, but also sometimes under the breath, about your body doing the thing bodies do. The changing of your chest becomes a family event before you have even had time to feel what it means to you. Before you have had a single private moment with your own body’s arrival into womanhood, the commentary has already begun. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Then you go to school, and the boys look at you differently. So do other girls.
Not all of them. Not always with malice or teasing, but often yes. The shift is glaringly obvious of how everyone sees you, the sudden awareness that your body is now a thing that generates opinions and responses in other people, and that those opinions and responses are somehow your responsibility to manage. You have no control if they grow ( too ) big, don’t grow at all or if one grows bigger than the other. Regardless how they naturally grow you will be punished and teased for it.
You are twelve years old and you are already learning to make yourself smaller so that the world around you can be more comfortable.
And then come the instructions on how to behave with your body.
Cover up, because if men look at you, or other girls mothers don’t like you, that is somehow your fault. Because your breasts, simply by existing in a shirt, are an act of provocation. Because the inability of certain men to manage their own gaze or women to hold back their snide remarks is a problem that lives in your wardrobe, not in their behaviour.
So you learn the calculus. Every woman learns it. The daily mathematics of what to wear and what it will cost you.
Wear the low-cut top and someone will say you are asking for it. Wear the high neck and someone will say you are hiding yourself. Wear the fitted shirt and someone will comment on your chest. Wear the loose shirt and someone will ask if you are pregnant.
There is no correct answer. There is no outfit that removes you from the equation. The calculation exists because the world has decided that your breasts are a problem to be managed and solved……..
rather than a body part you simply have.
Then, for many women, there is childbirth.
What happens to breasts during pregnancy and nursing is extraordinary. The body does something almost architectural, rebuilding these structures entirely to serve a new function of sustaining life like. And then….when the milk dries up it is once again something else nobody prepares you for. Their softening, their shrinking, their change in shape, the way they sit differently and feel differently as they are so different than they were before.
But this is unacceptable in many circles. the cultural expectation that they should be the same as they were at twenty two before they sustained life.
The perky, high and firm breasts of a woman who has not yet lived in her body. This is the across board beauty standard applied to us all… to a body that has grown children, fed children and changed across the decades the way all living things change.
The word used so often, even by us women ourselves for breasts that have lived a life is “saggy.” As if gravity, the same force acting on every object in the universe, is a personal failing. As if the body that nurtured your children was supposed to emerge from that unchanged. As if time and experience leave marks on everything except the places we have decided should stay decorative.
And still, if through all of it, if you wear something that “happens to show them”…..You are showing off.
Not existing as a woman with breasts, not getting dressed in the morning with roughly the same intention as every other person on the planet. Putting on clothes to leave the ho0use… no…if your breasts show at any amount, you are performing. You are inviting. You are making a statement that you then must be prepared to defend.
Rather than just….. having breasts.
Which is all we women are doing in life…is just having breasts that are larger than mens and that feed humanity…...
Oh Lovers...
The cost of having breasts is not just physical weight and back pain and the bra infrastructure and the grooves in your shoulders. It is the constant management of them for others. From the age of twelve, no stop, the management of other people’s inability to encounter your body without making it mean something about you.
That is an enormous amount of work to ask of a person as the body in its natural state is not a statement or a provocation. It is not an invitation or a challenge or a test of anyone else’s virtue.
It is just your body.
Doing what bodies do.
Women loving their breasts for exactly how they are…now THAT IS THE REVOLUTION.
In celebration of that, I have included two of my oldest rituals I have been teaching women for decades, and that is breast massage and the deer ritual for breasts. I still remember to this day sitting in my new home in Mexico years ago having just gotten back from teaching at a festival in Costa Rica. I was on the phone to my father in Australia and he asked, “So Melly, what do you teach at these festivals?” I answered “I give talks on our sexual energy and teach up to about 500 women at a time how to massage their breasts.” ….. there was silence on the other end for a bit, then he just said, mmhh oh what it would be like to be a woman sitting in the jungle massaging your bits with everyone else looking at ya”
Yep…that kind of sums it up ….. and to answer his question of what it would be like… just wonderful actually. Just wonderful
To have access to these 2 rituals simply be a paid subscriber.
💋
M