Flinging Breasts and Free Books

By Laura Vivanco on

I was reading Catherine Roach's Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture when I came across something that reminded me of a passage from Sarah Mayberry's Suddenly You which had generated a fair amount of controversy over at Dear Author. It's about breasts and breastfeeding:

Unlike many of the women in her mothers’ group, she had been unsuccessful at breast-feeding. A series of infections and an inadequate milk supply led her paediatrician to recommend bottle-feeding Alice when her daughter was barely a month old. Consequently, Pippa wasn’t nearly as casual about flinging her breasts around as some of her friends. To her, they were about sex and intimacy, not sustenance. (p. 42)

Here's what Roach, a successful breastfeeder, had to say on the topic of flinging one's breasts around:

Tassel-twirling [...] makes me inwardly cringe, it just looks so torturous, although I have to admit that all of the other women in my afternoon workshop seem to be having a blast. I’m one of the few who doesn’t glue on the tassels. I feel too sorry for the nipples. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent two years breast-feeding my child, an experience that was rewarding but also a form of hard labor for the breast. It left me with the sense that you’ve got to be gentle with them; they need nurturance, support, delicate handling. You can’t go swinging them around like a cowgirl looking to rope a steer. A bosom is not a centrifugal lettuce spinner. (115)

Roach came across the tassels while researching burlesque, to see if and/or how it differed from the stripping she'd already seen in stripclubs. She found that in burlesque the

look varies widely, from stunning to butch to art house to clown; from slim to fat; from pin-up polished to deliberately anti-glam. In comparison, the strip club insists on a much more monolithic and conventional vision of female form (slim, big-breasted, pretty, available). These differences illustrate that the definition of beauty and femininity in stripclub exotic dance is a comparatively narrow one driven by men’s pleasure and pocketbook. (111)

She argues that, "To the extent that the stripping industry fuels male fantasy – and female fantasy as well – about how a perfect woman should look and act, the 'average' woman can never measure up" (85).

Jade Beall's "A Beautiful Body Project" celebrates the beauty of more "average" women and, like burlesque, it puts on display bodies in a variety of sizes and shapes:

Beall says many of her clients don't like the images at first, and focus on what they see as blemishes or problem areas - a roll of fat, a wrinkle, a stretch mark.

But she says the more they look, the more they start to see the beauty in the images. (BBC)

Judge for yourself:

[Edited to add: I don't have a transcript of the video, but the gist of what's said in it is much the same as in this article in The Guardian.]

You can download

for free (in pdf format) from OAPEN, whose "Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books." Some of the other books available are: