Lipservice to big boobs
This is something I might write a longer more thought-out thing about later
But did anyone else (especially girls with big boobs) feel like, throughout your childhood and teen years, everybody was always saying guys were into big boobs and that conventionally attractive girl = girl with big boobs, but this never actually seemed to be the case?
Like girls in real life and in teen books would be all bemoaning their flat chests and wishing they had big boobs so guys would be into them, but then in real life, the popular girl the guys were all into was some skinny thing with C-cups at best, and the media-sanctioned epitome of female beauty was people like Keira Knightley and Rosario Dawson.
I just got reminded of this hard when I was re-watching Galavant. Madalena is initially the hero’s love interest and she’s always positioned by the show as super sexy and irresistible. Here’s how she’s described:
Long legs and perfect skin
A body built for sin
With cleavage you could hold a whole parade in!
…and here’s that ‘cleavage’ in action:
What’s with this? Why is this a thing?
I feel like I have a hunch as to some reasons, but it’s hard to put a finger on.
- “Big tits” is just a really easy description, and that should never be underestimated as a cause for overuse.
- It is a positive that’s correlated with negatives (it’s very obvious although rarely said that big tits on fat women don’t really count).
- Modeling has more specific demands than just “being hot to men”, and these anticorrelate with big breasts somewhat, and modeling is really influential.
- The first point also might work against women with big breasts (esp. in settings where other women are involved), as it is also really easy to go “people only like you for your tits”, and/or big tits are seen as kind of crude (c.f. girls in American schools being told they’re dressed provocatively for clothes that would be utterly normal on smaller-breasted girls).
I don’t really see how any of those explain it? I mean, ‘thin’ is an even easier description. The influence of modelling can make the Keira Knightley figure mainstream-attractive, but doesn’t explain why people would keep talking as if big tits were what everyone was into. 2 and 4 explain some degree of animosity toward women with big tits, but not how the world would settle on this bizarre convention of talking as if they are considered attractive but acting as if pretty much the opposite is true.
Also with the modelling thing, I understand that the convention for modelling is that models should avoid having curves at all costs, and that once something is the done thing it can stay that way just because that’s the way we do things. I don’t buy that there’s any reason why it necessarily should be that way. I mean even if you buy the argument that it’s easier to do cool and elaborate things with clothes when you don’t have to worry about making it work around curves, high-end fashion is ostensibly about showing off that you are the best at designing clothes. One can easily imagine a world where runway models had to have the most extreme curves you could find, because if that makes it harder, then clearly the curvier your models, the more skilled you must be to make your clothes work on them.
Kira Knightly has ~100k followers on Instagram, a place you can get lots of pics of her. Kim Kardashian has 100M followers.
Throughout my childhood and teen years, Kim Kardashian was not a thing.
Kim Kardashian (who has a D cup and is very curvy) has been a thing since 2007. Before that you had women like Jessica Simpson (D cup) and Pamela Anderson (whose implants were famous) and Angelina Jolie (who has an hourglass figure 36-23.5-35).
Mainstream American culture considers a few body types as “beautiful” but large breasts are “sexy.” Women with smaller breasts who want to be seen as “sexy” (on the national level) either need to dress in a way to make it seem like they have big breasts (photo shoots from certain angles, clothing designed for this effect), or find some other method to get that association in people’s mind (having a sex tape leak or whatever Miley Cyrus did both come to mind). Whereas (relatively skinny) women with larger breast have a hard time not being seen as “sexy” by mainstream society.
Also “big boobs” often means “big boobs relative to BMI”, so a thinner woman can be considered busty even if her actual breast volume is below average.
Also also, because it’s seen as sexual/sexy, liking big boobs is seen as crass and objectifying, or low class(?), particularly for heterosexual men. It’s basically assumed that it’s all the guy likes about the woman if he acts like that.