Nimue Brown's Blog, page 395

Knocked down, getting up

I start today tired, and wondering how on earth I’m going to manage the things that need doing – some of which are large and hard to make sense of. Some of which have floored me. Life is full of knock downs and we all get them. The rotten luck, the tragedies, the being crapped on from a great height. So here are the things I’ve learned.

Good friends are precious beyond words, and when you’re on your knees and life threatens to break you, friends are everything. Sometimes there’s insight, experience and perspective that can help turn a problem around. Sometimes it’s the sheer power of having people who believe in you and won’t give up and will sit with you and hold your hand and help you try to get up again, and support you when you wobble a bit. Friends who cheerlead. Friends who refuse to let you quit even when you’re so beaten it seems the only option. Friends who carry hope for you when you have none of your own.

Often what will keep me down once I’m knocked is the belief there is no point getting up again. That’s not always a depression issue. That’s for the days when three toxic things rolled in one after another and I can’t face another panic attack and there doesn’t seem to be any way of fixing things. There is no getting up unless you can work up some faith and hope things might get better. Belief like this can be wholly irrational – I’ve been through enough things I was told could not be done. Sometimes what it takes to get up is the skill to magic up irrational belief that it can get better.

I have to believe that I do not deserve the knock down. I do not belong on the floor. That’s been hard to get to grips with, and is not an easy thought to hold when things are bad.

Then there’s the decision about what sort of person I want to be. I don’t want to lie on the floor in a snotty heap, whimpering. I would rather die fighting. While there is breath, while I can act in any way, it is better to have the metaphorical sword or the actual pen in hand and to wield them. Thus far, every time I’ve thought I could not possibly bear any more, I have eventually managed to drag myself up for another round. I have taken beatings, emotional, psychological. I’ve been pasted physically by illness. I get up and I do it again. I won’t sit down, shut up and consent to being a victim. Never again.

The winding Druid path

When I first started to explore Druidry in a deliberate way, my path for the first few years was dominated by learning about what modern Druids do. I learned the wheel of the year and the conventions of ritual, explored some of the philosophy and spent a fair amount of time working out how what I already knew fitted in with that.

For a while my main focus became service – volunteering for several organisations, reviewing books, writing website articles, organising things. As circumstances changed, I found myself running rituals and teaching meditation. For some years the essence of my Druidry was helping other people along their path and most things I did were with an eye to how they might be helpful, not how they could deepen my practice or carry me forwards. But of course nonetheless, this did deepen my practice and carry me forwards.

I had a few years as a hermit – unplanned but necessary. With no community on hand that needed me, I started writing books and blogs. I went on an intense journey that changed my relationship with owning stuff and using resources. My Druidry became about this world and learning to live as lightly as I could. I started exploring prayer, developing a much richer and very private personal practice, totally different from anything I’d done before.

Returning to dry land, I’ve been exploring community again – not just Druid spaces. Finding places to be and struggling a bit with how and where I might fit. I’ve dedicated time in service to OBOD, which I’m really enjoying. A deepening relationship with my ancestors – which focused on ancestors of blood when it started nearly 4 years ago, has become a deep exploration of ancient ancestry. It involves a lot of physical journeys, walking ancestral ways in the landscape and exploring their places.

This summer I’ll be teaching ritual skills at camp. It’s a bit like going back to the things I was first doing – ritual comes easily and naturally to me, and always did. I come full circle in this one having learned a lot, and changed, and it will be a new journey. I know I learn most when I’m teaching.

At the moment I’m also finding that the call to express my Druidry has become a call to political activism. I see a lot of my friends responding in the same way. How can we talk about tribe, land, nature, relationship, without responding to the destructive political approaches that dominate right now. Badger culls, fracking, climate change and social injustice to name but a few make it difficult to waft about in the robes, ignoring the mainstream. We are needed more than ever, to act, and to speak up. As protestors, as commentators, as potential politicians ourselves, I’m seeing a lot of Druids and fellow travellers gritting their teeth and wading into the unlovely world of politics. Because we must.

My great longing at the moment is that the tide will turn. Hope will triumph over hate. Reason will triumph over delusion. The lying, cheating, stealing bastards around the world will be kicked out of positions of power, and a more functional set of people will take over. People with fair and sensible ideas who, for the majority of the time can be left to get on with it. But not all the time, because that makes them complacent. I dream of a future where there is no call to be political, and when the Druid path will bring me to some new place. Community resilience perhaps. Tree planting. Sitting on hills all night. A life where I can sing songs and make up stories, and not worry so much. Perhaps we can get there.

Angry Druid

For me, the journey of recent years has involved claiming my own anger and letting myself feel entitled to it. Anger is not a socially accepted emotion – especially not in women and many of us learn that we are to be quiet, grateful, biddable and co-operative and that we must never, ever cause offence by being furious. Never mind what’s done to us to provoke the fury.

I’m also only too aware that there are a second set of people who feel entitled to anger over anything that displeases them or makes them uncomfortable. There are a small number of people for whom the experience of anger is understood as an excuse for violence, as though to be angry is to have no choice but to lash out.

Getting the balance of needful, healthy, protective anger without falling into the anger that is deaf to all negative feedback, is tricky. It’s not what we feel that’s in issue here, it’s what we choose to do with it. How and when we express anger, is a choice. This is very much a work in progress for me, and as ever, alternative stories and perspectives are exceedingly welcome.

I’ve identified two different anger inducing situations for me. The first is impersonal – a response to sexism, casual or deliberate, to things that enable rape culture, racism, pedalling misinformation, hypocrisy and the such. The vast majority of anything said by anyone from UKIP and quite a lot of other political stuff too, in fact. I wade in and I comment. I make a point of being as polite as I can with this, because feeling entitled to be rude is a lot of what enables the other side in these fights. I’m not doing it with any hope of winning, but some possibility that others, getting to compare me being polite and rational with the hateful raving, might decide they don’t want to support the haters. It’s worth a try. While the clashes I get into are often wearing, I know what I’m doing and why and I feel fairly confident about it.

The personal stuff is a lot harder. I don’t feel confident about my entitlement to personal anger. If someone seems rude, unkind or aggressive in their treatment of me, my default is still to step back, and the urge is still to apologise and assume blame and responsibility. That’s been a big problem for me historically and has left me vulnerable, so I’m trying not to do it. Where possible, what I do is step away to explore my responses without the source of emotion present. If I can get a second opinion, I will. A wider context can help establish what is fair, reasonable, normal, etc. That enables me to make more informed judgements about how I’m handling things. I will talk to people I trust to see if it looks likely that I’m in the wrong. If it is necessary to go back and say anything, it will be calm and considered.

I’ve never said anything in anger that I didn’t mean and later had to retract. I have a great deal of difficulty with people who use ‘I was angry’ to excuse this. If honour is central to Druidry, then your word is everything, and if you speak carelessly, or say things in rage that are not meant, where does that leave your honour? I find I’m more comfortable with people who own what they do in anger, who meant what they said and are not ashamed to own it in hindsight. That’s a good deal easier to respect, even if I do choose to step away from them, than the person who lashes out, and in a desire to seem nice, later puts the lie to their own words.

I am convinced that it is possible to feel, express and honour anger- our own and other people’s – without falling into a shouty, aggressive, dysfunctional and dishonourable state. I’m aware of other people making journeys into the same landscape, and must particularly acknowledge Jo van der Hoeven’s recent post on anger – http://www.witchesandpagans.com/SageWoman-Blogs/peace-learning-when-to-speak-and-when-to-keep-silent.html

The troubling implications of a healthy lifestyle

One of the big pushes at the moment is to get people active enough to be healthy. The recommendation is to try and do five bouts of exercise per week, half an hour a throw. It’s the implications of this that stand thinking about.

I write this blog post having just come back from shopping. I’ve spent the last two hours walking in and out of town, and around it, I took things in for charity shops, and I came back carrying stuff. I’ve clocked up a few miles there, all of it whilst carrying weight.  I clock up more than ten miles a week in walking for transport, plus some occasional cycling for transport. I also walk for fun.

How, if you are reasonably healthy and have the use of your legs, is it possible to have a lifestyle that doesn’t deliver half an hour a day of activity? The answer has everything to do with our general dependence on cars, and our growing habit of staying at home being amused by our various boxes. Even the stats on couples having sex are down, and yes, that does count as being active! We don’t walk to the pub, or to neighbours homes, or local events. We don’t live near where we work, or near where we shop all too often. Urban design and positioning of critical resources (schools, doctors etc) increasingly assumes you have access to a car, and thus requires you to have that access, and makes it ever harder to get around by other means.

No one had to tell our ancestors to get exercise, because their daily lives had them up and about and doing for the greater part. No one worried about overweight children when my mother was a child. It didn’t really matter what children ate, they went out and ran around and most of them were not fat. Fear of cars and road safety makes us reluctant to let our kids out. Fear of cars means that most children do not walk to school. When I was a child, it was technically possible to play ball games in the road. These days, that same road is lined on both sides, with cars, and no mercy will be shown to any child who dares to risk damaging one with a ball.

Try walking and cycling, and you will run into issues around negotiating with cars – alarming junctions with rapidly moving traffic are terrifying. Try doing a roundabout on a main road when you can’t accelerate, and some of them are doing fifty… try walking and see how far you can get on the footpaths before you have to try and cross a stream of traffic. If you’re walking as transport, or cycling, you really appreciate the car fumes and the noise as well, insulated from neither, they do not improve the quality of your experience.

Most of us have bodies that were designed with movement in mind. We evolved to walk, to run, to swim even. Not to sit on our bottoms all day, every day, moving a few feet from bed to sofa, sofa to car, car to office.  Yet we want to force our children into ever longer hours at school and in other structured learning activities, we bundle them around in cars, feed them passive amusements and wonder why the little dears get rounder with each passing year.

That we need telling to try and be active for half an hour every day, really ought to alert us to exactly how much trouble we are in, collectively. The lifestyle we’ve been so carefully constructing does not actually serve us very well. And the answer? Drive to the gym, apparently.

Comedy fail

Here’s a thing I see all too often: An image of a person is posted online, sometimes with a demeaning caption. People pile in to ridicule. My experience is that frequently when the image is of a women, there will be male commentators who remark on how gross they imagine sexual contact with this woman would be. All too frequently when this happens, they go unchallenged. If you do challenge, you can expect (if you are female) to be told that you are fat, ugly and sexually unattractive, and people of any gender who complain will be told the problem is they have no sense of humour.

It’s really not funny.

If we don’t challenge this, we are tacitly supporting it and the people who do it will continue to assume that what they do is ok, funny and that you and everyone else likes it and approves. More often than not this is about men commenting on women, but it is supported by women and we do it to the guys as well, so while there’s a definite gender bias, it’s not a one way street. Regardless of gender, if you keep silent, you are complicit and if you speak up you will probably (but not always) get some verbal abuse.

Here are some points to help you tackle this when you encounter it.

1)      The odds are that the person in the photo is not aware of the picture or that it is circulating. This is a real person with real feelings. They probably aren’t responsible for any demeaning captions.

2)      In judging a stranger purely on how they look in the moment of a bad photograph, we reduce them. We say ‘only this facet of them matters’. Appearance is not something we have total control over. How a person behaves and what they choose to do is more important than how they look, and what a person appears to be doing in a solitary photo is not fair evidence of who they are.

3)      When we publically speculate about how gross it would be to have sex with someone, we are implying that we are either entitled or able to have that level of contact with them. This tends to be something guys do over women and it reinforces the idea of women as passive sex objects who aren’t entitled to choose. Reinforcing the idea that women aren’t entitled to choose quietly perpetrates rape culture.

4)      Reducing a person (usually a woman) to their sexual desirability is dehumanising, it is treating the person as a piece of available meat. Again, this is a rape culture issue.

5)      All of this behaviour is rude and demeaning. It is unnecessary, and the odds are the people doing it would not appreciate being treated on the same terms. The object of ridicule has been dehumanised and depersonalised for them in a way that makes it seem ok. Try asking how they would feel if someone talked about their mother, sister or daughter in these terms.

6)      It isn’t funny, but you don’t have to go very far back in time to find racists using the ‘comedy’ excuse to justify racism. Be absolutely clear that ‘sexist humour’ isn’t funny, it is sexism and offensive. Guys, if you uphold this one it has particular power, sexist guys being found unfunny by other men are more likely to realise they are out of order.

7)      If you get the feedback that you are ugly and not sexually attractive to the perpetrator, treat it as an enormous joke – how very funny it is that they imagine you would give them an option on getting anywhere near you! Point out that sexism isn’t innately attractive. Random abuse from strangers can painful and threatening, be prepared for it and do not take it seriously. If you are directly threatened, do take it seriously, that’s a matter for the police.

If you catch people doing this, try to call them out without being abusive in turn. It is enough to say ‘this isn’t funny, or kind or needed and you wouldn’t like it or find it amusing if we did it to you.’

Objects of desire

A bookcase isn’t merely a storage unit. It’s an expression of self, belief and ideals, a daily reminder of who we think we are, and a little information for our visitors. Many people in the UK do not own books, so being one of the ones who does have a shelf or bookcase automatically sets you aside. People who read tend to favour the company of other people who read, and will scan your books to check you out.

It’s not just about the reading. I own a lot of books that I probably won’t read, or won’t read again. They have stories about where they came from; when, why, who bought them, or bequeathed them. I had, during the first thirty or so years of my life, accumulated a lot of books and I lived in a house that clearly marked me out as a book person. There was no room for bookcases on the boat, we had one book box, and the rest were in storage. Books ceased to be objects of display for a while.

Now we’re settled in a flat. It isn’t a big space, and I like that – easier to heat and clean, and innately greener as a consequence. I want to live lightly, to consume less. I’ve let go of a great many things, and now I’ve started thinking about my relationship with the books I own. Why am I keeping them all? Do I need them? Would they be better off in other hands, being read? The author gets nothing if I give books away, but at the same time I’ve been converted to fandom by book loans plenty of times.

Giving away books is a very odd process, and runs counter to feelings and impulses I’ve had my whole life, and that run in my family. Even though my people have been resoundingly working class for some time (there are some distant figures, but that’s a story for another day…) we’ve long been book people. I own a bookcase which, from the date chalked on its back, was clearly my great grandmother’s. She liked Tennyson. Did she own more books than would fit in that bookcase? I don’t know.

In the early days of books, they were not just methods of communication, but objects of power and desire. You had to be wealthy to own a book, and the book itself would be gorgeous. To display a book was to display learning and disposable income. While mass production brought cheap paper that yellows in a decade or so, and unremarkable covers, that urge to display seems wired into the book owning mindset. That’s the trouble with kindle – no one can casually scan it and appreciate your taste, wit, erudite-ness, style etc. Books you just read and do not use to adorn rooms are only serving some of the functions of books.

Most things I now find it easy to let go of when I’ve ceased to have any use for them. Most things can flow through my hands, no trouble at all. Learning to overcome all the cultural and emotional layers I’ve built up around book owning, is a process. I started with the books I didn’t much like: A tricky process of admitting there were books that I hadn’t much enjoyed and didn’t mean to read again, but still had not been able to part with. Why? I’m not sure I can answer. Learning to recognise books that I won’t re-read and that no one else in my family would read, and letting them go. Why keep them? And yet, sometimes when I can’t sleep, I recall their covers like the faces of lost friends and wonder if I made the right call.

Made of trees and filled with inspiration… perhaps it’s no wonder I default to treating them like sacred objects.

Virtual Tribe

Not so long ago, I spent several years in a boat, mostly in rural locations. We had no car, money was tight, and I was suffering anxiety in ways that made in-person social stuff exhausting. There was nowhere to go, and no way to get there most of the time, and when there was, I found it hard. Things have improved a lot for me in the last year, but I will not forget what I learned.

I would have felt totally socially alienated on the boat, had it not been for the internet and the radio, both of which were intermittent. On Sunday nights, we listened to Genevieve Tudor’s folk program, and on Wednesdays, Radio 2 folk. These were essential, giving me a sense of connection to community and heritage. Inspired by good music, and having a sense of being part of this scattered, folky tribe, really helped me.

You have no idea how central a fixed residential address is to your legal, social and political identity until you haven’t got one. Some days I would look at the houses, and feel like some kind of exile. I no longer belonged. Sometimes it was difficult to establish legally that I existed. Everything was made that bit harder by the absence of a fixed address. But I still had a home in the folk community. I still belonged there.

My online tribe comes from across the world. Greens, Pagans, Steampunks, Folkies, authors, artists, dreamers, creators…Many of you I will never meet in person. Some of those internet connections have tuned into powerful friendships and working partnerships. Tom, I married! I take my internet tribe seriously. During those hard years, my online tribe supported, encouraged and inspired me. It didn’t matter so much that I was in a boat, with limited options and a nervous wreck. On facebook, I could contribute as an equal. That meant a great deal to me.

I know that some of the people in my virtual tribe are geographically isolated – the only Pagan in the village and other such issues. I know that some of my tribe are limited by mobility issues, and some lack the resources to be out and about. I know I’m not the only one to have struggled with mental health impacting on social experience. On facebook or twitter, or a blog like this we all arrive as equals. Our wheels, pills, variously shaped crutches, and the things that might disenfranchise us the rest of the time just aren’t so visible. That’s liberating, or it can be.

Knowing what a lifeline and sanity saver the virtual tribe is, I get both cross and depressed by the people who devalue this space. The folk for whom online isn’t real are themselves a problem. Some of them manifest this with rudeness and aggression they would never consider acceptable in ‘real life’. Many are emotionally fraudulent, playing games with other people’s hearts and minds as casual amusement. Many simply take the time to acknowledge this isn’t the real world, or their real life and this tribe is pretend and not so important as what you can do face to face and in person. That devalues us, needlessly. It is not kind, true or helpful.

When you have health, transport, money, leisure time and people you like in decent proximity, the internet can seem a lot less real and significant. For people missing some, or all of those things, it is a whole other experience. Can I suggest that if the online tribes are unreal to you, or you think what happens online doesn’t count, or matter, the you shouldn’t be online. I’m weary of the devaluing.

I’m no advocate of being online all the time – anything done all the time tends not to be a good idea. I wouldn’t advocate being in the pub all the time, either. This is a space, like any other. If you’re tuning up, treat it with respect and don’t feel obliged to humour the people who think it’s ok to do otherwise. After all if we were in a bar and someone came in and took a dump, we’d complain. There’s no need to tolerate the virtual equivalents.

Hope and Inspiration

The latest climate change report is grim. Faced with an alarming and uncertain future, we need hope and ideas more than ever. Those of you who have been with me a while will know that I fell over earlier this year – exhausted and demoralised. The things that need doing are so numerous, and overwhelming while my feelings of powerlessness have been growing. Turn on the news any day and the reasons to despair are many.

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading “Storytelling for a Greener World” (Hawthorn Press). Essays from many practitioners, exploring story, environment, action, community and hope. Most especially hope. Running through the book were clearly expressed beliefs that it is worth trying and that there is scope for hope. Methods for moving forward and reasons not to give up were abundant. In fact a big part of what this book is about, is inspiring and uplifting people, and how to reach out to others with story to create a vision of a better world.

The stories we tell ourselves and each other inform our life choices. The future we imagine, or fear, shapes how we live and the choices we make. Our beliefs shape the future we are jointly creating. This often leads to me feeling that I should keep silent when I’m struggling – no one else needs to be brought down by my anxiety, when up-beat, hopeful narratives would be so much more use. However, this book includes tales of extinctions. Not all stories have happy endings. Some are uncomfortable. If we can only tell each other happy tales of a lovely future in which it’s all going to be great, we risk creating a new framework for disenchantment and disbelief. Life after all, is never perfect and if we try to sell ourselves utopian imagery, we tap into our own awareness of how that begets dystopian outcomes.

The future is uncertain. We could make something better. There will be many challenges. We are going to need each other. It is quite reasonable to be afraid. If we share that we can overcome it.

There are no magical restoratives and no sure fire ways of setting the world to rights. What this book did, was to remind me of a most fundamental thing: We are story telling creatures. We build our communities, our cultures, our social systems and our futures out of the stories we tell each other about who we are, what we’re doing and what the priorities should be. We all get to participate in those stories, but, because stories are things we make up, reflections and interpretations of the world, there are always other options.

The big story passed round online for some years now is ‘keep calm and carry on’. We’ve got to ditch that and start making radical changes. Maybe we need to get angry with those in power, or at least cross enough to stop letting them dictate everything. We really have got to stop carrying on as usual, and start imagining other futures and different ways of life more consistent with what our planet can actually support.

The Greening

The coming of spring is a very location specific thing. Even across a few miles, sheltered and exposed spots have slightly different seasons. Through March, I’ve watched the greening. The first shoots poking up through the soil have now arrived fully, opening out into garlic leaves, particularly. The elders have unfurled their leaves already, with the hawthorn not far behind. I’m seeing the chestnuts opening, although the black buds of the ash trees seem tightly shut still. I think the beeches will open soon, and the oaks of course always tend to be a bit later.

This time of year brings a rush of new life and colour and that can be uplifting. I was outside yesterday, enjoying the sun, and more especially, the colour. One of the things I really struggle with in winter, can be the loss of colour. Yes, granted grey is a colour, but apparently lots of grey doesn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s the lack of strong differences. Perhaps it’s the washed out quality of winter colours. I do better when there are bright, cold winter days with blue skies and more intense dark shades for contrast.

I have an emotional dependence on colour. When my environment has very little colour in it, I tend to get melancholy. The relentless beige and magnolia of the hospital where I gave birth really got to me. I’ve struggled with the white walls of this flat, although we’ve inserted what colour we can by other means. January is the time of year I am most motivated to decorate. It’s also the time of year I’m likely to want a mad, psychedelic colour scheme, which isn’t always optimal.

However, painted colours are no substitute for sky and plant colours, and the colours of spring, the yellows of daffodils and primroses are a real joy. I’ve been comforting myself with a chilli plant, and the bright red peppers are cheery, but do not have the same effect as the white of the first blackthorn flowers or the snowdrops. I don’t think it’s simply because of that rush of new life or promise of longer days, either. After the grey days, white is a colour that impacts on me too (in flowers but not in wall colours, I am not sure why!), the vibrancy of white against a washed out winter background, can be startling. The presence of flowers is a thing in its own right.

Green is a wonderful, soulful colour. It is, for me, the colour of life. The green of chlorophyll in plants is a parallel to the blood in human bodies. It is the essence of the plant world, and a key part of most food chains. Green is life, health and hope. Once again, we survived the winter. We did not freeze to death, or starve, and perhaps there’s something very fundamental, ancestral in me which responds to this. The seasons turn, and the greening promises reasons for optimism.

The unfettered breast

Like many young women, I started wearing a bra when I was about twelve, and have worn one for most of my waking hours since then. In the last year or so I’ve picked up a lot of things online about more free range breasts – French studies suggesting breast firmness might be improved by being bra-less, and ideas that breasts need to move freely in order to function properly. It all makes a fair amount of sense. We did not, after all, evolve to wear corsetry.

For a few months now I have been experimenting, and I have noticed some things.

My first feelings of going bra-free were of awkwardness and discomfort – emotional, not physical. I felt exposed, even though fully dressed. I realise that I have been socialised to consider the unfettered breast a sign of loose sexual morals and availability. The idea that, anyone realising I had no bra would conclude that I am a slut and open to any and all sexual advances, was not a comfortable one. I have yet to go out in public without a bra, and this is a big part of why. I simply do not want the assumptions that could go with it.

Experience of attitudes to the female body have taught me that what I have on my chest are two objects of gratification for other people. I realised, in my unfettered times, that I feel very little ownership of my breasts and that’s something I’m trying to work on. My being comfortable with them should be more important than anyone else finding them pleasing, especially when we’re talking about people with whom I have no relationship at all and no wish to share my body.

The next realisation was that, in the absence of a bra, I become more aware of my posture. My breasts become less comfortable if I am slumped, or trying to fold in on myself. In a bra, I am often oblivious to my posture, but without one I need to sit or stand in strong, confident positions that support my breasts. Thus unfettering my breasts sometimes, has changed how I think about the rest of my body, and this has been a really useful process for me.

It took time and practice to feel relaxed just being around the house, fully dressed but without a bra. To be able to do that and feel normal, natural and acceptable has been a journey. I have learned that my menfolk do not seem to notice whether I am strapped up or not. Apparently it isn’t so obvious. I have learned not to feel demeaned by a more natural condition and to recognise that if I am not doing something in a sexual way, no one else has any right to sexualise it and impose that on me.

For a lot of reasons, I’ve never felt wholly present in my own skin, nor proper ownership of my body. I’m looking at small acts of reclamation, including how I dress and move, what I do, and do not do. I’d like to get to a point of feeling more present in my own skin, and more possessed of it – that in turn would help me hold better boundaries, and it would be an innately healing process.

I’m aware of an innate irony in writing all of this. Like the ‘naked men’ post of last year, a blog with breasts in it will get a lot of hits. Those will come from people online who were seeking objects of gratification, and who probably didn’t make it past the first paragraph. A breast is so much more than eye candy. A breast is part of a person, and to treat it as a separate object, does no good at all.