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September 9 - October 6, 2025
“A mastectomy is an amputation. Losing a body part is a severe trauma. Amputees wear prostheses to make them feel normal,” she explained. “But it takes time.”
We are engulfed in masculine views that rarely admit their gender-specific origin and masquerade as neutral.
Reporting on sexism and misogyny is essential, but repeating it like a mantra is not a strategy for change. I see optimism as a discipline and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“yitties.”
In straight-male-dominated venues, sexiness and funniness are generally opposed. When women predominate, eroticism and satire go hand in hand.
Leigh was also an advocate of “breast freedom”—now known as “free the nipple”—which fights for the right of women to go shirtless in places where men do. Due to activists of her generation, women in some places, including New York City and Los Angeles, have the legal right to bare breasts in public based on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Technically, they shouldn’t just be sunbathing, but protesting, dancing, or expressing themselves in some way.
Romantic myths prevent us from seeing contemporary sex as highly transactional. However, when one considers all the wining, dining, and gifting, it is hard to understand love without referring to what anthropologist Heidi Hoefinger describes as the “general materiality of everyday sex.”
In 2020, Bea Cordelia sued the city for violating her First Amendment right to freedom of expression by forcing her to wear pasties. Issues arose about whether authorities could fairly apply laws based on binary gender to nonconforming people. Would police enforce the ordinance against a transgender woman who is legally female but whose chest is flat? Or a transgender man who is legally male but whose breasts have not been reduced or removed? The law was found to be discriminatory, Cordelia won the case, and Chicago removed its nipple prohibition.
Tits are warm, complex, and deep. They’re an advertisement for and an appetizer to other services as well as a malleable tool in sex work. Tits are wholehearted and droll. Even tiny ones are generous. If they resort to violence, they can only smother.
She is currently nursing her own baby and giving raw milk directly to a cancer survivor who had a double mastectomy before giving birth.
the word for nipple in Norwegian, directly translated, was the debased “breast wart.”
“Apparently, in Chinese medicine, menopause is conceptualized as the season of spring, because it’s a new life in which a woman keeps her energy to herself instead of constantly ovulating, shedding blood, making milk. It is not other-oriented, but self-oriented. I’d like to think of weaning in the same way, but I’m not there yet. I’m still in mourning, thinking about the connection I’m losing.”
Iris Marion Young saw breast augmentation as a form of “phallocentric” compliance and disdained post-cancer breast reconstruction as “the ultimate in breast objectification.”
When breasts are lost to cancer, reconstructive surgery is often said to rebuild a sense of womanhood. For this reason, I sometimes see my own breast reconstruction as a gender re-affirmation surgery. It did not restore any real functionality; it reinstalled a graphic marker of my gender.
Still, only 40 percent of women who lose their breasts for cancer-related reasons go on to have reconstruction.37
As a 3D nipple tattoo artist explained to me, “nipples are really important because their absence or misplacement can cause unconscious alarm. Our brain goes into a loop searching for this fundamental marker of our humanity.”
Spandex, an anagram of “expands,” was invented in the late 1950s to improve the comfort of women’s girdles and was redeployed in form-fitting aerobics wear in the 1970s.
Sri Lanka, an island with extensive lingerie manufacturing facilities, where the native Sinhalese word for nipple translates rather wonderfully as “nozzle.”
Since 1998, American health insurance companies have been required to pay for breast implants after women have had mastectomies for medical reasons. Women have no federal right to breastfeed or to obtain an abortion, but we have the right to fake tits.”
syncretizing
heterodox
Tara, the Buddha-goddess who, for me, epitomizes the beauty of feminine power
