I have long been fascinated with our culture’s obsession with breasts. Because we are, aren’t we? Obsessed. We are hardly running low on boobs – every second person has them – but that has done little to placate our interest in them. Hoist them up, flatten them down, hide them away, or put them on show, there is no escaping them. Tits are everywhere.
How these wibbly, wobbly, veiny, gelatinous bags come to be regarded as symbols of sex, youth, and beauty is beyond me. It’s doubly weird when you consider that their primary focus is to make milk to feed babies. That’s the thing about boobs, they just can’t win, can they?
There has been a considerable amount of research done on what the aesthetically ideal breast looks like. We want them to be big, but not too big, and definitely not fake-looking. We want them bouncy and round, but they must also be perky and firm. They must be soft and squishy but able to defy gravity and stay pointing upright. That’s a tall order for a sack of glandular tissue, fat and skin.
Even if the desired shape is achieved, boobs are still incredibly tricky things. They are sources of great pain, irritation, and even disease, but also markers of femininity and beauty. Those with naturally huge boobs hate them, and those with less than a handful look on at the pendulously endowed with envy.
They are at once highly sexualised and deeply maternal. They are simultaneously for lovers and for babies. And every year, billions of pounds are spent making them bigger, smaller, higher and (hopefully) healthier. I feel so sorry for tits. It’s like they were hired for an entry level job (make milk) but then found out they were then expected to head up an entire organisation.
Surely, the ideal breast should be a healthy one that can lactate when required, but I don’t think that’s what “white van man” meant when he yelled “nice tits” at me as I was jogging last week. It’s not the first time someone has felt the need to shout at me about my breasts in public. I do have nice tits! I don’t need that hollering at me from passing traffic, but I’ve always been quite proud of them. They’re big enough to create a decent cleavage if squished together, but small enough to go braless, which I do most days. My nipples are where you would want them to be, pointing outwards and upwards. They are nice tits!
Or, at least, they were. I have found myself thinking about them a lot more of late because there has been a noticeable shift in their appearance, and that shift has been downwards.
I started to notice some discomfort in my armpits when I was lying down. I’d have to sit back up again and move around to get comfy. I initially thought it might be an issue with my scatter cushions, but pretty soon I realised what was going on. My tits had slid off my chest. They no longer had the viscosity required to resist gravity and maintain their shape on their own.
I will take a moment here to shout out to my big-titted sisters who will be reading these words with a mixture of scorn and derision. I know that when you lie down your breasts morph into two fat children trying to suffocate you. I know my slight discomfort pales into comparison with what you have to deal with daily. My friend Verity has boobs big enough to feed a crèche, but can also use them as a pillow when she lies down. I get it. But this was still a big moment for me! My tits are no longer perky.
I recalled someone at school telling us about “the pencil test”. If you can hold a pencil underneath your breasts when you’re standing up, you officially have “saggy tits”. I remember trying it as soon as I got home and being hugely relieved that I had “passed”. It didn’t occur to me that I was still in a training bra and that the exercise was rather like trying to stick a pencil to a white board, but there we go. I’d passed.
Thirty years later, I took the pencil test again. Reader, it gripped the pencil like a vice. I can actually get two under there, three under the left one. They can even hold a wooden spoon. I know that because I’ve started using my fun-bags to hold cooking utensils when I’ve run out of hands.
Confidence is a strange thing because you often don’t realise you have it until it’s gone. I promise I did not wake up each morning and consciously rejoice in my perky norks, before dressing them up for a day of promenading before dazzled onlookers. But I didn’t think anything of going braless, safe in the knowledge my tits looked good.
In fact, I haven’t worn a bra for years. If I need some support, I’ll wear a bralette, and now, aged 42, I’m wandering around my kitchen wearing spoons. Having failed the self-imposed pencil test, I’m no longer confident enough to “freeboob” it, and am wrestling the girls back into a bra. I hate it. Underwires, clasp fastenings, plunge cups – I loathe all of it and something had to be done.
In the quest to revitalise my jugs I started googling how to reverse droopy boobs. I was really after some kind of upper body workout but what I found was an entire industry and multiple surgical interventions available to me. This didn’t surprise me all that much; I am well aware that breast augmentation has consistently remained the most popular surgery for women for years. What did shock me was the medicalised language being used to describe something I had never thought of as a medical issue before.
Obviously, the pencil test is not used within the medical community, but you can bet your swinging udders that they have their own systems of assessment. Something called the Regnault’s classification has been used to measure boob droop since the 70s. It measures where the nipple sits in relation to the lower breast contour and the inframammary fold (the crease under your boob where you can store pencils and spoons). The further below the inframammary fold and lower breast contour the nipple is swinging, the more “severe” the condition is.
Upon learning this, you better believe that I ran to the mirror, hitched up my cardie, and diagnosed myself. It’s no longer slightly deflated tatters, its “first degree breast ptosis”. It sounds so serious! So medical. I don’t think this is enough to get me a disabled parking badge or priority boarding at the airport, but I still didn’t like the sound of it.
It’s not necessarily the medicalisation of boob shape that concerns me. Obviously, surgeons have to use some kind of aesthetic scale when they are operating on breasts, especially when it comes to reconstructive surgery. You can’t just dive in with a scalpel and hope for the best. You need to know what you are aiming for. But just knowing that my slightly downturned tits could now be considered a medical condition unsettles me. Because if it’s a medical condition, then that ups the ante on what you should do about it, and surgery is one possible option.
If you want your boobs lifting, rather than enlarging, then you could consider a mastopexy, which is where the nipple is repositioned and excess breast tissue is cut away. This is used in reconstructive surgeries and reductions, but it can also be performed simply to perk things up a bit. Don’t worry, I’m not thinking about doing it – and no hate to anyone who wants this surgery to feel more confident. I completely get that. I’d love mine to be a bit more alert and they are only first-degree breast ptosis.
But looking at a host of before and after mastopexy pictures on various cosmetic surgery websites, I started to feel so sorry for my poor jugs. Why was I being so mean to them? Hadn’t they served me faithfully and well all these years? How dare I shun them now just because they can hide cooking utensils underneath them!
I read through so many research papers on what is considered the perfect breast for this article. Along the way I diagnosed myself with multiple conditions of sagginess that I didn’t know even existed two days ago, and I find that I am no closer to understanding what makes the perfect lady lump than I was when I started. In fact, all it has done is made me feel slightly worse about my own.
If you are someone who wants to opt for breast surgery, for whatever reason, you crack on, but for me, making peace with my chesticles needs to come from within. I don’t think there is such a thing as the perfect, ideal breast. There are just breasts, and they are all pretty wonderful when you think about it.
So mine are starting to drop a bit, but I am going to be loud and proud about them. They shouldn’t have to hide away in an uncomfortable bra just because they don’t look like they did 20 years ago. I shall let them swing low, sweet chariot.
I hope whatever you are doing with yours, however many kitchen appliances you can fit underneath them, you can also show them a bit of love.
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