Tell Carrie Bradshaw the jig is up: we want funny women, we want them to talk about scandals and parties and the risqué, but we don’t want their advice on sex with men. Let’s give it a college try and reveal ourselves on “Unbuttoned,” a biweekly column taking a good naked look at the female student experience.
In my first semester at college, I went up a cup size. It was not a magical or particularly happy moment—months of weekend benders and a consistent supply of chocolate-covered pretzels in my dorm room had finally made their presence known. It wrapped itself around my hips (I outgrew my pants) and in the fatty tissue of my breast. My boobs had been a decent C-cup throughout high school, so this move to a D-cup felt simply ceremonial. This marked my entrance into the “Big Boobs Club” (BBC), and I could now enjoy the perks that come along with membership. These benefits were in no way exclusive to those with a nice rack, but now that I had one, I could attribute them to the state of my chest rather than general misogyny. A rundown of such perks includes (but is not limited to): free chest massages at college parties, visual examinations by the clerk at Safeway, and being treated like a porn star in a petting zoo. Celebrations aside, I had to deal with the practical consequences: my chest was spilling out of my high school bras, so my mom took me to shop for new ones.
At my hometown mall, there is a fork in the road: side by side, a Pink, fronted by mannequins wearing pajama pants and full-coverage bras, and a Victoria’s Secret adorned with posters of sultry models in lace straps, beckoning passersby to enter, or at the very least stop to gawk. Up to this point in my life, I chose to enter the Pink. I wanted something comfortable and seamless, a T-shirt bra, that would make my body ignorable. However, with my recent acceptance into the BBC and familiarization with the cult doctrine of college guys (the first commandment being the mental and physical fondling of women), I had grown into a woman, a woman witnessed by men who pined to witness her. Their fixed breast-ward gaze is as uncomfortable as it is validating—something natural and completely my own is subject to and deserving of reverence. To commemorate this, to confirm with myself that my tits are looked at because I’m showing them off and not because I’m being frequently violated, I entered Victoria’s Secret and had my mom buy me a pricey set of black, red, lacy, see-through, push-up things. If she had any objections, she did not voice them; I assume she went through a similar transformation at some point.
I returned to college for my second semester, armed with a wide selection of lingerie to wear to class. Each morning, I chose which type of discomfort I wanted to experience (constriction, a persistent itch, a poking wire) and donned it in silent affirmation of my degradation, squirming under a thick sweater as I sat untouched and ignored most of the lecture. My bras are concealed under ordinary tops because my transformation happened beneath my clothes. Growing into D-cups did not make me dress to accentuate my chest. Rather, it inspired me to toe the imaginary line between protection and acceptance—preventing any direct sightlines to my boobs, but knowing that if it were to happen, if men developed X-Ray vision that looked only through outerwear, they would see me plump and desirable.
I will share a secret of the BBC: every woman is born a sleeper agent of this club, waiting for the moment she is called to perform. Any size or shape or color of breast is fodder for the eyes of men. What promotes someone to the BBC is not an increase in boob size, but an increase in cognizance that their chest is prey for anybody, always. Becoming a person who has big boobs is, as I’ve described, much more of a mental transformation than a physical one. While it is true that I ate my way into lingerie, my tits only perched themselves so perkily in my mind after one semester in college exposed me to much more than a lifetime’s worth of violation from classmates, friends, and strangers. I carried the weight of these experiences (and my huge rack) on my sorry back, collecting the burden until it finally snapped. I was once a woman who wore what offered the most concealed support. When my breasts made me in no way ignorable, I was deemed to deserve this onslaught of attention while simultaneously avoiding it. I wore something provocative and hid it under layers of clothing to feel, even for a moment, that I was, in fact, asking for it—the reality that any boob size is just as magnetic to the eyes of men was too painful to behold.
When a man’s gaze reduces me to a pair of boobs, I am not satisfied. In fact, I despair; we despair, constantly, at each unwanted touch and gaze. Yet to hate it consciously, to reject it outwardly, would be a constant losing battle. I cannot cuss out every perverted guy, every creepy passerby, every fraternity brother. I do not want to lose every time I go outside. So I accept it all, quietly and personally. I wear the sexy matching underwear. I want to be looked at. But no number of lacy affirmations can assuage the discomfort of violation.
