Ah, to be a DDD-cup. It’s prescient of the British Association of Aesthetic
Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS, you acronymised correctly) to e-mail me their
leaflet, “71-year-woman thrilled with new breasts”, on the very day that I
am scheduled to meet a woman who says that there are times when she feels
like a “walking pair of tits”.
The way Susan Seligson describes it in her new book, it’s clear that feeling
like a WPOT is not a good thing as far as her self-esteem or attempts to
take up jogging are concerned. But a glance at the BAAPS website tells us
that enormous, or at least conspicuous, boobs are what so many women want.
In America, from where Susan comes and lives and where British women in
search of their next beauty fix tend to take their cues, a boob surgeon to
the stars, Dr Robert Rey, noted on TV recently: “Inner beauty is
disappearing in this country.” Before Dr Rey sets to work on their breasts,
his clients, he says, “feel unfeminine and incomplete”.
The shirt-potatoes under discussion in this article, Susan’s, are triple Ds
and come attached to a curvy, sturdy 52-year-old body. Susan’s boobs are big
but so is her behind. Her waist is tiny. Naked she must look like Robert
Crumb’s ideal woman. For Susan the problem has always been twofold: her
confidence, which is small like her waist, and her brain, which is big like
the rest of her. She used the brain to study macrobiology at university, the
point at which her breasts “really started growing, they just really got
away from me. I would try to smash them into a too small bra and used to
pretend they didn’t exist, as if they were somebody else’s boobs. I didn’t
enjoy them.”
The problem was that the brain and the boobs weren’t meshing. “That’s the
confusing thing about being a woman,” she says. “You want to be attractive
but you don’t want to be physically attractive at the expense of your brain.”
Now that even pensioners are upgrading their cup sizes to Cs or Ds, one would
have thought that Seligson’s knockers are envied. But there’s an ambivalence
there. And that’s because unlike the 71-year-old’s new set — yearned for by
their owner ever since her old ones were described by her mother as “cow’s
udders” (how long ago? did she really save up for half a century?) — Susan’s
are natural.
And Susan’s look natural too. When at one point she pulls up her shirt to
flash her new bra — a red lace Rigby & Peller number, the British
brand worn as a courtesy to me who has flown to meet Susan in Cape Cod all
the way from The Times “of London”, it suddenly becomes clear that
Susan and, say, the late Anna Nicole Smith, who also packed a triple D
according to an internet link called the Official Celebrity Bra Size List,
have nothing in common. In the same way that, except for the fact there are
two of them, two cushions have nothing in common with a couple of cannon
balls.
When she pulls the fitted black top back down into a pair of jeans Seligson
tells me that her wardrobe is adventurous today compared to what she used to
wear well into her forties, which was more or less a tent. “When I was
younger I liked nothing about my body. I didn’t enjoy my breasts. I’d watch
the boyfriends marvel over them and it was as if they weren’t really
attached. I was non-participatory. Also I thought I was fat. My ideal body
was the skinny kind where you can wear jeans low on the hip with the bones
sticking out. When you get to my age and you see your friends start to fall
apart you think, ‘Oh my God, that I spent any time . . .’ ” she drifts off,
concluding a moment later: “Wanting to be beautiful, it takes such a toll .
. .”
Before meeting Susan I typed the word “breasts” into Google. What I got were
a lot of sites about breast cancer and a lot of porn and men’s magazine
suveys. In between were either pap shots of celebrities topless on holiday
or celebrities, tops on, campaigning against breast cancer. The point is,
most of the boobs were fake. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a
trend in breast augmentation surgery, but the fake boobs I was being
bombarded with on March 1, 2007, looked almost virile — not just the nipple
but the whole half-orb appears to be permanently erect. It began to make
even more sense that most plastic surgeons are men.
Without an occasional trip to the female changing rooms of your local pool,
you might forget what real boobs look like, even if you are a woman and own
a mirror. As a rule of thumb, I now know that the bigger the real boobs are,
the less they resemble the fake versions. Frankly, it was a shock when Susan
pulled up her shirt. Here were a pair of breasts which didn’t look as if
they were about to head-butt me. I mentally compared them with Anna Nicole
Smith’s rack, reminiscent somehow of an armoured truck, and tried to find
the appropriate slang terminology to contrast the two sets. Susan’s were
gazongas; loaves of love, amortisseurs , Good-years maybe, dairy
pillows had she been breast-feeding.
By contrast, Anna Nicole’s were unquestionably howitzers. No other word would
do. Compared to Susan’s, Anna Nicole’s jutting breasts were really quite
masculine. Susan’s boobs — how to describe them? Do you ever catch sight of
an old rotary phone — the alphanumeric chrome dial, the heavy receiver
designed to last a lifetime — and feel nostalgic for another, less
complicated age? Susan’s boobs make you feel like that. They’re very 1950s.
What is a bad day in the world of this particular WPOT? “Often, it is
breast-size-related,” Susan concedes. To give you three examples: the day a
rogue male tweaked Susan’s nipple in the Louvre (the unsolicited
nipple-pinch/breast-grope has happened to Susan ten times and counting); the
day a smart businessman approached her in New York and offered her $10 “to
get a look at them. and I promise I won’t lay a hand on you”; and the day an
avuncular boss took Susan aside to have a discreet word in her ear.
“You do a good job,” he said. “And you’re very fortunate to be a very
well-endowed young woman. But I’m going to have to ask you to wear loose
blouses when you come to work here. My salesmen are having trouble
concentrating.” Whose fault was it that they couldn’t concentrate? There are
still women out there campaigning for the right to go topless all day long
because, they argue, breasts are not sexual organs. If men saw more of them
all day long, breasts would be as sexually arousing as noses or elbows.
Susan disagrees. “I think a lot of it is really primal and unavoidable. It’s
hard-wired. You feel as if it’s your fault, that there is something obscene
about your body. I always felt like that in a bathing suit.” Married for
over 20 years to a cartoonist, illustrator and sculptor, Seligson says she
now feels less self-conscious about her body.
She has established herself as a journalist and has written a well-received
travelogue. She even wears a little eye make-up. But up until a couple of
years ago there were still unanswered questions in her life such as, “How
many situations might have been different had I chosen to wear a different
shirt that day?” So she decided to write a second book.
What starts as a memoir soon becomes an exploration of the world of
predominantly enormous breasts. Susan travels to Los Angeles to interview
the former editor of a magazine called Busty Beauties ; she talks to
women who have had their natural breasts reduced and some of the
surprisingly high number of women (4,000 in the US) who have had their
implants removed.
She attends a sex fair in Las Vegas where she attempts to track down Maxi
Mounds who is in Guinness World Records for her augmented breasts,
the world’s largest. “[She is] a six-foot, hazel-eyed blonde with a
twenty-inch waist and a bust size of 156MMM . . . just how big are Maxi’s
boobs? Each weighs 20 pounds.” Maxi’s breasts are growing, Seligson tells
us, because her surgeon used polypropylene string instead of saline implants
to make them feel more realistic.
Ditto the career-stripper Lisa Lipps, whose aesthetic goals are recorded for
posterity in Chapter 7 of Seligson’s book: “I was a good DD; I still had
room to go and the elasticity of my skin was just great. I saw all these
huge beautiful busts, and all I could think of was, ‘I don’t want these
boobs for the industry. I want them for me.’ I worked out, I was hard as a
rock, and I would be this live, walking cartoon character.” An agent tells
Susan about a girl who went to Mexico to try to get a breast implanted on
her back. Back breasts are the future for novelty strippers, he thinks. Most
strippers love their big boobs, but Susan also talks to other women who
complain that now they have had implants men assume that they’re dumb. Not
that she’s surprised; she’s been there, after all.
She’s halfway through the story in which an Ivy League professor interrupts
her during an interview for a science article to tell her that on account of
her breasts “I assumed that you were stupid”, when it starts occurring to me
how significantly different my life would have been had I had big ones. Men
grow up thinking about this all the time, the comparative size of their
penises, but do small-breasted women really know what they’re missing? The
male facial expression that Susan calls the “Big Tit Alert” — have you ever
witnessed it? T-shirts which read: “My face is up here, pal” — have you out
of frustration with men ever had occasion to wear one? You’ve done yoga,
right? But have you ever been partially suffocated by your own breasts
during a shoulder stand?
It occurs to me further that small-to-medium-breasted women also miss out on
so many surreal large-breast-related experiences. Here’s one of Susan’s: “I
encountered a lone fisherman. We exchanged greetings and small talk about
the weather. A while later, when I returned to my car, the fisherman was
gone but I saw, written in the veil of dirt on the rear windshield, the
words NICE TITS.”
Back at my hotel that evening I have another look at what the 71-year-old
pensioner has to say about breasts. A good cosmetic surgeon, she is quoted
as saying, can help “change something that has affected their [women’s]
confidence”, that “something” being the five signs of ageing, presumably,
otherwise known as the inexorable slide towards death. The pensioner says
that before she had the work done she never appeared naked in front of her
husband.
I read a line in Susan’s book. Dr Rey is saying: “I do a procedure and they
[the clients] just blossom.” Big fake breasts are supposed to give you
confidence. So how come growing your own big real ones takes it away?
“Having big breasts definitely made me less confident,” Susan tells me over
coffee the next day. “The confusing fact was that here was a body that was
really responded to, but I was convinced I was unattractive.”
She’s reconciled with her body now, although still bewildered when “I run out
for a quart of milk in what I slept in last night feeling at my absolute
least attractive and the guy behind me in the grocery store is like, ‘hey
baby’ — how men are oblivious to the fact that nothing about my body
language is receptive.”
I’ll finish on the most interesting chapter in Seligson’s book. It’s called
I’m Doing It For Me and Seligson is talking boobs with Robert Goldwyn, a
professor emeritus at Harvard and the long-standing editor of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery , the journal of the American Society of Plastic
Surgeons. Earlier on in the chapter we’ve been told that studies have
indicated that bigger breasts make women appear younger. Why do women get
breast implants? She asks Dr Goldwyn. “To please men,” he says. “I thought
that after women moved up in the world the demand would go down, but it
hasn’t. Towards the end of my practice I felt sorry for these women. They do
it to please others, frankly.” He sounds rather gloomy. Vaguely, I wonder if
there are any statistics as to how many lesbians have had boob jobs.
I read on. A survey of 25,000 men reveals that only 56 per cent are
“satisfied” with their partner’s breasts. It’s not the size they mind. It’s
gravity. Twenty per cent of the men surveyed in the poll considered their
partner’s breasts, “too droopy”. I think of the 71-year-old and her shiny
new boobs. I imagine her husband and hope he is a handsome stud of a man,
half his wife’s age.
Stacked: A 32DDD Reports From the Front, by Susan Seligson, is
published by Bloomsbury USA
They make surgeons out of plastic nowadays? Eeeh, the advance of technology, astounding innit.
Starling, Lancaster,
London Lady, while I appreciate that you due to your religious beliefs you do not have the problem of unwanted attention focused upon your assets I fail to see the point you are trying to make. Those of us who either already have a different religion or do not have a religion at all are hardly likely to convert to Islam on the basis that we would then be expected to cover our entire body in the presence of men. While I occasionally bemoan my lot because a particularly disgusting man has behaved towards me in an inappropriate and lecherous manner I enjoy my freedom to wear a bikini on the beach, cycling shorts on my bike etc etc. I simply cannot imagine the restrictions that your religion puts upon you and find this aspect of your faith far more disturbing than any leering old letch I may encounter.
If I wore a jibab then presumably I would never have been able to experience the pleasure of swimming in the sea, rock climbing, dancing, white water rafting, parachute jumping etc.
jo, southend on sea,
I'm afraid the jilbab would get caught in the spokes of my bike, London Lady.
starling, Lancaster,
You are talking about finding bras, how about swimwear...
Why is there an assumpation that women with big bosoms are fat???????
And why are 'plus' sized bras so damn expensive???????
Whats more why are most bras made of such crap, man-made materials expensive. What happened to cotton, and silk underwear?
sol, london,
I'm a 22 year old 32G cup wearer. I wish I was a lot smaller than I am so I can wear the clothes that my peers wear. The smocks that seem to be all the rage make me look 6 months pregnant as they hang off my breasts. But If I wear tighter clothes they look too small for my figure...
It would be scary to lose my cup size on another note, as I do seem to hide behind them and with the media being the way it is, I feel that I wouldn't be sexy or whatever without my boobs, especially as I'm short and not the slimmest of size 14s.
Shops need to begin to cater to our bigger sizes. I love Katie Price for her new range in ASDA as I'm sick of paying £40 for a decent bra.
As for the Yoga?! I can't sleep on my back without nealy suffocating myself!
Lizzie S, Bristol, UK
"It began to make even more sense that most plastic surgeons are men"
I will counter that sexist remark with another: Most surgeons, plastic or not, are men!
Pete, Cov,
People talk about women being oppressed in Islam because they veil themselves & their bodies ! In Islam when you recognise that ,none has the right to be worshipped except the true Creator - Allah ; people then follow & understand the rules revealed by God.
As a Muslim woman I feel very happy & comfortable with wearing the face veil & loose outer cloak (jilbab) .Many people don't realise whatever your size is, you can wear the most attractive of clothing under your jilbab -which you then remove (this outer cloak -jilbab) within your home & in female environments . So I do not suffer from unwanted male attention or that indignity ; & I am able to wear the most attractive of clothing for myself, my family & friends !
I do not feel exploited as my beauty is not for all eyes to see - but only for those who have a right to see it , like a husband & those who would truly appreciate it -while I feel truly confident ! www.thenoblequran ( for anyone interested )
London Lady, London,
Any obvious physical dimension outside average is going to get attention. Do people not also stare at very tall people or morbidly obese ones or the handicapped? The people with class simply do not make a scene.
Also, many men wish they were taller because a lot of women seem to desire taller men and many women wish they were more well endowed because they think men desire women with large breasts. Fortunately we are all created individually and NOT the same.
Joshua Holcombe, Atlanta, USA/Georgia
Being treated like a piece of meat hurts. It's liek saying that person has no worth as a human being and it's a form of bullying. There's no point saying "get over it" because some people are more sensitive, like it or not, and they will be hurt more by being treated like dirt.
Breast reduction for people over a certain size, maybe over a D?, should be available free on the NHS if it isn't already. Large breasts hurt, they are incredibly uncomfortable and they cause back problems.
TS, Washington, DC, USA
What's a DDD cup? Oh, E. This is an English site, isn't it? :P
I'm a 34F. I wish I was a 34B, so I wouldn't have to fork out a fortune on bras. Lots of shops have gone "big", but they always seem to think that people with large boobs have large backs, and start the bigger cups with a 36 back size.
I don't care whether guys stare at my chest, it's the back and shoulder aches that are a pain!
And "Why does Susan wear tight tee-shirts if she dislikes the attention?"
Because otherwise she'd look like she'd stuffed two dwarves up her jumper. At least a tight t-shirt shows the rest of your figure. If you buy a big, loose top, it makes you look huge in the wrong places.
Starling, Lancaster,
Biologically speaking we are told that size is immaterial. Yes, Chinese women the world over tend to wear padded bras and they look unatural, even freakish. I prefer natural breasts and definitely prefer them on the smaller size C is more than enough
peter, Singapore,
I have lived most of my adult life with uncomfortably large and (like many women) rather lopsided breasts. I have been fortunate enough not to suffer back problems, but have always been in denial about what size I actually am, and have hidden my frontage under unnecessarily baggy clothes and in bras that were far too small. At a guess I was probably about 32K or larger, a size which was emphasised by my high waistline. Like many others I have often found men initially, at least, attracted to my breasts rather than to my other attributes.
A few years ago I started to get sores on my shoulders under the bra-straps. Eventually I went ahead with a breast reduction, at the age of 58. Now that my breasts are 1.5 kg lighter, I am a happy, comfortable and confident 32F - I even wore a strapless dress to my 60th birthday party - something unthinkable before the operation. I just wish that I had gone for a reduction many years earlier !
Sarah, London,
I am 22 and I've been large chested ever since I was 12. I absolutely hate them. When I was skinny and a size 12 they were a 34DD. Now that I'm a size 16 they are a 34J. I'm planning a reduction as soon as possible.
This is one of the first articles I've read that makes a disinction about real and fake large breasts. When I was at school a lot of my friends would say that they wanted larger breasts, but I'll wager they wanted larger ones that looked like fake ones.
London Girl, London,
As a man married to the most desirable woman in Africa and probably on the planet I could now write a book on the "big boob effect" on both men and women. The effect is astonishing and ladies if you have big boobs you will just have to live with it. I suggest you make the most of it if you can.
My wife was stunning when I met her but then spent 3 years pestering me to have her boobs fixed because they had sagged after having her first child. The result is show stoppingly superb. My wife thinks its the best investment I ever made (the alternative was a new BMW) and I agree with her.
So as long as the lady is doing it for herself and there is no health risk then go for it.
So Gentlemen, take your time and maybe you will be fortunate too, but you must be able to cope with the attention and stay relaxed at all times. Believe me its worth it.
My lovely lady is 32H- 24-36 and unlike all the models these measurements are genuine.
Stephen, Nairobi, Kenya
I can completely understand how Susan feels. Ever since the age of 18 I have been a size 32E. Men can't help but stare at my breasts and pass comments on them. My friends are obsessed with them and even my boyfriend thinks that it is acceptable to pass comments on their size in public. I find this particularly offensive because people would never consider shouting out something about a person's small breasts.
N, London, UK
I was a 34J when I had my boobs reduced to a manageable 34D. A guy in the school where I worked didn't recognise me - he'd never looked at my face before!
I felt like a walking pair of boobs and, with a size 12-14 bottom half and a size 24 top half, found buying clothes a nightmare (let alone buying a bra!). After the reduction I was in a shop in tears just because I could buy normal clothes.
I wouldn't like to be too small, but when they get too big, boobs can be a problem physically in so many ways.
Lis, Preston, UK
Breasts are the same as all things when it comes to women, in general. They are a "hang-up" and go in the same category as bums, thighs, hips, etc, because someone, somewhere will always have some disagreement with that area of their body.
The one thing that drives me totally crazy about breast implants, is why people get D-cups, or larger? In recent years, bras D-cup and above have been easier to buy, but they do seem to have gotten smaller. Regardless of that, its the style. D is generally the size where the straps are twice as thick, or you go from having 2 hooks to 3. I can deal with the attention and I might want to wear a strappy top - but I can't, because my bra straps are too thick.
Why people make life harder for themselves in trying to find a bra is beyond me. I suffered enough stress from it when I was a 34D, and now I'm an E, its even worse.
Jayne, Doncaster, UK,
Oh come on girls, let's just accept the fact that there will always be men who are just too stupid to not make it obvious they are staring. I was always really shy in my teens but that never stopped me from fighting my corner where those kind of idiots came about, I found a loud "stop staring at my chest " always did the trick. Also , I was never into wearing low-cut stuff, but that doesn't mean I don't like to wear clothes to show off my feminine shape. I am a size 34E (34DDD here in the US and I have found it really difficult to get the correct size , really miss old M&S ) I've always felt rather proud of my boobs, it's not held me back from getting a degree or job I love and I love the fact that the way they are now celebrates the fact that I breastfed both my kids, now 6 and 10.
Melissa Doyle, Franklin, Tennessee,USA
That's the other thing. I don't understand why people assume that having larger breasts makes you sexually promiscuous. Even if you're modestly dressed. I think that would explain why men feel they can comment on them.
If anyone has any explanations (however sexist/controversial etc!) I would honestly love to hear them!
A, London, UK
OK, I'm male and Iove breasts, but I've trained myself not to look at a woman's chest when I'm talking to her, because many years ago a colleague once very kindly explained to me that it was demeaning. I used to be a nurse, and now I am at a university, so I have known incredibly intelligent women, and I have always been grateful to that colleague. Had she responded in the defensive way that some respondents here do, I'm not sure it would have worked. There is no way that we can stop people looking at us, so it is better to be adult about it. I think the tee-shirt comments are just the answer - awareness that men ARE going to look at breasts, especially those that are spectacular in some way, but showing a sense of humour about it.
JW, Sheffield, UK
If you're not going under the knife you will all just have to learn to live with your large assets. I know good bras can be hard to find, but try this link - the best bra I have ever bought!
http://www.bravissimo.com/bravissimo/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=KA61&cid=Lingerie_Pure+%26+Simple&language=en-GB
Jo, London,
Woman in "I'm not keen on my perfectly normal body" non shocka.
Veronica, London, UK
Asta
link to website selling those t-shirts
http://www.cafepress.com/7mpictures.18926463
Felicja, Manchester, UK
As a 34 year old, I'm a natural 34E (same as DDD I think), and I often wonder with all the implants nowadays if men are forgetting what big real ones are like and would be shocked if confronted with a pair. They are far from pert, rather blue tinged and veiny, heavy and droopy with large areolas and nipples. Not exactly maiden fresh, but very real. I think one reason why a lot of women have a problem with their large bust is that they have so little to do with men's fantasy version of pert weightless balloons. Another factor is growing up, trying to get accustomed to a body that seems to mature much faster than your emotions and intellect, making you want to try and hide the progress (and avoid the attention) by hunching your back and wearing 'tents'. This feeling of alienation probably stays with a lot of women into adulthood, and so their breasts feel forever separate from their person.
I was a very shy teenager who was called Samantha Fox from the age of 12. At first I was thrilled by the attention but soon regretted it as my summer holiday male friends decided my breasts were toys for them to play with regardless of my opinion on the matter. I was held with force, clothes were pulled off and I was groped endlessly during three summers. The flashbacks haunt me to this day. It was just 'kids mucking about', no-one interfered and I myself was trapped in a bind where turning my back on these guys would mean having no friends to hang out with. My self-esteem dropped to about zero and stayed there well into adulthood.
I think women who want larger breasts are blissfully unaware of the darker side, of the not quite so flattering attention you might get and how that could make you feel. I show my cleavage with pride these days and have grown to befriend my bust. It took a long time, they have caused me a lot of trouble and shaped not just me but my whole person. Life would have been much simpler if they were smaller, at least in my teenage years. Growing into a confident woman is still work-in-progress.
Grete, Southampton, UK
I'm a 30F. I am thoroughly sick of unwanted attention and people - male and female - assuming that I am both thick and sexually promiscuous.
When I was fourteen years old, a boy once asked me, "Hasn't anybody ever told you a handful is enough?" People just assume that women choose the size of their breasts. If they did (surgery notwithstanding) then life would be much easier because the signals that our breasts radiated would actually be accurate.
Part of the problem is that there are no respectable, intelligent, attractive big-bosomed women in the media - just porn stars and page 3 girls. Consequently our society lacks respect for women with large breasts.
Breasts are considered male property - if I had a pound for every time I'd been told (by both men and women) that I should be happy with my large breasts because men find them attractive I'd have enough for a deposit on a flat in London - which would make me considerably happier than my enormous knockers ever have.
Samara, London,
Why does Susan wear tight tee-shirts if she dislikes the attention? It's all just a self-promo for her book ~ pfft
Just get over yourself Susan!
shishi, Sydney, NSW
I am a 34F and much that I don't look ridiculously out of proportion, my breasts do get that much attention. I too have had the incident where you look rough as sin but men feel obliged to comment because all they've looked at is the size of my chest. It's incredibly degrading and I have to be in a very good mood not to let it get to me. I'd love to know why men think it's appropriate to comment on a woman's breasts unashamedly in the street?
Just so you know: I'm not grumbling that they're too big. My gripe is that a large number of men can't cope with the size of my breasts.
Alys, London, UK
I beg to differ - most men can't help but look (even for a second, then the polite ones remember that it's rude). My modest rack seems to attract attention no matter what I wear. I have to get one of those t shirts.
Whats even weirder is when women stare at them. They're hypnotic.
Rebecca, Camrbidge, UK
What on earth are triple-Ds? You mean E? Go and look in a decent lingerie shop. There are double-As, there are double-Ds and there are double-Fs. There is no such thing as a DDD.
Claire, London,
live with them? There IS physical discomfort. If you had a large lump of useless flesh anywhere else on your body you would get sympathy.
anne, ipswich,
I am 4'11" and have currently 38 GG bosoms. They vary depending on my weight at the time. When I was very slim they were 32 H. In the same way that most people are surprised if I specify my height or age, most people do not notice the size of my chest.
That is because who I am is far more interesting. If a person is a strong and vibrant personality then physical attributes fade away. I have once or twice encountered superficial people who judged on appearances, but that was their serious problem and not mine at all.
A person with low self esteem will always find something to focus their difficulties on. A pity because it stops them getting to the real root of their problems and prevents them from enjoying life properly.
Susan should be glad she has those boobs, they are a great way to tell if a boyfriend is worth bothering with or not. Without them it might take a while to find out thy are superficial jerks.
Anyone who tries to be beautiful - isn't.
Michele, UK,
Susan seems to have insecurity problems bigger than her boobs.
I'm a natural 32G and I've never felt that there was anything obscene about my body. Sure, there are some outfits that I can't wear but then, there are others that I get away with.
I've also got a brain, have a law degree and never had a particular problem with people assuming I'm stupid.
If any guy is stupid enough to let my boobs distract him when he should be listening to what I'm saying to avoid agreeing to something he's not keen on, then tough.
Dom M, London,
Thank God someone else feels the same way. Clothes are a complete nightmare as it's generally a complete cover-up and the guys you get leering at you aren't the guys you want anyway. Even worse I am lopsided so have to have a bra fitted to the larger side which makes me feel even more like a freak. The worst thing about fake breasts is it makes some men feel that they're the norm.
carole, London, uk
Was it really necessary to fly to the States, adding several dozen tonnes of carbon to global warming, just to discuss this subject? What about all the British women who have the same situation? Or the Germans - you could have gone by Eurostar.
Alison, Paris, France
Pu Li - so why are 90%+ of bras padded / push-up in China? I had to look long and hard to find non-padded ones (that also weren't nylon 'lace' or bearing hearts, bows or cartoon characters, but that's another story). Even the sports bras are usually padded.
Men - of whatever background - are very interested in breasts! It's almost a reflex action. Part of this is simply because men don't have them. Even gay men are fascinated by breasts. No, it's not very interesting if you have them yourself, as nearly half the world's population does (pre-pubescent girls obviously don't), but it's foolish to deny that fact.
londoner, Wuxi, China
Grumble if they're too big, grumble if they're too small. It may come as some surprise that the vast majority of men don't think about tits all day. Here in China where the norm is to be modestly endowed, there aren't queues of women dissatisfied with what nature blessed them with. If it's not a matter of physical discomfort, why is it important? Half the population of the world has a pair of breasts. Live with them.
Asta, do they sell marker pens and T-Shirts in Hamburg??
Pu Li, Guangxi, china
where are these "My face is up here, pal"-shirts available?
asta, hamburg, germany