Mammary Obsessions

By Alexis Jhamb | Monday, April 10, 2000

Twelve people, four of them men, filed nervously into the small lounge of the Women's Resource Center (WRC) Thursday, February 3 for the viewing of "Breasts: A Documentary." This event marked the beginning of the WRC's "Sex Series"—a College-funded symposium featuring videos, book club discussions, and guest speakers. The WRC has since publicly proclaimed the Sex Series to be a "resounding success," even though few of the events drew more than 10 students.

Twelve, however, quickly proved to be a generous attendance figure: four introduced themselves as full-time WRC staffers.

Some interloper with a sense of humor had set the lounge's television set to UPN, which at this hour featured World Wrestling Federation programming. This gave the four professional and eight amateur feminists pause to decry the cheapness of the media and the oppressive tendencies of testosterone"in other words, an opportunity no one in this group was likely to miss. What we got was ten minutes of commentary that ranged, rhetorically, from the obvious to the humorless (wrestlers, apparently, are "grotesque"). The women raged, and the men, the kind of men who wear sympathy bellies when their wives get pregnant, nodded empathetically, in a sort of extended emotional kowtow. The group's forceful consensus was that neither women nor "educated" men would ever watch such trash. The heads around the room (a sympathetic semi-circle) bobbed.

Male pituitary processes thus dispensed with, the group proceeded to the video, and thus to the evening's relevant glands: the mammary.

Breasts: A Documentary begins, not unpredictably, with twenty-two women, ranging from 6 to 84 years old, listing some of the terms used to describe breasts. Then each woman gets to expound on her feelings about the size, shape, and "perkiness" of her breasts, with special attention given to women with breast implants or reductions. The interviewed women included three children, two strippers, several relatively unendowed women, four plus-sized women, two lesbians, and two mother-daughter pairs.

Most of the women were either topless or wearing only a bra, with the thankful exception of the 84-year-old who had lost both breasts to cancer. Exploring the women's relationships to their breasts highlighted the expanse of emotion involved. Some of the more notable interviews included a shrieking six-year-old girl who explained that if someone told her she was growing breasts, she would punch him (glandular revelations, it seems, only come from men), and the stripper in her late twenties who said she had gradually come to resent feeding her infant because the process ruined her breasts. The vastly differing viewpoints converged on one established point"that no woman can ever be happy or accepting of her breasts.

The director of Breasts: A Documentary, whose name is Meema Spadola (really), seems to have been quite busy lately. In 1999, she produced another film, Private Dicks: Men Exposed, which featured men"in full frontal nudity"interviewed regarding their thoughts on their penises, what they do with their penises, and sundry chatter relating to penises. She has also published a book titled Breasts: Our Most Public Private Parts, which claims to decompose the mystery of "what it is to be a woman." Its message, she says, "is about making peace with your breasts, getting to know them and feeling happy with them." Spadola, who continually creates straight-to-HBO documentaries, has been called obscene by most film critics.

After the film, the group rapidly shrunk with the prompt departure of two of the men after the closing credits.

So the crew began to discuss the issues the film raised. The worn sociological arguments about women"that upon puberty, girls begin to feel a shame in their maturity that does not lessen over time"were hatched. The personal experiences during puberty of the women in the group, as well as their views of their particular size and shape, were considered. The central point of agreement was that women's views on their breasts, definitively the most public of intimate organs, contributes significantly to their self-image.

A secondary point, advocated strongly by the WRC workers in the group, held that a woman could only have negative thoughts about her breasts because our viciously patriarchal society functions to thoroughly subordinate women even within themselves. Once expressed, this idea was unsurprisingly met with some sustained eye-rolling"even in this group.

In its Spring 2000 newsletter, the WRC writes that it is "proud to have taken a step toward resisting and countering culturally prevalent attitudes and behaviors that denigrate female sexuality and sexual self-determination" during the Sex Series. So what exactly are those behaviors that deny females their sexual freedom? What are these radical changes that the WRC wishes to implement? Dartmouth already has demonstrated its progressive bona fides in the creation of a Women's Studies department and major option. Should it add to the ORC a list of fifty single-sex classes? Or perhaps a cluster of female-only dorms? I do not dislike the WRC, however I do dislike its glaring and superfluous radicalism in a field that has been raked over for the past several decades.

The pure, and fundamental, fact is that having breasts"and, by extension, being a woman"is not nearly as difficult or terrifying or stigmatizing as the WRC folks want Dartmouth's better half to think. The very existence of the WRC is valuable at Dartmouth; it's good for women to have places free from male influence. But the fact that their support depends, in large part, on how well they can scare the females in Dartmouth's student body leads to an unhealthy advocacy of fear. And that can do nothing but further divide Dartmouth's community"a result which is directly opposed to the WRC's mission.

Mammary Obsessions

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