The Itty Bitty Titty Committee

So, you have a small chest. Swimsuits only remind you of how you wish you could have the magical ability to increase your amount of cleavage — think of the infamous line, “I must, I must, I must increase my bust”, circa Judy Blume. Bra shopping morphs into numerous attempts to convince yourself a 36B does fit your small and painfully in between, hanging in the balance, breasts. Homecoming dress shopping often culminates in a floor swimming in tulle, chiffon, satin, and silk, the frustration of a too-small chest or a too-big chest, the singular fact restricting your ability to primp for prom. You have a small chest. You’ve internalized it. There’s something wrong with not having enough of the so-called sexy skin. It’s your body but you’re lacking in standards. Others are filling up their swimsuits, donning perfectly snug dresses, and going about the day-to-day with bras that fit with no fuss. In summation, your bust is your bane, but what if it didn’t have to be?

I proudly say that I have a small chest. I am a member of the itty bitty titty committee. I love my breasts because I have been through so much with them. In no amount of exaggeration, they are my bosom buddies. Years have been spent trying to accommodate my breasts, feeling a sense of shame in their size, acting on a need to enhance and bolster my bosoms for fear of their lack of visibility. An unknown anxiety plagued me, that if I did not have the kind of breasts that added an air of voluptuousness to my figure, where was my womanhood? Was I only a woman if my body screamed a sensual visibility that donned an obviousness that garnered supposed worthy remarks from a scathing society? If I had less to show, did that mean I had less to me? The ratio of breasts to self-worth was an uneven one. I attached self-worth to what lay captive between the cups of a lacy, gauzy hellion. 

Many bras, swimsuits, dresses, and tops did not work for my body nor, in particular, my breasts. I was stuck somewhere in the gray area between an A and a B cup, minding my way through the marshy grounds of bosom ambiguity. Each time I walked into a department store to pick out a new bra, anxiety took hold of my heart, as I knew I would go straight to the padded push-up bra section, in desperate need of the fairy godmother of titties, if there ever was one. Yet every time I tried on one of those ridiculous bras, with their excessive underwire and hard, poking, and prodding padding, I felt that I was making a deal with the devil, a bargain with my bosoms that sacrificed comfort for a misogynistic makeover whose promised visibility eerily offered me, the uncompromising feminist, something to fill me up that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. 

There I was, Tuesdays at Target, standing barren, boobed, and bra-laden, feeling comical in the leopard print and the suffocating exposure of my breasts that made me feel I was morphing myself into a figure of self-consciousness, rather than a woman of confidence. In my ridiculous prints and smushed breasts, I felt more like a cougar on the prowl than a woman standing tall, with a spine as straight and hard as anything. Why did the visibility of my most private, yet most publicly sanctioned parts, cause an anxiety in me that I needed to remedy and procure the utmost discernibility of them so as to feel pride in my body, a sensation that I was alright? 

Perhaps the obsessive desire to enhance and to escape small-boobage stems from society’s claim to control, and by extension, push narratives on female autonomy. The messages we receive about our breasts are that they are sexy. We have only fully blossomed into a woman when we have sprouted breasts, have bought bras, and we have more cleavage than courage, more bras than brains.  Our subsuming of womanhood lies not in redistributing our time and resources into the growth of our character, strength, resilience, dreams, and most importantly, being unapologetic. Rather, we have catapulted into and have fully embraced womanhood, when our bodies morph into a voluptuousness that sends the male species into a frenzy of ogling eyes, innuendo-heavy remarks, and a gaze that surveys the landscape that is our newly turned earth. The size of our breasts thus is fully equated with the amount we have to offer the demands of the patriarchy, the oppressiveness, and the exhausting sexuality that demand our most cognizant effort. The breasts we bear are a reflection of how much we have to give, or more explicitly, how much we have to take. When we don’t measure up to the desired push-up bra C cup bathing beauty of cinema, we are left to feel that when we have nothing to show, we are nothing. We are forced into a position that makes the small-chested of us feel that with the smallness of our breasts, we are just as small. Thus, when I have struggled with the size of my breasts, my obsessive desire to “push up” is a scream to be seen in a society that values skin as sex, sexuality as unquestionable adulthood, and by extension, an adulthood with an immature closed-minded conceptualization of maturity, and thus value a position of visibility in our crowded, consumer, and concerning culture. Tits have quite literally become titular, holding a position in our minds and culture without any significant literal authority. 

As time has gone by, I have learned little by little to bequeath my breasts with the confidence and love they deserve. Bust is not a must for a successful womanhood and a powerful sense of self. In fact, the more that we obsess about our breasts, the more that we become attached to our chests as a way to maintain a visibility that destroys any chance of a healthy repudiation of female oppression and control. Embracing small-chestedness is doing my part in resisting the sexed-up standards that perpetuate the ideal feminine in a society that values women as barely human and more of holes. By abandoning a desire to change my body in the need to feel scene, I am perpetuating the concept of visibility as a means of dictating something to value and by extension use that in the mission of gender oppression. By loving our breasts and our bodies just as they are, regardless of size, regardless of bounce, and buoyancy, we are spitting in the face of the voices that tell us the value of the attachment to purely objectifying gazes, . If we learn to stop the push-up bras, the pouty-lipped pushed out busty selfies, and the desire to size up, we are resisting the reinforcement of the right image. I am a small-chested woman. Now is the time to resist, and bust someone, society’s, chops. 

• #body image
• empowerment
• Experiences