bodies

This website is simply a collection of pictures of women’s breasts.  Not models or actresses, just women.  It is a fantastic way to demonstrate the wide variety of natural body shapes.  Below the jump are a few of the many pictures, with histories, on the website:

“I’m 26 and never been pregnant. Even though my breasts are quite small they’ve had stretchmarks forever, even the smaller one. I sometimes wish they were bigger and perkier and I always wear a padded bra otherwise I feel like my stomach sticks out more than my boobs! But I’m grateful I can sleep on my front and I’ve more or less accepted how I am. I think the human body is always a beautiful thing, even if it’s hard to see our own one that way. ”

“I’m 24 years old and I have never had children. I was very happy with my breasts four years ago till they suddenly sprung from smaller B’s to larger C’s, I had priviously been taking birth control and my doctor said this was all “normal”. I come from a German/Dutch background so I assume it has alot to do with genetics. I have some pretty severe bacne and it often spreads to my chest and breats. As you can see one is larger than the other and these are my areola at their largest. .. I also have LOTS of enlarged pores in my cleavage, stretch marks near my underarms which are only just starting to disappear due to about 20lbs weight loss.”

“I’m a young woman from Athens, Greece that happened to run across your site.  I’m 25 years old, never been pregnant and considered neither slim nor obesse. I do have a couple of extra kilos on me. When I was a teenager my breasts grew rapidly and as a result of that I have fairly visible stretch-marks. I do sports and weight-lifting and maybe that has caused my breasts to be slightly pointing outwards. My right breast seems to be placed a bit lower on my chest, seeming shaggier that the left (in my opinion). A couple of years ago my breasts started growing (for no apparent reason-yet painfully) and from cup C I went to DD.”

“My breasts have always been small, some days I love them!! And some other times, I hate them!!! What I liked the least was the hair I had on my areolas. I’m getting laser hair removal now and it makes me feel a bit more comfortable about myself. I guess not having a stable relationship didn’t help much.”

“I am a 24 year old of a slim build. The fact that I have hated my breasts since childhood outrages me. I am healthy and beautiful and happy, but I have never looked at my breasts in the mirror without feeling sad. I am angry at a culture that makes women hate the beautiful uniqueness of their bodies, and learning to love my breasts will be a slow process that I am excited to tackle. All of the beautiful breasts on this website make me see how beatiful we all are! Bodies would be so boring if they all looked the same!”

“Hello. I recently found your site and it has made me feel alot better about my breasts. I started to develop breasts at 8 years old and they were small for a while and in just one year I went from an A to a C. I have stretch marks but they have faded. I was mostly worried about my areolas, I don’t think my breasts are done developing so I have learned to accept them how they are. I am 18 years old. I have gained and lost weight on and off my whole life. As you can see my areola is very light and I have blue veins, one which wraps around the left breast areola.”

See also these selections of bellies and vulvas, and this attempt to refigure imperfection.

Also in boobs, see boobs.

And don’t miss this post on how men, also, feel insecure about their “boobs.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Pris S. sent in an ad that ran in the Collegiate Times, the Virginia Tech campus newspaper:

Of course, it’s a great example of advertising making people feel as though they aren’t sufficiently attractive so they’ll buy a product. But it’s also interesting because it’s an example of a cosmetic procedure that is increasingly marketed to men as well as women. Women do get laser hair removal, obviously, but so do men. Our standards of male attractiveness increasingly demand control of body hair. Hairy backs and shoulders are a source of ridicule. I have known several men who felt very self-conscious about their body hair, some of whom shaved or waxed some of it. Even chest hair is questionable; most images of shirtless men (in ads, pin-ups, calendars, etc.) show very little chest hair. The “man-0-lantern” chest-waxing scene in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” of course used men’s concern about body hair for comedic effect.

The other thing that’s interesting here is the connection between having body hair (which, as far as I can tell from the ad, could include just about any type, including pubic hair) with being an “ape,” as though we should be ashamed of the fact that we are, in fact, mammals who have varying amounts of body hair. I suspect that it’s also part of the caveman stereotype–having lots of body hair is sort of associated with being less civilized, less fully human or modern. It’s also a beauty standard that is certainly going to be harder for some groups, those that tend to have more and/or darker body hair, to meet, which could bring up some interesting discussions about whose bodies are considered attractive, etc.

Thanks, Pris!

NEW: Andrea G. sent in a link to the line of Mangroomer products, which include electric shavers for back, nose/ear, and “private” hair:

These would be great for discussion new standards of male attractiveness–which increasingly pressure men to shave body and pubic hair, though not their legs or armpit hair, since that type of shaving is girly!–and also as an example of gendered marketing. Notice the very sciency-techy element to the website, with the graph-type lines in the background, the “swoosh” sounds, and so on.

Andrea also sent in this Nads commercial, in which we learn that the product saved a woman from a life of misery, since neighborhood children taunted her for having a beard:

It’s a great example of the social construction of bodies: we think it’s gross when women have beards, but at least in theory okay when men have them. Of course certain groups, such as Mormons, discourage men from growing beards, and in general full beards are relatively uncommon in the U.S. today and might be seen as unprofessional or otherwise inappropriate in some situations. But men usually won’t be openly mocked for growing hair on their faces (Joaquin Phoenix’s recent transformation aside), whereas for a woman, allowing hair to grow and be visible on her face would be socially unacceptable.

Thanks, Andrea!

@ 0:13 “I dream of kissing him under the Eiffel Tower.”

Yes, the commercial in general is pretty ridiculous, but I’m completely baffled as to why would someone need lap band surgery in order to be able to go to Paris and kiss someone under the Eiffel Tower.

It looks like she’s already with him. So, does she need to lose weight in order to take the relationship to the next step– like traveling together, or getting married and going on a honeymoon to Paris? Or are they already married but she is unable to travel unless she loses weight? Will she only feel good about herself, or enjoy herself in Paris if she lost weight first?

And he looks like he is pretty similar in size to her. Does he also need to lose weight in order to kiss her under the Eiffel Tower?

I don’t know about you, but I want to tell them to skip the surgery and just go to Paris already.

Browsing the Apple iTunes Application store the other day, I came across an application where guys can track their girlfriend’s menstruation cycle– and most importantly, their PMS symptoms– so that they can avoid the women in their lives who are going to be irrational, crazy, lunatics for a few days every month.

Take PMSTracker, for example, which tracks your “wife/girlfriend/sister/mom” so that you can avoid unexpectedly having your head bit off (or, in the example below, by your secretary).

And then there’s an application called “uPMS” which aims to help “all guys out there suffering the monthly Psychotic Mood Shifts” by warning them when to “keep their head down.”

My favorite is an app called “I am a Man” which advertisers itself as a better “lady tracking” application by making it easy to track several woman. And, according to the description, it will even somehow help you save money!

And here’s the calendar tracking several girls at once. Importantly, the application is password protected, and if one girl checks out the program she’ll only see herself list (and not various other girls that this guy must be hiding from her):

There are a few useful iPhone and iPod Touch apps geared toward women and couples for keeping track of their menstrual cycles, fertility cycles etc. I’m not an expert on social constructions of menstruation (maybe someone who is can add more to this!) but what’s interesting to me about these particular apps is that they (1) perpetuate the assumption that PMS turns women into complete, irrational lunatics. Yes, some women experience serious and real psychological PMS symptoms, but the degrees to which they do varies greatly. (2) They apps trivializes real PMS symptoms by making it a joke that women into lunatics once a month. Not every woman’s cycle is actual 28 days, and often isn’t predictable like clockwork. And (3) what about the physical symptoms of PMS that are often much more uncomfortable and debillitating for women?

As former a sexual health educator and current sexuality studies professor, I meet students whose ideas about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have been shaped by the ‘scary slideshow’: that series of full-color, close-up shots of the worst infections.

(Not safe for work–explicit images of STDs)

more...

Over at Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, I found a page about depictions of the Jezebel stereotype, which included a number of fascinating/horrifying images. The Jezebel was, of course, a sexually promiscuous African or African American woman, wanton and lustful. Here’s a topless grass-skirted Jezebel ashtray:

According to the website, this license plate with a pregnant Black woman came out after Lyndon B. Johnson won the 1964 Presidential election (he used the phrase “All the way with LBJ” in his campaign):

A Virgin Fishing Lucky Lure:

This is a set of swizzle sticks shaped like African women:

I found an image of a full set for sale at Go Antiques:

Note that the swizzle sticks supposedly show the woman at different ages; the age is in that cutout area in their butt. The text next to the figures:

Nifty at 15, Spiffy at 20, Sizzling at 25, Perky at 30, Declining at 35, Droopy at 40

If you look carefully you’ll see that their boobs and butts sag as they age. I wonder if this same aging scheme applies to White women? At 33, apparently I’m just about to leave the last decent stage of my life and enter my declining years. Of course, in modern America we have cosmetic surgery, so I guess I could stave off droopiness for at least a few years.

Anyway, they’re good examples of the way Black women’s bodies have often been sexualized, and how people were comfortable showing them naked even when the idea of women’s sexuality in general wasn’t considered appropriate for polite company. The Jezebel stereotype reemerged in a slightly different form  in the 1980s with the idea of the “welfare queen,” a poor black woman (on public assistance, of course) who has lots of kids with various men just to get more welfare payments, an image President Reagan used to further reduce public support for the welfare state.

I read some very silly celebrity blogs, but make a point of staying away from the ones that make fun of people for being fat, sad, whatever, even as they may poke fun of the sometimes-ridiculous things celebrities wear.

That said, AYYY! does a “puzzle corner” every Monday and blurs out the faces of people in a similar theme (i.e. child star pics of current stars) and the reader’s meant to guess who’s who.  Last week, they did one of women who are currently very twig-like, but once were curvier.

So, let’s pretend we’re playing the puzzle just like any old Monday morning. Do you think you recognize any of these stars? I’ll admit, I only had guesses for a couple of them.

So, let’s have the big reveal, shall we?

1. Renee Zellweger, 2. Nicole Richie, 3. Madonna, 4. Amy Winehouse, 5. Lindsay Lohan, 6. Jennifer Connelly, 7. Christina Ricci, 8. Courtney Love, 9. Teri Hatcher, 10. Sophie Dahl

And here are the same women today:

Now, I want to put a disclaimer out there that I’m not trying to body shame anyone here—fat, skinny, in between, or whatever words you prefer to describe yourselves. And, based on their older pics, I’d say that these are not generally women who are naturally this thin (though, of course, such natural changes can occur). I’m sure we all know at least one naturally extremely thin woman, and they get their share of shame (No boobs!) and guilt (Gawd! You’re so lucky! I wish I could be that skinny!) from people daily. I’m not here to add to that.

The point I want to make is that these women have ALWAYS been beautiful. They were considered beautiful enough to be stars with their curves, so what made them think they needed to lose them?

What I want to know is: What changed? What happened between the ’90s (when several of those pics were taken) and today? You can see evidence of the skinnying of hollywood over many decades, but it seems like it suddenly sped up to an extreme point in the last 10-15 years.

What are your takes on the social/political issues that have made this shift occur? My guesses include a lot of conservative blowback against the liberation of women, but I’d really like to know what you think.

* Title unapologetically stolen from ayyyy.com, the inspiration for this post.  Originally posted at Shakesville and Crossing the Highway

———————–

InfamousQBert, sometimes known as Bethany Keeler, is a pinko-commie-liberal-vegetarian-feminist, living, writing, and attempting to fight the good fight in Dallas, TX.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Julie C. drew our attention to this ad for an internet service that filters “inappropriate” content:

Lizvang nicely articulates an objection (my emphasis):

The breasts, the vagina, the uterus and the colon is cut out of an anatomical text book. When did biology and education about our bodies become shameful? Haven’t we as a society moved past the “a woman’s body is dirty” mindset?