Thanks for the mammaries...

‘We must! We must! We must increase our bust! The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us!’
When I was 11 this mammary mantra was regularly chirped out by my friends and me, accompanied by the synchronised elbow jerks thought to encourage growth. While the idea that all the boys were ‘depending’ on us to produce said busts added to the urgency of their emergence, I was never in doubt that I would soon be flaunting a pair of ripe, melony bazoombas. My friend Claire had already bought her first bra but there I was, still in a skinny ribbed t-shirt. The way I saw it, I was robbed. I was lead to believe that, upon womanhood, I’d automatically attain Playmate of the month proportions. I even started to skip lunch breaks and pop into the M&S underwear department to be measured, hoping that the measuring tape would magically move up a size. Then one day, having decided that I would be flat for the rest of my life, I woke up and there they were…

And I wasn’t too sure I liked them. Suddenly I was a child in a womans body and Irish road diggers were wolf whistling at me at the bus stop. I started to envy my less endowed friends who could slip into their tutu’s with no problem. Ballet became a thing of the past and netball became uncomfortable. Now that I had them I didn’t want them. The wake up call also came when 12 year old Wilbur Smythe from the boys school opposite aggresively challenged me with the question ‘Can you see your feet?’ A young girl does get a little confused when all of a sudden she obtains the stacked-stick look as demonstrated by Barbie. If I was a 50’s teenager I would have been considered hot, Lollobrigida la la’s were the thing and were poked out with pride. But it was the late 70’s and fashion dictated boobs to be small and chirpy, so I inevitably started to develop bad posture in order to hide the monsters from sight. Of course, all the less endowed girls envied me and the equally endowed considered me a threat… my early teens were a made a nightmare by a couple of overgrown glands.

By the time I went to University I had learned to live with ‘them’ and the fact other girls were trying to achieve the same effect by melting down a barrelful of Barbies and pouring the resultant fluid into the chest region didn’t make me feel so bad. And what of these implants? Well we have Pammy to thank for those kind of mammaries. Rock hard, obvious looking and lacking in perspective but as popular as ever. Girls in Brazil get them for 18th birthday pressies, and although they carry many health risks women still insist on shoving these lumps of plastic under their skin in order to get the vital statistics men lust over. A male friend once told me that as a ‘breast’ man, he doesn’t care how the big boobs get there as long as they’re big. So men basically are to blame for lesser endowed womens’ feelings of inadequacy.

My best friend had spent most of her life not believing boyfriends when they told her that they loved her breasts just as they were. She states that on meeting her husband, his early dating statement ‘I like small breasts’, had a distinct whiff of backhandedness, especially when she used to catch him ogling any udder going, with absolutely no positive discrimination towards the small A department.

In her struggle to compete with enemy breasts (thank God I’m not an enemy) she now hoists her dainties into that triumph of engineering, the Wonderbra. This flying buttress for boobs ensures that even the modestly endowed gal can pack a rack. She does admit though that although she enjoys the pretence of a formidable decolletage her pleasure is somewhat diminished by the nagging paranoia that everyone probably knows that all of her wonder is supplied by the bra. The turning point came when over coffee one morning she whisked out a package that she had received. Expecting some sort of new sex toy, I was disappointed. I could not believe that falsie advertising had gone to my friends head…a couple of gloopy little jellyfish prosthetics called Curves slithered out of the box. She had ordered them especially for a party she went to the night before. Although they made her feel shapelier and sexier at the beginning of the evening, after a few drinks she couldn’t help but laugh at her bogus bust and on a trip to the loo stuffed them in her bag and emerged looking her old self, naturally streamlined. She had finally accepted her litheness…

This in turn made me re-evaluate my own French Fancies, and I decided to give myself a break on the breast question. After all, I love them on other women in all flavours, be they ample or athletic, plump or pert. But have kept mine hidden. Maybe it was time I threw out my ‘minimiser’ bra and started to extend my appreciation of breasts, in their infinate varieties of goddess-like glory, to myself?
To this end, I’ve updated my childhood mantra to ‘I must! I must! I must accept my bust!…