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Tits Up
What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts
0 of 1 copy available
After years of biopsies, best-selling author Sarah Thornton made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy. But, after her reconstructive surgery, she was perplexed: What had she lost? And gained? An experienced sleuth, she resolved to venture behind the scenes to uncover the social and cultural significance of breasts.
Riotous and galvanizing, Tits Up excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation's oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers. Thornton draws insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and "free the nipple" activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women's chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender, and desire.
Everywhere she turns, Thornton encounters chauvinistic myths about this elemental body part that quietly justify deficits in women's bodily autonomy and endorse shortfalls in their political status. Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition—to liberate breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice.
"With a sociologist's eye, a reporter's nose, and a double-D brain, Sarah Thornton explores the contradictions, power, and fundamental formidability of breasts. ... Exquisitely written and consistently illuminating."—Mary Roach, New York Times best-selling author
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 7, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798892739511
- File size: 252331 KB
- Duration: 08:45:41
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 3, 2024
In this fun and far-ranging account, sociologist Thornton (Seven Days in the Art World) explores the topic of women’s breasts from a female perspective—tying in multiple aesthetic, professional, and spiritual threads of analysis while eschewing the “male gaze.” Relating her own anecdotes on breastfeeding in the 1990s—when it still had a strongly taboo feeling, especially in public—and her postmastectomy mismatched synthetic breasts (nicknamed Bert and Ernie), she explains that losing her natural breasts for medical reasons inspired her to discover more about how other women (including trans women) relate to their tits. In sections covering the sex industry, breastfeeding, plastic surgeons, bra designers, and the body positivity movement, Thornton draws from informative, intimate conversations with experts. These include a wry, thoughtful plastic surgeon; sex workers who perform feats of asymmetric breast movement; cheerfully aging hippies who revel in the freedom of topless communal events; and Old Navy bra designers (the model who serves as the template for all the company’s bras has perfectly average breasts and a master’s degree in economics that helps her give market-oriented feedback). What emerges is an arresting look at how these subjects’ niche experiences have erased, in their own minds, any perception of breasts as merely “passive erotic playthings.” It’s an inviting and down-to-earth portrayal of women’s relationship with their bodies.
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