A generation later, Meema Spadola found that this attitude had not changed:
...every time I did an interview or gathered together a group of women to discuss breasts, what always amazed me was just how much our breasts shape our lives, and, more than that, how eager so many women are to talk about what breasts mean to them.
(Spadola, p. 239)
Another factor that perhaps reinforces society's focus on breasts is that they're just so darned obvious:
Breasts are public-visible. They exist "out there," as a sign, a password. They define and determine other people's perceptions of a girl's femininity. They express what kind of person she is without her will or consent.
(Latteier, p. 19)
The media have capitalized on this high visibility:
The tremendous anxiety and self-consciousness that women exhibited while being photographed, another factor we hadn't anticipated, confirmed our notion that women were negatively affected by the ever-present media images of "ideal" breasts.
(Ayalah and Weinstock, p. 13)
When Ayalah and Weinstock undertook to counter the media-created image of the ideal breast, they initially envisioned simply a book of photographs showing breasts as they really are. But they soon found that women wanted to talk about their breasts as well as allow them to be photographed. We'd like young girls today to be aware of the discovery made by Ayalah and Weinstock's subjects more than 20 years ago:
The one observation that most women made during their brief exposure to the photographs was about the variety of breasts. "I always thought breasts looked pretty much the same. How amazingly different they all are. They seem to have different characters-like individual faces."
(Ayalah and Weinstock, p. 15)
But, unfortunately, most young girls today don't think of their bodies as personally unique. They're caught up in cultural expectations about what they and their bodies should be-a situation that underlies and molds their development from girls into young women. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg concludes in the preface to her eye-opening cultural study:
...although young women today enjoy greater freedom and more options than their counterparts of a century ago, they are also under more pressure, and at greater risk, because of a unique combination of biological and cultural forces that have made the adolescent female body into a template for much of the social change of the twentieth century.
(Brumberg, p. xxv)
In the next article we'll look at the ways in which cultural expectations affect girls during adolescence. In the meantime, if you have comments or stories to share about your experiences, please post a message here.
