Confession time. I absolutely adore breasts, me. I love my own. I love looking at other women's. I was in the hairdressers last week, getting shampooed, and directly in my line of vision was a twenty-something woman in a moderately low cut top and very pert medium-sized breasts. I love it in summer when women display their silhouette. I can totally understand men who are breast-fixated, even though it can be irritating in a work context when they direct their eyes at my boobs rather than my eyes (look, I'm 5'2", isn't it easier to look at my gorgeous eyes than my boobs). I find the following in an interview with a fave celebrity crush to be a turn-on:
His charm packs more calories per square inch than clotted cream, but it is at least more winning than the usual lardy showbiz schmooze. Indeed, you are helpless before it; in all the interviews where the female journalist has been wooed, her assets covertly assessed and her hand warmly overgripped, nobody in this politically cautious age has ever minded in the least. People threaten legal action for less than his dark devouring eyes insinuate...
In my world, it would be socially acceptable for women to walk around topless in all the places men walk around topless.
I would be quite happy walking around my house topless except I don't have nets in the front window.
I've just been watching Gangs of New York. One scene stuck - in the whorehouse where the whores are wearing dresses that 'forget' to cover their nipples. For me, seriously erotic.
Then we get the Janet Jackson furore. If it was a publicity stunt, it was incredibly bad taste. Notwithstanding that, the reaction has been unbelievable. The contrived shock-and-horror doesn't seem to be about the cynically manipulative publicity stunt but simply about the unspeakable horrors of a bare breast being exposed -
a show that requires parents to send their kids out of the room is unconscionable.Sure, anything sexual on telly has an uneasy inter-generational tension. I feel uncomfortable watching sex on the TV with my mother. The Christmas 98 special of Men Behaving Badly with Martin Clunes wanking into a Kleenex drew complaints, not because of the subject matter per se but because, as my incredibly liberal cousin put it, she's watching it with her then seventy-something mother and teenage sons.
I just kind of wonder - I'm more-or-less straight, but I am definitely turned on by breasts, naked or otherwise. I feel comfortable with that because I understand my sexuality. All my lovers, past-and-present, have been candid about their fascination for breasts; I know the power of lifting up a t-shirt, especially after I have removed my bra. I remember when Engand lost on penalties to Germany in Euro 96 and a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square, and the BBC Nine O'Clock News showed a woman lifting her t-shirt and her partner fondling her boobs - what a way to mark defeat...! I would love to do that...
Breasts are powerful, and I suspect that many who complain about Janet Jackson do so because they are uncomfortable with their own reaction. Men, I don't really understand - I am puzzled at straight men who aren't turned on by breasts. Maybe a lot of the complainants were women who don't understand that being turned-on by breasts doesn't make you a lesbian.
Perhaps it's the penultimate taboo. Perhaps if it were socially acceptable for women to go topless wherever men go topless, naked breasts would cease to have their erotc appeal. Maybe it would be empowering, but perhaps it would be a matter of regret.
Dammit, I so don't fit the feminist stereotype...
