The inspiration for today’s installment of The Rack comes from the 1988 Warner Bros. film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.


© 1988 Warner Bros.

Breasts certainly attract attention–attention which gets me a lot of free drinks when I’m out at a bar. Every time my sexy vixen bar persona makes some guy stumble over his words, the awkward, brace-faced four-eyes inside me sticks her tongue out at all the boys who ignored me in middle school. It’s a great confidence booster that lots of guys think I’m hot, and I’m certainly not complaining about that . . .

BUT

Nothing in life is free. For every desirable guy that hits on me, there are fifteen thousand catcalls in the street. There are creeps watching me run on the treadmill at the gym. Worst of all, there are assumptions. I chose at a young age to embrace my breast size–to dress “normally” rather than try to constantly cover up and “blend in”–to be myself. In a society of fetishized breasts, however, “not hiding” and “displaying” are one and the same. They are perceived as overtly sexual, inviting attention and commentary, and somehow suggesting more “experience” than other women.

Choosing not to cover them up is choosing to fight against the rampant media stereotypes propagated by well known big-breasted women. If you’re at a loss for examples of big breasts in the media, flip to the E! Network and find the Girls Next Door, playboy models who live in Hugh Hefner’s mansion in scantily clad, polyamorous bliss, or AMC’s Mad Men, a 60’s throwback in which the voluptuous Christina Hendricks plays a savvy secretary who, at 35, ends her affair with the boss to marry the first dope that comes along before she hits official old-maid status. There is nothing original about my arguments about the objectification of women on television and in society, but this: the bigger the breasts, the bigger the problem. If I had a dollar for every time a guy has assumed I’m some kind of nymphomaniac based on looks alone . . . I’d have a lot of dollars.

There is something inherently taboo about big breasts, about daring to have cleavage, about “showing off” one’s body. It violates the puritanical ideals our country was built upon. As my grandfather would say, it isn’t “modest.” And what isn’t modest isn’t corporate. It isn’t professional. It isn’t serious. Raise your hand if you think that’s bullsh*t!!!