Why EVERY woman moans about the size of her breasts
19 minute read
I have to
begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth
and sixth grades, we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that
supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls.
The
episode in Huckleberry Finn where Huck is disguised as a girl and gives
himself away by the way he threads a needle and catches a ball — that
kind of thing. We learned that the way you sat, crossed your legs, held a
cigarette, and looked at your nails — the way you did these things
instinctively was absolute proof of your sex.
Now
obviously most children did not take this literally, but I did. I
thought that just one slip, just one incorrect cross of my legs or flick
of an imaginary cigarette ash would turn me from whatever I was into
the other thing; that would be all it took, really.
+9
Nora Ephron, pictured, tried many methods to increase the size of her breasts to no avail
Even
though I was outwardly a girl and had many of the trappings generally
associated with girldom — a girl’s name, for example, and dresses, my
own telephone, an autograph book — I spent the early years of my
adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any point gum it up. I
did not feel at all like a girl. I was boyish.
I
was athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive, noisy, rambunctious. I
had scabs on my knees and my socks slid into my loafers and I could
throw a football. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a
mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl, a definite
indisputable girl.
As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts.
I was about
six months younger than everyone else in my class, and so for about six
months after it began, for six months after my friends had begun to
develop (that was the word we used, develop), I was not particularly
worried. I would sit in the bathtub and look down at my breasts and know
that any day now, any second now, they would start growing like
everyone else’s.
They didn’t. ‘I want to buy a bra,’ I said to my mother one night.
‘What
for?’ she said. My mother was really hateful about bras, and by the
time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want
one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine.
‘Why not use a Band-Aid instead?’ she would say.
+9
The When Harry Met Sally writer believes that women are never truly happy with their breasts - whatever size
It
was a source of great pride to my mother that she had never even had to
wear a brassiere until she had her fourth child, and then only because
her gynecologist made her. It was incomprehensible to me that anyone
could ever be proud of something like that.
It
was the 1950s, for God’s sake. Jane Russell. Cashmere sweaters.
Couldn’t my mother see that? ‘I am too old to wear an undershirt.’
Screaming. Weeping. Shouting. ‘Then don’t wear an undershirt,’ said my
mother.
‘But I want to buy a bra.’ ‘What for?’
I
suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing,
has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with
becoming a woman, than anything else. Certainly more than getting your
period, although that, too, was traumatic, symbolic.
But
you could see breasts; they were there; they were visible. Whereas a
girl could claim to have her period for months before she actually got
it and nobody would ever know the difference.
Which
is exactly what I did. All you had to do was make a great fuss over
having enough nickels for the Kotex machine and walk around clutching
your stomach and moaning for three to five days a month about The Curse
and you could convince anybody.
There
is a school of thought somewhere in the women’s lib / women’s mag /
gynecology establishment that claims that menstrual cramps are purely
psychological, and I lean toward it. Not that I didn’t have them
finally.
Agonizing cramps, heating-pad cramps, go-down-to- the-school-nurse-and-lie-on-the-cot cramps.
But,
unlike any pain I had ever suffered, I adored the pain of cramps,
welcomed it, wallowed in it, bragged about it. ‘I can’t go. I have
cramps.’ ‘I can’t do that. I have cramps.’ And most of all, gigglingly,
blushingly: ‘I can’t swim. I have cramps.’
Nobody ever used the hard-core word. Menstruation. God, what an awful word. Never that. ‘I have cramps.’
+9
Ms Ephron said her mother was proud that she did not need a bra until after her fourth child was born
The
morning I first got my period, I went into my mother’s bedroom to tell
her. And my mother, my utterly-hateful-about-bras mother, burst into
tears. It was really a lovely moment, and I remember it so clearly not
just because it was one of the two times I ever saw my mother cry on my
account (the other was when I was caught being a six-year-old
kleptomaniac), but also because the incident did not mean to me what it
meant to her.
Her little girl, her firstborn, had finally become a woman.
That
was what she was crying about. My reaction to the event, however, was
that I might well be a woman in some scientific, textbook sense (and
could at least stop faking every month and stop wasting all those
nickels).
But
in another sense — in a visible sense — I was as androgynous and as
liable to tip over into boyhood as ever. I started with a 28 AA bra. I
don’t think they made them any smaller in those days, although I gather
that now you can buy bras for five-year-olds that don’t have any cups
whatsoever in them; trainer bras they are called.
My
first brassiere came from Robinson’s Department Store in Beverly Hills.
I went there alone, shaking, positive they would look me over and smile
and tell me to come back next year. An actual fitter took me into the
dressing room and stood over me while I took off my blouse and tried the
first one on.
The
little puffs stood out on my chest. ‘Lean over,’ said the fitter. (To
this day, I am not sure what fitters in bra departments do except to
tell you to lean over.)
I leaned over, with the fleeting hope that my breasts would miraculously fall out of my body and into the puffs. Nothing.
‘Don’t
worry about it,’ said my friend Libby some months later, when things
had not improved. ‘You’ll get them after you’re married.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
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Necking I could deal with. Intercourse
I could deal with. But it had never crossed my mind that a man was
going to touch my breasts, that breasts had something to do with all
that, petting... they never mentioned that
‘When you get married,’ Libby explained, ‘your husband will touch your breasts and rub them and kiss them and they’ll grow.’
That
was the killer. Necking I could deal with. Intercourse I could deal
with. But it had never crossed my mind that a man was going to touch my
breasts, that breasts had something to do with all that, petting, my
God, they never mentioned petting in my little sex manual about the
fertilization of the ovum. I became dizzy.
For
I knew instantly—as naive as I had been only a moment before — that
only part of what she was saying was true: the touching, rubbing,
kissing part, not the growing part.
And I knew that no one would ever want to marry me. I had no breasts. I would never have breasts.
My best friend in school was Diana Raskob. She lived a block from me in a house full of wonders. English muffins, for instance.
The Raskobs were the first people in Beverly Hills to have English muffins for breakfast.
They
also had an apricot tree in the back, and a badminton court, and a
subscription to Seventeen magazine, and hundreds of games, like Sorry
and Parcheesi and Treasure Hunt and Anagrams. Diana and I spent three or
four afternoons a week in their den reading and playing and eating.
Diana’s mother’s kitchen was full of the most colossal assortment of
junk food I have ever been exposed to.
My
house was full of apples and peaches and milk and homemade chocolate-
chip cookies—which were nice, and good for you,
but-not-right-before-dinner-or-you’ll-spoil-your-appetite.
Diana’s
house had nothing in it that was good for you, and what’s more, you
could stuff it in right up until dinner and nobody cared. Bar-B-Q potato
chips (they were the first in them, too), giant bottles of ginger ale,
fresh popcorn with melted butter, hot fudge sauce on Baskin-Robbins
Jamoca ice cream, powdered-sugar doughnuts from Van de Kamp’s.
Diana
and I had been best friends since we were seven; we were about equally
popular in school (which is to say, not particularly), we had about the
same success with boys (extremely intermittent), and we looked much the
same. Dark. Tall. Gangly.
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Ms Ephron said she bought three padded bras while at school - all which were of a different size
It
is September, just before school begins. I am eleven years old, about
to enter the seventh grade, and Diana and I have not seen each other all
summer. I have been to camp and she has been somewhere like Banff with
her parents.
We
are meeting, as we often do, on the street midway between our two
houses, and we will walk back to Diana’s and eat junk and talk about
what has happened to each of us that summer.
I
am walking down Walden Drive in my jeans and my father’s shirt hanging
out and my old red loafers with the socks falling into them and coming
toward me is . . . I take a deep breath . . . a young woman. Diana.
Her
hair is curled and she has a waist and hips and a bust and she is
wearing a straight skirt, an article of clothing I have been repeatedly
told I will be unable to wear until I have the hips to hold it up.
My jaw drops, and suddenly I am crying, crying hysterically, can’t catch my breath sobbing.
My best friend has betrayed me. She has gone ahead without me and done it. She has shaped up.
Here are some things I did to help:
Bought a Mark Eden Bust Developer.
Slept on my back for four years.
Splashed
cold water on them every night because some French actress said in Life
magazine that that was what she did for her perfect bustline.
Ultimately, I resigned myself to a bad toss and began to wear padded bras.
I
think about them now, think about all those years in high school I went
around in them, my three padded bras, every single one of them with
different-sized breasts.
+9
Ms Ephron said she wished that her friends or family could have warned her about the odd-sized padded bras
Each
time I changed bras I changed sizes: one week nice perky but not too
obtrusive breasts, the next medium-sized slightly pointy ones, the next
week knockers, true knockers; all the time, whatever size I was,
carrying around this rubberized appendage on my chest that occasionally
crashed into a wall and was poked inward and had to be poked outward — I
think about all that and wonder how anyone kept a straight face through
it.
My parents, who normally had no restraints about needling me—why did they say nothing as they watched my chest go up and down?
My
friends, who would periodically inspect my breasts for signs of growth
and reassure me—why didn’t they at least counsel consistency?
Buster Klepper was the first boy who ever touched them
And the bathing suits. I die when I think about the bathing suits.
That was the era when you could lay an uninhabited bathing suit on the beach and someone would make a pass at it.
I
would put one on, an absurd swimsuit with its enormous bust built into
it, the bones from the suit stabbing me in the rib cage and leaving
little red welts on my body, and there I would be, my chest plunging
straight downward absolutely vertically from my collarbone to the top of
my suit and then suddenly, wham, out came all that padding and material
and wiring absolutely horizontally.
Buster Klepper was the first boy who ever touched them.
He
was my boyfriend my senior year of high school. There is a picture of
him in my high-school yearbook that makes him look quite attractive in a
Jewish, horn-rimmed-glasses sort of way, but the picture does not show
the pimples, which were air-brushed out, or the dumbness.
Well, that isn’t really fair. He wasn’t dumb. He just wasn’t terribly bright.
His
mother refused to accept it, refused to accept the relentlessly average
report cards, refused to deal with her son’s inevitable destiny in some
junior college or other.
‘He was tested,’ she would say to me, apropos of nothing, ‘and it came out a hundred and forty-five. That’s near-genius.’
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Ms Ephron said that her first boyfriend, Buster Klepper 'wasn't dumb. He just wasn't terribly bright'
Had the word ‘underachiever’ been coined, she probably would have lobbed that one at me, too.
Anyway,
Buster was really very sweet—which is, I know, damning with faint
praise, but there it is. I was the editor of the front page of the
high-school newspaper and he was editor of the back page; we had to work
together, side by side, in the print shop, and that was how it started.
On our first date, we went to see April Love, starring Pat Boone.
Then
we started going together. Buster had a green coupe, a 1950 Ford with
an engine he had hand-chromed until it shone, dazzled, reflected the
image of anyone who looked into it, anyone usually being Buster
polishing it or the gas-station attendants he constantly asked to check
the oil in order for them to be overwhelmed by the sparkle on the
valves.
The
car also had a boot stretched over the backseat for reasons I never
understood; hanging from the rearview mirror, as was the custom, was a
pair of angora dice.
A previous girlfriend named Solange, who was famous throughout Beverly Hills
High
School for having no pigment in her right eyebrow, had knitted them for
him. Buster and I would ride around town, the two of us seated to the
left of the steering wheel. I would shift gears. It was nice.
There was necking. Terrific necking.
Buster
had a green coupe, a 1950 Ford with an engine he had hand-chromed until
it shone, dazzled, reflected the image of anyone who looked into it,
anyone usually being Buster polishing it
First
in the car, overlooking Los Angeles from what is now the Trousdale
Estates. Then on the bed of his parents’ cabana at Ocean House.
Incredibly wonderful, frustrating necking, I loved it, really, but no
further than necking, please don’t, please, because there I was,
absolutely terrified of the general implications of going-a-step-further
with a near-dummy and also terrified of his finding out there was next
to nothing there (which he knew, of course; he wasn’t that dumb).
I
broke up with him at one point. I think we were apart for about two
weeks. At the end of that time, I drove down to see a friend at a
boarding school in Palos Verdes Estates and a disc jockey played ‘April
Love’ on the radio four times during the trip. I took it as a sign.
I
drove straight back to Griffith Park to a golf tournament Buster was
playing in (he was the sixth-seeded teen age golf player in Southern
California) and presented myself back to him on the green of the
eighteenth hole. It was all very dramatic.
That
night we went to a drive-in and I let him get his hand under my
protuberances and onto my breasts. He really didn’t seem to mind at all.
‘Do you want to marry my son?’ the woman asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
+9
Nora Ephron said she was a 19-year-old
virgin when she agreed to get married when her mother-in-law gave her
advice on how to make the most of her tiny assets by comparing breast
sizes, picture posed by model
I
was nineteen years old, a virgin, going with this woman’s son, this big
strange woman who was married to a Lutheran minister in New Hampshire
and pretended she was gentile and had this son, by her first husband,
this total fool of a son who ran the hero-sandwich concession at Harvard
Business School and whom for one moment one December in New Hampshire I
said — as much out of politeness as anything else — that I wanted to
marry.
‘Fine,’
she said. ‘Now, here’s what you do. Always make sure you’re on top of
him so you won’t seem so small. My bust is very large, you see, so I
always lie on my back to make it look smaller, but you’ll have to be on
top most of the time.’
I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘I
have a book for you to read,’ she went on. ‘Take it with you when you
leave. Keep it.’ She went to the bookshelf, found it, and gave it to me.
It was a book on frigidity.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
That
is a true story. Everything in this article is a true story, but I feel
I have to point out that that story in particular is true. It happened
on December 30, 1960. I think about it often.
When it first happened, I naturally assumed that the woman’s son, my boyfriend, was responsible.
I
invented a scenario where he had had a little heart-to-heart with his
mother and had confessed that his only objection to me was that my
breasts were small; his mother then took it upon herself to help out.
Now I think I was wrong about the incident.
The
mother was acting on her own, I think: that was her way of being cruel
and competitive under the guise of being helpful and maternal. You have
small breasts, she was saying; therefore you will never make him as
happy as I have.
Or
you have small breasts; therefore you will doubtless have sexual
problems. Or you have small breasts; therefore you are less woman than I
am.
She was, as
it happens, only the first of what seems to me to be a never-ending
string of women who have made competitive remarks to me about breast
size.
‘I would love to wear a dress like that,’ my friend Emily says to me, ‘but my bust is too big.’ Like that.
Why do women say these things to me?
Do I attract these remarks the way other women attract married men or alcoholics or homosexuals?
This summer, for example. I am at a party in East Hampton and I am introduced to a woman from Washington.
She
is a minor celebrity, very pretty and Southern and blond and outspoken,
and I am flattered because she has read something I have written.
We
are talking animatedly, we have been talking no more than five minutes,
when a man comes up to join us. ‘Look at the two of us,’ the woman says
to the man, indicating me and her. ‘The two of us together couldn’t
fill an A cup.’
Why does she say that? It isn’t even true, dammit, so why?
I am nonetheless obsessed by breasts. I cannot help it
Is
she even more addled than I am on this subject? Does she honestly
believe there is something wrong with her size breasts, which, it seems
to me, now that I look hard at them, are just right?
Do I unconsciously bring out competitiveness in women? In that form? What did I do to deserve it?
As for men.
There were men who minded and let me know that they minded.
There were men who did not mind.
In any case, I always minded.
And
even now, now that I have been countlessly reassured that my figure is a
good one, now that I am grown-up enough to understand that most of my
feelings have very little to do with the reality of my shape, I am
nonetheless obsessed by breasts. I cannot help it. I grew up in the
terrible fifties—with rigid stereotypical sex roles, the insistence that
men be men and dress like men and women be women and dress like women,
the intolerance of androgyny—and I cannot shake it, cannot shake my
feelings of inadequacy.
Well, that time is gone, right? All those exaggerated examples of breast worship are gone, right?
Those women were freaks, right?
I
know all that. And yet here I am, stuck with the psychological remains
of it all, stuck with my own peculiar version of breast worship.
You
probably think I am crazy to go on like this: here I have set out to
write a confession that is meant to hit you with the shock of
recognition, and instead you are sitting there thinking I am thoroughly
warped.
Well, what can I tell you? If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person. I honestly believe that.
After
I went into therapy, a process that made it possible for me to tell
total strangers at cocktail parties that breasts were the hang-up of my
life, I was often told that I was insane to have been bothered by my
condition.
I
was also frequently told, by close friends, that I was extremely boring
on the subject. And my girlfriends, the ones with nice big breasts,
would go on endlessly about how their lives had been far more miserable
than mine.
Their bra straps were snapped in class.
They
couldn’t sleep on their stomachs. They were stared at whenever the word
‘mountain’ cropped up in geography. And Evangeline, good God what they
went through every time someone had to stand up and recite the Prologue
to Longfellow’s Evangeline: ‘ . . . stand like druids of eld . . . /
With beards that rest on their bosoms.’ It was much worse for them, they
tell me.
They had a terrible time of it, they assure me. I don’t know how lucky I was, they say.
I
have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place,
considered their point of view. I think they are full of s***.
—May 1972
This
is an unabridged extract from The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron,
to be published by Transworld on 11 September, price £20. To order a
copy go to mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p free for a limited time only.
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