Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

258 Pages·2012·2.8 MB·English

by  Florence Williams

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, and her articles
and essays have been widely anthologised. Breasts was named a finalist for the
2011 Columbia/Nieman Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Williams lives in
Boulder, Colorado.

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Copyright © Florence Williams 2012

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First published in the USA by W. W. Norton & Co. 2012.
Published in Australia and New Zealand by The Text Publishing Company,
2012.

Cover design by WH Chong
Image by Levi Brown

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author:
Williams, Florence.
Title: Breasts : a natural and unnatural history / Florence Williams.
ISBN: 9781921922640 (pbk.) ISBN: 9781921834868 (ebook.) Subjects: Breast
—Popular works.
Breast—Health aspects.
Breast—Diseases—Environmental aspects.
Breast milk—Contamination—Environmental aspects.
Dewey Number: 611.49
In memory of my grandmothers, Florence Higinbotham
Williams and Carolyn Loeb Boasberg,
and my mother, Elizabeth Friar Williams.
Contents
Cover Page
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction • Planet Breast
1 • For Whom the Bells Toll
2 • Circular Beginnings
3 • Plumbing: A Primer
4 • Fill Her Up
5 • Toxic Assets: The Growing Breast
6 • Shampoo, Macaroni, and the Americal Girl: Spring Comes Early
7 • The Pregnancy Paradox
8 • What's For Dinner?
9 • Holy Crap: Herman, Hamlet, and the All-Important Human Gut
10 • Sour Milk
11 • An Unfamiliar Wilderness: Periods, the Pill, and HRT
12 • The Few, the Proud, the Afflicted: Can Marines Solve the Puzzle of Breast
Cancer?
13 • Are You Dense? The Aging Breast
14 • The Future of Breasts
Acknowledgements
Notes
Permission Credits
Footnotes
• Introduction •
PLANET BREAST
Save the Tatas

— BUMPER STICKER

F
UNBAGS. BOOBSTERS. CHUMBAWUMBAS. DINGLE BOBBERS. Dairy pillows.
Jellybonkers. Num nums. When I was growing up, my mother called them
ninnies. That word, according to Webster’s, means “fools,” and lists nitwits,
nutcases, and boobs as synonyms. For my own children, I amended the word to
nummies, thinking it a bit kinder. Looking up its etymology recently, I found the
word defined as “yummy,” but its origin may stem from numbskull. We love
breasts, yet we can’t quite take them seriously. We name them affectionately, but
with a hint of insult. Breasts embarrass us. They’re unpredictable. They’re goofy.
They can turn both babies and grown men into lunkheads.
For such an enormously popular feature of the human race— even today,
when they are bikinied, bared, flaunted, measured, inflated, sexted, YouTubed,
suckled, pierced, tattooed, tassled, and in every way fetishized—it’s remarkable
how little we actually know about their basic biology. We know some things:
they appear out of nowhere at puberty, they get bigger in pregnancy, they’re
capable of producing prodigious amounts of milk, and sometimes they get sick.
We know men even get them once in a while, and that tweaks us out.
Not even the experts among us are certain why all these things happen, or
even why we have breasts in the first place. But the urgency to know and
understand breasts has never been greater. Modern life has helped many of us
live longer and more comfortably. It has also, however, taken a strange and
confounding toll on our breasts. For one thing, they are bigger than ever,
according to lingerie manufacturers and purveyors who are ever increasing their
cup offerings to sizes like H and KK. We are sprouting them at younger and
younger ages. We are filling them with saline and silicone and transplanted stem
cells to change their shape. Most of us are not using them to nurture infants
anymore, but when we do, our breast milk contains industrial additives never
tasted by our ancestors and never meant to be digested by humans at all. More
tumors form in the breast than in any other organ, making breast cancer the most
common malignancy in women worldwide. Its incidence has almost doubled
since the 1940s and is still rising. Breasts are living a life they’ve never lived
before.
Fortunately, scientists are beginning to unveil the secrets of breasts, and
with those secrets, a new way of looking at human health and our decidedly
complicated place in nature. To understand the transformation, we need to go
back in time, to the very beginning. We must first ask, Why breasts? Why us?
We share 98 percent of our genes with chimps, but among that immeasurable 2
percent are the ones governing breasts. Chimps, unlucky sods, don’t have them.
In fact, we are the only primates so endowed with soft orbs from puberty
onward. Other female primates develop small swellings while lactating, but they
deflate after weaning. Breasts are a defining trait of humanity, and mammary
glands define our entire taxonomic class. Carolus Linnaeus understood. That’s
why he named us mammals.
Breasts are us.

I DIDN’T THINK A LOT ABOUT MY BREASTS UNTIL I BECAME A mother. My breasts
developed about the normal time. I liked them fine. They were small enough not
to get in the way of sports or cause backaches, big enough that I knew they
existed, symmetrical enough to look okay in a bathing suit on the rare occasions
when I wore one while growing up in New York City. I wasn’t like Nora Ephron,
who wrote an essay for Esquire about how she obsessed over her small breasts in
the 1950s, the era of the torpedo bra, in California: “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.”
Poor Nora. Her worry acknowledged a truth that had been evolving since
the sun set on the Pleistocene: breasts are really important. Consider this: in our
mammalian ascent, being breastfed allowed us a youthful pass from gathering,
chewing, digesting, and purifying food found in nature. Other animals such as
reptiles had to live near specialized, high-fat food sources. Mammals just had to