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The Women’s Perspective on an American Obsession describes and explores our national breast fetish, which is defined as a culturally constructed obsession that is deeply interwoven with beauty standards, breastfeeding practices, and sexuality. By tracing the complex history of this erotic fascination and discovering how it affects men’s and women’s sexuality and their relationships, this book will help women accept their breasts as they are and provide male readers with insight into how women think and feel about their bodies. This awareness will enable them to better understand and empathize with women’s experiences as objects of a cultural fetish.Focusing on adult joys and anxieties about breasts, sex, and breastfeeding, this text uses research and expert opinions from several different fields, including psychology, anthropology, sociology, mythology, and sexology. You will find several other issues in The Women’s Perspective on an American Obsession that involve men’s and women’s struggles with this obsession, such

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

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Ellen Cole

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Profile Image for Tim Martin.
874 reviews50 followers
February 12, 2023
Quick reading, very broad overview of social science topics as related to women's breasts, covering psychology, sociology, mythology, history, literature, and anthropology. Medical and anatomical topics relating to breasts are very brief.

Chapter 1, “Love and Loathing,” opens with a discussion of the author’s personal experiences with and perceptions of her own breasts, briefly mentions widely varying perceptions of “what a breast should be,” noting some cultures throughout the world and even Western culture over time, even recent history, have varied a lot in what they perceive as “the ideal breast.” The author notes that society as a whole, especially Western society, has widely conflicting views about breasts, and as much as there seems to be a “fascination with them” there is also a “vein of hostility” with “[l]arge-breasted women tak[ing] the brunt of it” though if a woman has small breasts she often as seen falling “short of being desirable,” a real paradox, as large breasted women are “treated like a slut” so it seems like women can’t win. Also, a mention of the eight different breast identities as put forward by sociologist Raymond L. Schmitt, identities involving among other things age, occupation, motherhood, and sexuality.

Chapter 2, “Initiation,” focuses on how for adolescent girls, “the advent of body consciousness often comes with the first appearance of breasts.” She talks about the paradox of young girls really wanting breasts as they go through puberty but also how “girls have difficulty incorporating breasts into their images of themselves” and how 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 a person she is without her will or consent.”

Chapter 3, “Dressing the Part,” looks at the history of women’s clothing as it relates to breasts as a “key cultural symbol,” beginning with the ancient Minoans of Crete (2800 B.C.-1450 B.C.), whose women wore dresses that “completely bared and emphasized the breast,” with never “in the annals of fashion have women shown off the breast with quite the same exuberance as the Minoans,” speculating with some reason that their “exposed breasts may have been a statement of power.”

Chapter 3 had an interesting bit on the J.C. Flugel’s theories about “an erotic cycle in women’s clothing,” of how fashion “will emphasize one part of the body for a while until people get sated and lose interest,” with in the Middle Ages and Renaissance the part that was emphasized was the woman’s stomach, with the “age of the breast” not arriving until the first quarter of the seventeenth century (a shift only possible with the advent of the corset). What follows is a whirlwind tour of how breasts were clothed (or not so clothed) from the courts of Louis XIV to the “age of the brassiere” (the 20th century) to later the cultural symbol of the braless breast in the 1960s and 1970s to bra burning. Much of this later history is very brief, often only a paragraph on any one element.

Chapter 4, “A Matter of Life and Death,” looked at breast implants, including the history, science, problems with breast implants, and a great deal of the psychology of why women get breast implants (more on psychology and sociology than medicine). The author seems to lean more towards “social pressures to be beautiful than to personal neuroses as the reason women get breast implants,” mentioning how authors like Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf have said contemporary culture “has responded to women’s liberation by imposing increasingly rigid body standards” and how women who fail to live up to “new hard body, big-breast beauty standards…. felt weak.” Faludi and Wolf wrote in 1991 and this book itself was published in 1998, so I wonder if that still holds true as I write this in 2023.

I do think her passages about objectification of breasts seemed to ring true to things I have heard and read more recently, with breast implants among other things “favoring form over function and looks over feeling,” how breast augmentation treats breasts as a prosthesis and breast implants can impact how sensitive they are and possibly lead to babies having autoimmune diseases if they breast-feed with women who have implants (something I had not heard before, and only mentioned in passing in a single sentence). She does however seem to close with a “its complicated” vibe on whether breast augmentation is good or bad and goes to pains to not judge women who get implants.

Chapter 5, “Garden of Paradise,” talks a little bit at first about the breast-feeding function of breasts, opening with a discussion of how babies appear to recognize the smell of the milk of their mother’s breast, how babies are hardwired to suckle on breasts (again, as with so many things in the book, only a very brief discussion, maybe a paragraph), spends a good bit of time discussing Melanie Klein’s theories about how babies have ambiguous or at least divided views of breasts, seeking the “good, nourishing breast” but when “denied the breast” laying in bed “screaming and flailing…playing out an enraged fantasy of attacking the breast.” Not sure what I think about that, but that is what is discussed in the chapter.

Most of chapter 5 though is analyzing what babies really think about breasts and how infant desires for the breast can shape later adults, whether playing a role in eating disorders or later a search for intimacy, all often in theory in some way related to hunger “for the symbolic breast,” closing with “[o]n some level, our feelings about the breast will always mingle with our sense of how we are fed, how we are nourished by life, and whether the world is a place we can trust.”

Chapter 6, “When Instinct Meets Culture,” focuses on breast-feeding itself, noting Western ambiguities if not outright hostility to public breastfeeding, how Americans have been quite uncomfortable with the fact that “suckling produces hormones that stimulate sensuous feelings in the mother,” discusses the biology of this (relating to the hormone oxytocin), how environmental stresses such as fear can stop the production of milk, briefly (too briefly, again) discusses that during “both breast-feeding and lovemaking, marked vascular changes occur in the skin of the breasts and nipples become erect,” and how “the survival of the human race” according to Niles Newton, “depending upon the satisfactions gained for the two voluntary acts of reproduction – coitus and breast-feeding.”

There is also discussion of breast-feeding in several tribal cultures and through history, including discussions of wet nurses, how breast-feeding has largely “been a casualty of the industrial revolution,” and closes with a return to the idea that if women were permitted to feel pleasure from breast-feeding this might lead to higher rates and longer periods of breast-feeding, that “confusion between the sexual and nurturing function of women’s breasts is a key issue in breast-feeding in our culture.” I had thought since this book was published breast-feeding and even public breast-feeding has been much more accepted in the U.S., but it does not seem addressed at least in this chapter.

Chapter 7, “Circles of Desire,” opens with a discussion by the author of always enjoying “the breast caress" but lamenting that other don’t, bemoans the lack at least at the time of studies in sexology (particularly what it says about the role of breasts in lovemaking), noting that “only one-half of American women enjoy having their breasts touched when they make love” but according to Alfred Kinsey that 98 of men engaged in sexual contact with breasts. A brief discussion of why some women do not enjoy this may be physiological, a really long discussion of Freudian theories which I will be honest I didn’t always either understand or agree with (“I am willing to believe that, for Joan, her breasts symbolized her father’s penis” is a whole sentence on page 102), it was nice to read about non-western cultures that view the breasts in erotic terms after hearing in general that is only a western thing (such as the Lepcha of the Himalayas and natives of Truk), though again as with so much of the book, it is so very very brief, often a sentence or two. There is a lengthy section though on the cultural constructs over whether or not breasts are erotic in American society and a lengthy discussion of object relations theory (“somewhat of a synthesis between Freud and the cultural constructionists”).

Chapter 8, “Breast Men,” is about why a man is a breast man and what “makes him so crazy about breasts?” In looking at the breast fetish, the author does discuss what a fetish is, how the term paraphilia has come into vogue as a “less loaded term,” looks at whether paraphilias and pornography deviate from the mainstream or not and things once called paraphilias or pornography have entered the mainstream as western society has become more liberated (“When perversions were first described in the late nineteenth century, focus on breasts counted as a fetish. Now it is so widespread, it is no longer considered a paraphilia"). She also looks at the theory over whether or not breast men were denied breast feeding as babies and speculates whether or not women are affected by a “lack of oral satisfaction during infancy.” She looks if there are any “breast women” among lesbians and closes with some general thoughts on breast men (and women), concluding by my reading it has for most it has less to do with something like “a person’s infantile relationship with his or her breast-feeding mother” but rather “on his or her relationships with the entire culture” as “most breast men reflect and parallel the culture-wide fetish.”

Chapter 9, “How the Woman Got Her Breasts,” looks at theories as to why women, unique among mammals, have “permanently enlarged breasts” with women going “about with full, rounded breasts even when they are not making milk.” The author looks at the archaeological record, at “stone age” peoples alive today, and the study of closely related primates such as the chimpanzee. As I expected, she does begin with a discussion of Desmond Morris and his 1967 work _The Naked Ape_ which “opened the breast evolution debate” with Morris stating basically that “breasts evolved as sexual ornaments developed specifically to promote pair bonding,” goes on to discuss the theories of John Cant (who postulated that “enlarged breasts and fatty buttocks” signaled to men a woman was healthy and fit enough to bear and nurse infants), of G. G. Gallup (writing in 1982, that breasts showed “not fat content but ovulatory potential”), Robert L. Smith (writing in 1984 that permanently enlarged breasts, which looked to be lactating, may have evolved to confuse men as to their fertility status and allowed women to spend more time with other men on the side basically, with their mate thinking they were temporarily infertile, but over time “hominids got used to permanently swollen breasts and started experiencing them as attractive in and of themselves”), as well as one other theory, though in the end stating that these theories are all “steeped in ethnocentric assumptions,” among them assuming men are even attracted to breasts, as well as more recent studies showing that “stone age” cultures do have more women hunting than earlier theorists seemed to account for.

After taking some issue with the purely transactional theories of food-for-sex (“the “primal prostitute””) that earlier theories revolved around, the author discussed theories of how breasts were a consequence of a selection for greater fat, that breasts evolved not as signals of any sort of fitness or sexual receptivity, but rather “as by-products of greater fat,” fat that could help survival for the woman and any children. Additionally, some such as Judith Anderson, proposed among other things breast size and enlargement evolved for purposes to insulate milk and to making it easier to breastfeed, particularly as hominids faces grew flatter.

Chapter 10, “The Great and Terrible Breast,” looks at breasts in stories and art, going all the way back to depictions in Stone Age Europe, where breasts she argues breasts may have been an enduring symbol not unlike the much later Christian cross, through the role of Isis and her breast milk to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, how in Ancient Greek times breasts went from objects that were venerated and breast milk a source of power to “become objects to be dominated” and “no longer all-powerful and benevolent.” She talks about a few myths about infants biting breasts, stories of “frightening breasts” such as Turkish legends about devs, medieval tales of healing powers of the Virgin Mary’s milk, goes back to discussing the tales of how Amazons who removed their right breasts so as to be better at the use of the bow and in some tales avoid giving their daughters breast milk, about what it might say about women in society viewed as having to give up the feminine in order to acquire power.

Chapter 11, “Breasts Unbound,” focused on breast activism, particularly with regards to public breast-feeding, the La Leche League, and extended breast feeding, which is far from the norm in the United States. She discusses how some (such as one anthropologist, Katherine Dettwyler) who says that the root of the problem is “our sexualization of breasts” and how most cultures “do not think of breasts as sex objects.” Speaking of desexualizing breasts, she also covers the top-free movement, noting among other things how activists say bans on women being topless while men can be topless as violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.


There are several pages of notes, an extensive bibliography, and a thorough index. Many of the works mentioned in the bibliography are scientific journals.

It’s a pretty quick read, both for being only 165 pages of text not counting things such as the bibliography, but also for being such a brief but very broad overview. It might make a nice companion to _Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History_ by Florence Williams (published 2012, while this book was published in 1998). In Williams book you get some time devoted to the psychology, sociology, and anthropology of feelings about breasts, but most of the book is medical and anatomical in focus, where the reader learns about stroma, parenchyma, endocrine disruptors, lactoferrin, galactorrhea, and involution. This book had little to none of that sort of discussion and barely at all touched upon breast cancer, but did go far more into the history of fashion as it relates to breasts, breasts in mythology, Freudian theories about breast fetishes, and looking at the psychology of breast men and did have many interesting things to say about breast-feeding.

My main problems were the age of the book (24 years old) and it is such a fast paced, brief survey. The writing was accessible and easy to read. I both liked and disliked how the author often refused to come down on one side or the other on a particular topic but she did present for the most part conflicting theories and was free in admitting many controversies are quite complicated. I do appreciate how she didn't condemn women for getting breast implants and men for being breast men, but you could tell as far as the latter she did lean a bit into desexualizing breasts, though she didn't seem to have a problem per se with breasts as also being seen sexually (my interpretation of her writing).
Profile Image for John Carter McKnight.
470 reviews87 followers
July 23, 2011
Well-researched, but a general-audience rather than academic book: prone to over-simplifications in its attempts to cover a range of fields in a very short book. Still, a worthwhile read for a quick overview applying a broad range of disciplinary perspectives to a single question.
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