I think your breasts are big enough
Women’s existence in reference to men: A Facets article
Okay all you Nice Guys, this one is for you. I need you to sit down, stop talking about how you’re a Nice Guy for a minute, and just…listen. I know you’re just trying to help, to be one of The Nice Guys, and believe me if I didn’t believe that was true, I would not be taking this time to explain this to you. But there is something I really want you to understand, and it’s important.
Unhinged Terra talks about her tits
First, a bit of background for those who doesn’t know me, I’m Terra Kestrel, anthropologist, writer, and unhinged Uruk Hai. Also, I frequently talk about my tits.
I am on a waiting list for breast augmentation, and joke about my breast size a lot. The reasons I am having breast augmentation are varied and range anywhere from “I don’t think my boobs are big enough” to “I have scientific measurements and have, through careful comparisons with peer reviewed research, confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that my boobs are, in fact, not big enough.” But regardless of the reasons, I talk about them often because…well, they are not big enough.
Unfortunately, very often when I joke about my boobs being too small, a man drops into my mentions to say something like1 “I think your breasts are big enough” or “My 2 cents though: breast size in general is overrated” or “Your breasts are the right size to me” or some other nice, helpful statement.
I want to explain to all you Nice Guys why those statements are not helpful.
It’s all about you, man
Whenever we talk about women’s appearance, we can immediately drop into a discussion straight out of feminism’s first- and second-waves, specifically the points aligning with the arguments that women shouldn’t care what they look like. We can also (more pointedly for me) talk about the reality of Trans people’s existence in a world where we are constantly in danger of actual physical violence if we don’t conform to the arbitrary gender standards of whoever happens to be holding a knife at that particular moment.
But for this discussion, I want to talk specifically about how women are perceived, and specifically how we are perceived relative to men. This topic is middle school level-obvious to many women. It is also obvious to any man who has read anything from…
*gestures vaguely at 400+ years of feminist writing2
…but for those men who haven’t read anything from…
*gestures vaguely at 400+ years of feminist writing
the short story is this: Women only exist in relation to men.
This is, of course, patently absurd. Nonetheless it is the opinion of…well…the entire structure of our society as is rather well documented in…
*gestures vaguely at 400+ years of feminist writing
From Aristotle’s assurances of woman’s “natural defectiveness” because we have “a certain lack of qualities” (that men have), to The Bechdel Test, showing how often women are portrayed in relation to men, we are constantly reminded how we exist relative to men.
In the introduction to her book Le deuxieme sexe,3 Simone de Beauvoir states “If I want to define myself, I first have to say , ‘I am a woman’; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious.” Much of her introduction, incidentally, is spent discussing the alterity of “woman” as a condition of other to the natural state of maleness. Notably she recalls the statement of Monsiur Benda in Le rapport d’Uriel: “A man’s body has meaning by itself, disregarding the body of a woman, whereas the woman’s body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the male. Man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man.”
The most notable aspect of the writing regarding the deficiencies of women is that it is written by men, which led the seventeenth-century feminist Poulain de la Barre to write “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party.” All of Womanhood, it seems, is defined by men as alterity to manhood. Women are “determined and differentiated in relation to men,” de Beauvoir writes, “while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”
Women know intuitively that society views us this way. Thousands of interactions across our lifetimes inform us of this. Sometimes, we even internalize this view and become the other. The lucky of us are able to define ourselves in spite of this, but none of us avoid it. There is ample and documented evidence from the earliest written records that the expectation of society is that a woman’s body is “devoid of meaning without reference to the male.”
For this discussion, I will condense that history into the phrase “The Male Gaze.”
Women and body augmentation
The history of women’s otherness intersects our discussion at The Male Gaze–which, because of the, frankly, fucked up view society has of women’s bodies, tends to cause a lot of women to internalize a need for a specific kind of physical attractiveness that is based on the sometimes real, often only perceived, desires of men. Thus, we end up with a 120 lbs Vanity Fair model being figuratively cut to pieces by plastic surgeons.
Yes, the internalization of The Male Gaze by women is a very real problem. Yes, plastic surgery rates have absolutely increased in the last several decades (Yes I, at 50+ years old, am scheduling breast augmentation, thus adding to that decadal increase). Unfortunately, when men tell an individual woman she doesn’t need plastic surgery, they often have a problem differentiating the coincident from the causal.
It is far too easy to believe that the rise in plastic surgery is due entirely to the Male Gaze, that all women who have plastic surgery do so specifically because they believe their bodies are devoid of meaning without reference to the male. Likewise, it is far too easy for men to think of themselves as feminists, and for their perceived feminism to make them feel the need to tell a woman, in essence, what she should feel about her body–without ever considering that by doing so he is defining her desires in relation to himself.
The reality is the reasons a woman might elect for body augmentation are extremely complex. They vary from a desire to conform to The Male Gaze to a desire by a male-repulsed lesbian (e.g. me) to look attractive to women who exist entirely outside of the The Male Gaze (e.g. other lesbians). The reasons run the gamut from wanting to look more womanly in general (me) to desperately wanting to look just womanly enough to not get stabbed in an alley by a bigoted man with the emotional control of a toddler (also me).
But here’s the thing, unless a woman is discussing her self image specifically in relation to you as an individual, then you can rest assured that, whatever the ultimate reason for the woman’s desire, it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
Stop making it about you, man
I do not exist in this reality as something that is in reference to you.
I understand that, as a man, you may believe that I do, that you may have an internalized habit to interact with me as if I do, that society has–since well before the dawn of the written word–assured men that we do. But I assure you that is not, in any way, the truth.
“I think your breasts are big enough” and other such statements are annoying and patriarchal because they exist embedded in the assumption that your opinion is relevant to my image of self. In other words, the assumption is that I exist in reference to you.
But I promise you, I do not. Your opinion has no importance to my desires and does not inform my reality in any substantive way. And the issue is not just that your opinion does not matter but that you–because of what society has convinced you–actually believe that injecting your opinion into a discussion about my desires of self is an appropriate thing to do.
This is an issue of power. When a woman expresses her desires about self, there is only one reason for a man to step in and discuss what he believes about her and her desires: To ensure she is placed in reference to him.4
I’m here to help
Okay, I know what your question is:
“Then what am I supposed to say?”
It’s a good question, and an important one. It is also an easy one.
Anytime a woman is talking about herself and you have an opinion about her self, the one thing that is always appropriate to say is…
Absolutely fucking nothing.
Because it is not about you.
Yes, these are quotes. No, I will not link to them.
To justify the 400 years, I note the essay Before Beauvoir, Before Butler: “Genre” and “Gender” in France and the Anglo-American World, by Karen Offen, in which she discusses early French treatment of gender such as the celebrated seventeenth-century French novelist Madeleine de Scudéry and her contemporary counterparts arguing that women had been “deformed” by culture. I think it’s pretty clear that women have known this since (*looks at pre-history back 10,000 years), especially given the work of scholars like Marija Gimbutas. However, Reply Guy being how he is, I have documentation of 400 years, so that’s what I reference in my statement.
My notes come from the 2009 English translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
This, by the way, is a powerful tool of systemic oppression. It’s patriarchy that can actually be perpetuated by The Nice Guys. Because not only does it enforce woman’s existence as something in relation to a man, it convinces the man that he’s doing it for the good of the woman. It’s not only patriarchal, it’s paternalistic.
Facets is a series on Stained Glass Women which invites trans writers other than Doc Impossible to contribute material as they see fit, with as minimal editorial interaction as possible. For transparency, I am cataloguing all changes I have made or requested to the originally-submitted text:
Links to several sources which illustrate the writer’s points have been added.
The proposed header image was changed.
One word was changed, to eliminate a comma splice.
This is also why "Smile!" is so offensive.