by Mara Altman
The horror!
“It’s not that easy,” Dr. Armpit said, trying to assuage me, “but again, it can definitely happen.”
This nightmarish prospect luckily has an upside. If bad BO can be transferred, then hypothetically, good BO can be as well. For people who reek so badly they are afraid to leave their homes (of which Dr. Armpit assured me there are plenty), he has begun experimenting with bacterial transplantation. It’s like a heart transplant, only better because no one has to die and there’s no blood. The donor refrains from washing her armpits for four days to ensure a plethora of fauna to harvest, while the recipient washes daily with an antibiotic. “Then we do the transplant,” Dr. Armpit explained.
I got the visual, and quite enjoyed it, of Dr. Armpit standing in an operating room. He is dressed in a long white lab coat, face mask, and gloves. A lone armpit is below him on a gurney, and instead of being armed with a scalpel, he has one tiny cotton swab he applies meticulously, like a mom putting peroxide on her daughter’s scraped-up elbow.
So far, Dr. Armpit has performed transplants on nineteen people who have all had varying levels of results. “We’ve noticed improvements,” he told me, explaining that a few of his patients, to this day, continue to smell fresh. “But there is still a lot to learn.”
While he continues to work on eradicating body odor—an effort that will surely win him the Nobel Peace Prize one day—he hopes that people refrain from becoming overly judgmental about their or anyone else’s armpits. “If you have body odor, don’t get too upset about it,” he said. “Remember, it’s not your fault, it’s the fault of your bacteria.”
6
My Cup Runneth Under
On one recent humid September day, I was in my apartment bathroom, plucking my nipple hairs. During typical nipple-hair conversations, I tell friends that I have so many, like four strands. I have more like twenty-three really, but I round down. So I was standing there with my tweezers for about two minutes, but actually more like ten. I was there, sprucing up my breasts, because I was getting ready for my first urban topless bike ride. Hundreds of New York City women were gathering within the hour to exercise chest equality. In their minds, breasts are not sex objects that exist just for men to ogle. They account for our fifth and sixth extremities, which have been unjustly held captive inside rayon-blended bra cups for too damn long. They deserve, just like male nipples, to feel the direct caress of our city’s balmy car-exhaust-laden air.
The theory goes that once enough people are regularly exposed to the female breast, it will lose its titillation. It will become desensitized. Normalized. On a scorching day, toplessness will be the new tank top. Breastfeeding will be a child snacking on some PB&J. Boobs, for better or worse, will effuse the intense eroticism of the elbow. Okay, they’ll still probably be pretty hot, but they won’t cause onlookers to get into a tizzy.
Breasts, as they stand (or sag or bounce), are still rather taboo out in public, so participating in something like this felt highly intimidating. I’d spent the two weeks prior tottering between “Hell, no” and “Probably not.” First of all, I’m more or less flat-chested, and I suspected anyone who consciously chose to be topless in public would have a righteously large and perky rack. I’d feel like I’d showed up to a black-tie event in an awkward-fitting freebie convention shirt. Second, when I’d thought about participating, the possible pitfalls had seemed huge. What if I changed careers? Say someday I want to be a politician. I’m running on a ticket of universal health care and weekly pizza parties for all, but then, during opposition research, a picture of my bare tits bobbling above a bicycle is revealed. I am no longer fit to serve. Keeping fabric less than a millimeter thick between your body and the world somehow preserves your integrity and makes you honorable, respectable, and capable of deep thoughts. Taking that little swatch of material away makes you a hussy.
Instead of ascending to one of the highest offices in the nation, I end up grinding snow cones at roaming county fairs and have a fleeting moment of fame in a sideshow.
But maybe I was just being dramatic. We are now an open-minded and progressive society, right? No one would really care about bare breasts, especially in New York City. It’s here that I’ve witnessed a man drop his pants on a subway platform and take a dump into an empty Starbucks cup and not one bystander even flinched.
So I asked Maggie, my very liberal and body-positive friend, if she’d join me on the ride.
“No,” she said. “People will think I’m a sex perv.”
She doesn’t mind being a sex perv, but she understands that there are implications if others think she is a sex perv. Her perceived perviness could affect her business prospects as an upstanding acupuncturist. Clearly, you can’t properly heal someone once they’ve witnessed your areolas.
After much deliberation—most of it done while picking three-month-old polish off my toenails—I decided to go ahead, throw caution to the underwire, and do the damn bike ride despite my reservations. I still wasn’t sure about my own aims in participating. For one, I wasn’t sure I wanted breasts to be normalized. What level would advertisers have to stoop to in order to sell beer and sports drinks? There’d be a whole cadre of horny teenagers wondering where to go after first base. Plastic surgeons would have to come up with a new profitable body part to inflate, and worst of all, I’d be left responsible to pluck my nips at much more regular intervals.
Still, I found myself too curious to pass up the opportunity.
As I stood in front of the mirror, giving myself a last once-over—jean shorts, knee-length socks, tennis shoes, bright pink fanny pack, and breasts with less volume than a minibar bottle of tequila—I wondered if the gathering was going to feel like the who-wore-it-best section in a women’s magazine. All of us showing up to an event wearing the same (no)thing. Please vote: Did Mara Altman or Selena Gomez wear breasts best?
We want to be sisters on a mission, but are conditioned to judge—not only ourselves, but those by our sides.
Or would there be a sense of camaraderie, as if we’d all shown up in the same uniform like foot soldiers fighting for a shared cause?
After that revolutionary and empowering thought, I put on a shirt. Also, I put on a bra underneath that shirt. As absurd as it seems, I was concerned about exposing inappropriate nipple contours while on my way to a topless bike ride.
After a twenty-minute walk, I arrived at the meeting place, a bike tour company located just north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn called Loudest Yeller. The business was in the brightly lit basement of a large brick apartment building. Only a smattering of girls had arrived, all with their tops still on and each suspiciously under forty. Did all the fortysomethings have more important things to attend to, or did wanting to expose oneself for equality expire after being hit with more than four decades of gravity?
About eighty people must have become lost on the way over, because the festivities were about to start and yet there were only ten of us. I was quickly informed that only ten had signed up. I’d planned on my own boobs being masked by masses of other boobs—one little fish getting lost among an enormous school—but we’d be more like the morning’s catch displayed at a fish market. “Let’s get ready, everyone,” said Adam, a curly blond dude who owned the shop and who had volunteered to lead us around the city. “Pick out your helmets.” He pointed to a wall where black and blue headgear hung from floor to ceiling.
The women began tugging off their shirts. You can never tell from the look of someone what their method of clothing removal will be—will they cross their arms, reach for the bottom hem, and lift it over their heads, or go for the much more precious style of taking one arm out of a sleeve at a time until they have a ring of shirt around their necks and then carefully hoist it away from their heads? I hail from the crossed-arm method and got ready to rip off my shirt, but before it rose above my sternum, it was as if I got caught in a glue trap. A pause button was pressed—my arms froze. I couldn’t reveal myself.
This salesclerk, I was sure, was going to laugh at me. She’d stare at me, maybe pull my shirt collar out and look down: “I’d give you a training bra, but it doesn’t look like you have anything to train!” She’d slap her knee and howl.
While my mom searched for this demon clerk, I ran off and hid in the middle of a circular clothes rack. Minutes later, the pink silk pajamas hanging in front of my face parted and there was the salesclerk pushing eight different tiny bras into my hands. For some reason, she found my desert plane absolutely acceptable. In other words, the training bra is not a device used to train breasts—to help lift them or support them—it is used to train us in covering ourselves up.
Meanwhile, Adam had already begun to fit the women to appropriate-size bikes. I had to get it together and be liberated already, so I turned around to face the wall. I crossed my arms—defying a lifetime of conditioning—and slipped off my shirt, a move that I have traditionally done only in a dark room after at least a second dinner date and two glasses of wine.
Then I turned back around and no one seemed to be looking at my boobs, but I felt like I was looking at everyone else’s boobs. They must have been looking at mine, too, because, come on, they were boobs. Who doesn’t look at boobs? Since it did not look like they were looking at mine, though, I hoped it didn’t look like I was looking at theirs, either.
I had expected the most perfect boobs to show up. I would be the lone petite asymmetrical outcast, but it turned out that these ladies were all sizes and shapes—a nice full pair to my left, a droopy but perfectly lovely set to my right. There were areolas the circumference of baseballs and others a quarter would completely eclipse. There were ones like torpedoes and others like bags filled with sand. One set was located so high up that this girl, if there was a particularly bad pothole, would likely get choked out by her own cleavage. Bras, with their dome-like shells, make every pair appear so uniform. Bras are like wrapping paper, hiding a wholly surprising gift inside.
At this point, I had already been topless for about three minutes, and yet it was incredible: It still appeared as though everyone was still looking at me directly in the eyes.
Instead of being concerned about exposing themselves, the women had the probably much more legitimate concern about staying upright on the bikes while zooming through one of the most congested cities in the country.
“I don’t even know how to ride,” one of the women said.
Adam waved me over and placed a blue helmet down on my head. “Fit?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He pushed a yellow-frame bike toward me and then told me to bring it outside to give it a test ride.
The glittering sidewalks and concrete buildings effused the dense wet heat of a sauna. Modesty, I quickly came to realize, wasn’t the only reason people wear shirts. One is for sun protection and the other is to absorb your (or, in this case, my own) profuse sweat.
Even though I was in a more natural state than I normally am, I felt like I had to try harder than normal to act natural. If I put my hands to my sides, I felt like I was trying too hard to appear like nothing was out of the ordinary. If I crossed my hands over my chest, I felt like I was trying to hide. Hands on the hips just seemed too predictable. I settled the conundrum by getting on my bike already.
By that time, all ten of us were now on our bikes, looping up and down the empty sidewalk, giving the brakes a test run. And we all still had boobs. I made sure to double-check.
Conundrum: Even though I have my own pair that I can stare at anytime I want, I still kept looking at everyone else’s breasts.
Conclusions:
We have a long way to go before desensitization.
Boobs are inherently distracting.
I’m developmentally stunted.
I counted a pair or two or three that I wouldn’t mind having as my own, but that’s not creepy, right? It’s just like admiring someone’s long legs or toned biceps.
In fact, in that moment, being surrounded by breasts was doing less to normalize them than to make me think about them constantly. Maybe the desensitization process is like the flu—it gets worse before it gets better?
It was early yet, but so far, the only real benefit of going topless that I could gather was that getting dressed becomes 80 percent easier. Breasts don’t clash with anything. When I surveyed the group, I saw jeans, red culottes, gray pedal pushers, and even black sailor shorts. Everything worked with nipples! I think we, as a society, would save so much time each day if we only had to pick out pants.
Adam, who in solidarity was also bare-chested, waved us over. We all began pedaling toward him. In honor of the topless ride, he told us that we’d be visiting various feminist locations throughout the city. “Let’s do this,” he said, dipping his wheel into the bike lane.
So far, we’d only been on a quiet street, so we hadn’t encountered any pedestrians, but that wouldn’t last for long.
We began rolling down the asphalt single-file. Cars whipped past, and as we rode under a long line of trees, the heat of the sun flashed on and off my skin. The breeze flowed over my body, cooling me where little beads of sweat had sprung. I hummed as I felt my lips stretch wide.
But the peace was short-lived.
Less than ten minutes in, a man rode his bike alongside me. I thought he was going to say, “Nice tits,” or something, you know, offhand like “Wow, how is it that your breasts are so hairless?” and I was getting ready to say, “I appreciate the compliment—I plucked this morning actually, but this is about equality and I am not a sex object.” But instead he snarled and said, “Put a shirt on!” Before I could react, he took off and continued giving his message to each girl in front of me.
I remember when I first realized, like really realized and processed, that women had breasts. I was eight years old. (Maybe it took me so long to register because my mom had tiny knockers.) I was with Nancy, a middle-aged woman who took care of me after school. We were filling up at a gas station. It was when she went to pay the attendant that I noticed it—she had breasts like bowling balls and walked like she was lugging around two suitcases on her chest. It was odd—these bouncing balls of flesh. These things that presumably one day I would have. I wondered how women ran. How they wore seat belts and jumped rope. Did these things tug and hurt or, worse yet, become tangled? Ultimately, I wondered how women lived life with these masses—didn’t they get in the way?
As I watched the man pedal off ahead of us, it became clear that I was onto something as a child, but I’d had it slightly off. Breasts don’t get in the way in the logistical or tangible sense that I’d expected, but sometimes in a much more insidious way.
At about twenty minutes in, we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. I was near the front of the pack, and as we neared the base of the bridge, there were three people with camera lenses that looked like an extra limb sprouting from their foreheads. I’d seen the same kind used by photographers on the National Geographic channel when attempting to capture polar bears frolicking on snowy outcroppings. They’d been tipped off. These three people had press credentials around their necks and were aiming straight at us.
&nb
sp; When toplessness is newsworthy, it’s safe to say it’s a long way from normalization.
There went the presidency.
We rode for two hours before lunch. We rode through Battery Park and stopped in view of the Statue of Liberty, where one of the girls—one of the ones who had breasts that I wouldn’t mind having (it was something about the perkiness, the lightheartedness of the pair, like they were tulips reaching for the light in the sky)—read Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.”
HER: A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
ME: I wonder how far off my breasts are from looking like her breasts.
HER: From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
ME: If I had breasts like that, I wonder if life would be easier.
HER: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she with silent lips.
ME: If I had breasts like that, I think I’d want to be in the newspaper.
After the recitation, we made a quick stop at the New York Stock Exchange, which was filled with men in suits, but what really stood out were the many tourists aiming their cameras at us. Our meaningful movement, to them, was merely a stunt to document on their Instagram feed.
We then stopped at a building near City Hall Park where Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had started a women’s rights newspaper called The Revolution. I wondered whether, if Susan were alive today, she’d be down for Free the Nipple or think it frivolous while women’s genitals are routinely mutilated in countries like Guinea.