The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs

by Dawn O'Porter

  In general both men and women have intervened, offering me constant solutions to my body issues – not mine, theirs – because it seems that even if I accept my body it doesn’t necessarily mean other people do. Some ask, with genuine concern, if I will be ‘relieved to get a boob job once my modelling career is over’? I am always astonished by this question because to me it brings into question my womanhood, as if by not fixing the problem I am somehow incomplete. I can assure you that I am all woman, in attitude as well as physical attribute. I revel in my femininity so how could I betray that by succumbing to a social stigma of what’s considered right and wrong, socially acceptable, even? I have collected a couple of amusing anecdotes over the years to satisfy the reader’s appetite: How will you breastfeed? Did you have them removed? It’s a humbling thing to put aside someone else’s ignorance in order to stay sane. One journalist, a woman, splashed my tits over a double-paged spread in a tabloid newspaper, seemingly indignant that I had chosen to wear a revealing dress. Her response? Contrived references such as ‘part-time ironing board’, etc. My point is, SHE wasn’t comfortable with my body, therefore I was punished and subjected to public humiliation.

  As a prerequisite to accepting my body/boobs just as they are, it has given me enormous empathy and respect for all other women. Our boobs are precious, gentle and sensitive but also proud, happy and upstanding in a very powerful, responsive way. I’m all for variety in tit/tittage of all different shapes and sizes – heck I have fondled my sisters’ (of blood and friend variety) enough over the years, and they mine in equal appreciation!

  Garnering both positive and negative descriptions of my body over the years has, at times left me feeling very uncomfortable – I have worked hard to be kind to myself and quit judging. After all, my tits have served me well – they work, they satisfy and I am eternally grateful to be healthy. Why shouldn’t I be upfront about them?

  PS I haven’t worn a bra in 15 years!

  Pillow Talk

  CHRIS O’DOWD

  INT. TEENAGE GIRL’S BEDROOM – NIGHT

  A girl, 16, lies in bed.

  A cheeky boy has just climbed out the window.

  Under the covers –

  LISA

  I’m fine, I’m fine, I don’t want to talk about it.

  REGINA

  OK. It’s just … you don’t seem fine. You seem a little tender.

  LISA

  What the hell is so wrong with me?

  REGINA

  Nothing, you’re beautiful, you are –

  LISA

  Bullshit! Bullshit, Regina. Night after night I just lie here, freezin’ my tip off like a lonely shadow, while you cavort over there like the feckin’ Queen of Sheeba.

  REGINA

  You’re being very sensitive …

  LISA

  Of course I’m sensitive, and he knows exactly why, and it’s the same reason he’s being so top-half friendly this week.

  REGINA

  Well, fanny’s house guest has been no picnic either.

  LISA

  Stupid, stupid, stupid boys. They always ignore the introverted one –

  REGINA

  (under her breath)

  – inverted –

  LISA

  What was that?

  REGINA

  Eh … nothing … I was just agreeing with you.

  LISA

  Does he think I’m sick? They’re stretch marks, not leprosy, you knob!

  REGINA

  What you need to remember is … Jimmy is left handed.

  LISA

  Well, ambidextrous Andy did the same nonsense. Titism is all it is, plain and simple.

  REGINA

  You’re not plain and simple, Lisa –

  LISA

  Easy for you to say, old piercy Pip over there, steering palms like a big silver hand magnet …

  REGINA

  Hey! You didn’t have to deal with the infection.

  LISA

  I know, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I’m sorry, I’m just …

  REGINA

  Hey, she should guide them more.

  LISA

  Like it’s not enough she puts us on show at parties, and then during the day –

  Silence.

  REGINA

  No support at all, I know, I do.

  LISA

  Another 15 years of this shit and then she’ll just turn us into big food troughs.

  REGINA

  Hey, at least we’re in it together.

  LISA

  Yeah. I love you R – wait, what’s this … No, no, don’t turn over, sleep on your back ya bit—

  The End.

  My Date with Destiny … in the Form of Boobies

  DERMOT O’LEARY

  I’ve never been much of a boobies man (OK, from here on in, can we call them breasts? Otherwise we could be in a second-year common room looking at Fiesta magazine in the 80s and trust me, this could be a very dark place).

  When my friends were all hunkered down, transfixed by the screen, trying in vain to get dealt a straight flush to beat ‘Sam Fox’s strip poker’ on the ZX Spectrum, circa 1987, I was wondering, firstly, how do you know the rules of poker aged fourteen? (They didn’t.) And secondly, there’s no way the lovely Sam is going to give up a brief glance at her heavily pixelated crown jewels to a group of adolescents who can’t play poker for toffee (she didn’t).

  Don’t get me wrong, I adore – did you hear me? – ADORE the female form, in all its forms! It’s just that when it comes to breasts, it’s much like your taste in chicken; you’re a breast guy or a leg guy. And when you were a fourteen-year-old boy you DID NOT say you were a leg man, we had them too, as well as bums, it just didn’t add up, it was the equivalent of not having red blood cells coursing through your veins.

  So now, twenty-five years later, it gives me great pleasure to say I’ve seen the error of my ways, and I realise that being attentive to one’s breasts is of paramount importance to women (and men) of all ages.

  My wake-up call came at The Pride of Britain Awards a couple of years ago. I was giving an award, and it’s always been the most worthy, thought-provoking ‘put your own stupid problems into context’ kind of night. Think toddlers with super-human strength pulling their grannies out of burning buildings, or OAPs walking on their hands for charity from Lands End to John O’Groats … If you’re not in floods of tears within ten minutes, then you’re made of stone. It quite simply restores your faith in your fellow man.

  I wasn’t on the table I expected to be on, but I was with friends, so I didn’t make a fuss and sat where I was put. One hour in, a blonde, bald bombshell and her twin sister bowled up to my table. Kris and Maren were friendly, but were certainly on a mission.

  ‘And why have you changed your seat? You’re supposed to be sat with us.’

  This was bad. A: I had no real idea what they were talking about, and B: A cancer patient was telling me off … which is not a good look, especially when you don’t know why.

  I obviously folded like my fourteen-year-old friends’ poker hands, and sat them down for a chat, and chat we did, all night. I was vaguely aware of the issues around breast cancer, but Kris and her sister Maren’s knowledge combined with their passion and energy was a much-needed education.

  Two years (and two half-marathons) down the line, I’m proud to be a patron of one of the hardest-working and dynamic charities I’ve ever worked with. The girls at CoppaFeel! and their merry band of game disciples (who incidentally also bake a mean cake) travel the country to universities and festivals spreading awareness and the word of all things booby (curses, I’ve said it again) to both women and men. Hell, they’re so on it, they now even stage their own festival! (‘Festifeel’ … very strong) to spread the good word.

  And much like my experience with them, others have found … they are pretty hard to say no to.

  Turns out I am a boob man after all.

  DAWN O’PORTER

  A few
years ago a friend of mine went for a mammogram and she was so scared of what they might find that she fainted whilst still clamped into the machine. If you have ever had a mammogram you will know how hard they squeeze your boobs, so you will know how likely it is that if you faint, you will have to, um … hang? Awful as this is, it’s also quite funny. I thought maybe poetry was the best way to tackle it.

  The Booby Trap

  It’s an awkward moment in a woman’s life,

  When the fear of going under the knife

  Losing your hair

  Losing your life,

  Means you can barely stand on your shivering limbs

  As you imagine your loved ones singing hymns.

  You flop your breast onto a cold metal plate

  And wait for the machine to decide your fate.

  It squeezes so hard

  It makes you cry

  How will you ever say goodbye?

  Forced into an unnatural slump

  You obsess about them finding a lump.

  As the robot gropes you

  All of those hopes you

  Have of growing old and wise

  Vanish in the vision of your own demise.

  The worries of what this result could mean

  Overflow your brain

  Wipe it clean.

  No air can find its way to your head

  One word is on your lips

  Dead

  Dead

  Dead.

  Stop being so silly, you make yourself think

  But further away your faculties sink.

  As the machine takes pictures

  Snap

  Snap

  Snap

  You’re left hanging

  By the tit

  From the Booby Trap.

  Beauty and the B(r)easts

  HOLLY BAXTER – THE VAGENDA

  Once upon a time, my mother thought her giant breasts were 32As. I was a knock-kneed thirteen-year-old, and I needed a clean bra from the laundry when she told me to just borrow one of hers. ‘We’re the same size, after all,’ she said, jiggling her giant bazookas next to my tiny teenage pimples. Something had clearly gone awry.

  Mum’s sense of dimensions had been drastically altered by years of her older sister – a woman endowed with chesticles so huge that they began to eventually curve her spine, whispering to her, Gollum-like, in the bedroom they shared, that ‘dental floss with knots in it would do as a bra for you’. During her delicate formative years, Mother had been subjected to regular taunts about fried eggs on ironing boards while sitting down for lunch, and offered membership to the ltty Bitty Titty Brigade when she came in for dinner. By middle age, she’d become practically apologetic whenever anybody set eyes on her perfectly shapely frame. She considered her breasts a personal failure. It all came to a head that Tuesday when the laundry was late out of the dryer. Such was the success of her sister’s teasing, it turned out, that my poor mum had been squashing herself into teenage training bras for forty years, well after giving birth to two children and breastfeeding them to boot. Most people knew Auntie Susan as a formidable character, but nobody had quite realised the true extent of her powers until I peered into my mother’s underwear drawer. Amongst the Spanx, stockings, and seamless knickers was a terrifying truth in the form of a neatly folded row of A-cup brassieres. Their strained straps and misshapen holders spoke of decades of knocker oppression.

  Something had to be done, and the solution came to me in a cold sweat a few nights later, as I lay contemplating the effects of squashing pumpkins into salt shakers. The only person with the courage and ability to tackle such a chronic case of funbag dysmorphia was the stern lady in the changing rooms at Marks & Spencer. Armed only with a measuring tape, she would surely set to work in dismantling Mum’s problems with proportion. An objective instrument of measurement would finally afford her the proof of her own body, and any doubts would be quelled by the measurer’s strident sense of purpose. The plan was watertight – tighter, indeed, than a 32A on a glamour model.

  A few weeks later, we put the plan into action and slayed the beast of self delusion. Mum was officially declared a 34DD, to much aplomb, and picked out bras in her actual bra size for the first time in her life. Freed from the shackles of her previously undersized underwear, which had been leaving red welts along her sides for as long as she could remember, she finally saw her body for what it really was. Clothes fitted in ways that they had never fitted before; her revolutionised underwear drawer was a joy to behold. The spell had been broken.

  As for me, well, I learnt from previous generations’ mistakes and got myself a measuring tape once I’d grown a pair. I live in blissful harmony with all of my bras, which live happily ever after, pressed against my chest. And I definitely can’t borrow my mother’s underwear anymore, which is really a great relief for all of us.

  Like all good fairy tales, of course, this one wouldn’t be complete without a didactic conclusion. And so the moral of this story is that everyone can get silly about boobs, but it’s worth not being too silly about your own.

  Boob Envy

  RHIANNON LUCY COSSLETT – THE VAGENDA

  I didn’t really pay much attention to my breasts until I realised that they weren’t growing at the same rate as everyone else’s. While girls in my class began to develop ample bosoms at the tender age of eleven, I remained ‘flat as a pancake’ for most of my teenage years. I came of age in the laddish decade that was the nineties; when humungous fake tits started to dominate the wipe-clean pages of Loaded and almost filled page three of the Sun, which was stuffed quickly and covertly down the backs of school radiators by the boys, in its entirety. Meanwhile, Geri Halliwell, my idol, had a cleavage that I could only dream about, and my friend has hilariously nicknamed hers ‘Pinky and Perky’.

  It was around this time that I began to get the message loud and clear: that the breasts maketh the woman, and that, as such, I was still very much a girl. The boys would ping the girls’ bra straps outside French, and laugh when they sensed no lump of elastic underneath my polyester polo shirt. A strange kind of hierarchy emerged in the corridors between classes; the girls with the bras were, of course, on top. Having a bra became a status symbol - it was, after all, the decade of the Wonderbra - and eventually I demanded one not out of necessity, but as a result of peer pressure.

  I longed for the smushed together, pneumatic ‘boobs’ (they were always boobs, not breasts) of the girls on telly, and would cry into my mother’s much more ample pair on more than one occasion. Magazines didn’t help, either. I was aware from a very young age (too young, I’d argue) that I wasn’t quite up to scratch compared with, say, Melinda Messenger, and that these women embodied a kind of cheeky, plasticky sexuality that wasn’t really me at all. At the same time, the existence of the lads’ mags gave me the uncomfortable feeling that having tits automatically made a certain kind of man feel that he could make you the subject of scrutiny. When a friend of mine complained that a pervy old geezer had leered at her bosom before telling her to ‘put them away, love’, I felt a bit sick. Some of the girls at school had much older boyfriends, as though their breasts had made them women inside as well as out. One of them showed me her lovebite in the toilets, small and lurid and red, right next to her nipple. I didn’t envy her.

  In my mid-teens, I became a goth, for a bit at least, and discovered eyeliner and boys. The realisation that the young lad with his hand up your top is too busy counting his lucky stars to question you about your cup size can be a powerful one. In my experience, you worry more about ‘the girls’ before you’re having sex than you ever do once you’re doing it. Provided that they’re healthy, of course. ‘Just wait till you get pregnant’, my mum would say, whenever I moaned about my chest. I didn’t fancy that much, ta (I still don’t) and plus, I liked the effect the pill had on their size.

  Then, aged eighteen, I moved to Paris, and miraculously stopped caring. Whether it was the string of boyfriends that followed or the fact
that the French in general seem less obsessed with all things boob-related than the English, perhaps because the women there are smaller and more gamine (if they had the comedy boobs of the tabloids they’d be constantly falling flat on their faces – ce n’est pas très cool). Either way, my breasts just became another part of me - nothing to worry about at all, and perfectly sized when it came to encasing them in gossamer-thin scraps of lacy French lingerie. Granted, they’re smaller than the average pair, but as the years have gone by I’ve learned to love them. I doubt somehow that they’ll ever make their way downwards to my waist, but I’d like to see them try.

  VICTORIA WHITE

  My mum has boobs. Nice squashy ones that sort of fall out of her bra when she takes it off. When boys were mean to me as a teenager or ditched me for Kirsty Grantham in the year above me because she let them touch her breasts, my mum would cuddle me into her squashy boobs and let me cry there. Growing up I assumed I’d have boobs like my mum – as my dad doesn’t have them it’s hard to imagine what his side of the gene pool has by way of boobs! But as eleven, twelve, thirteen passed and I still had no reason to go to that bit in Marks & Spencer where they sell early-years bras, it became clear that Dad boobs I had – literally. I am now forty and I still have no boobs. And strangely, as I have every other body hang-up known to woman, I am fine with this. I like that I can wear really low-cut tops and not look slutty. I like that even on a ‘fat’ day I know I can wear black trousers and from the waist up look sort of skinny. I like that I can buy those meshy Calvin Klein sports bras that offer no support whatsoever and are really just two triangles of fabric held together by string. Best of all, I know, for certain, that my breasts will never hang over my belt like the dinner ladies’ at school used to. But I sort of feel sad that my sons will never be squished to my breasts in a maternal way. When they get dumped my only way of consoling them will be with reassuring words, like, ‘Don’t worry, wanna go Nandos?’