{"id":5677,"date":"2024-05-07T09:01:52","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T09:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=5677"},"modified":"2024-05-07T09:22:58","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T09:22:58","slug":"sarah-thornton-discusses-why-were-so-obsessed-with-breasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=5677","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Thornton Discusses Why We\u2019re So Obsessed With Breasts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After her own mastectomy, sociologist Sarah Thornton sought to answer the question.<\/p>\n

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The day before her double mastectomy surgery six years ago, the author and cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton let her breasts free. She went swimming in an outdoor pool in the San Francisco Bay Area and untied her bikini top, allowing her 34Bs to sway in the water and soak up the sunshine. It was her way of saying goodbye to them, she said in a recent interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was someone who kind of dismissed them as just dumb boobs, irrelevant, not important,\u201d she said. As a self-proclaimed feminist, she used to think that any obsession with breasts was vain and distasteful, driven by a superficial need to please the male gaze. Her own breasts were the focus of two sexual harassment incidents in her teens, and, about a decade ago, they became a source of fear: Breast cancer ran in the family and doctors discovered atypical cells. After much prodding and testing, getting rid of a part of her body that she wasn\u2019t particularly attached to seemed like an easy precaution to take.<\/p>\n

But months after her surgery, which included getting implants that felt like \u201csilicone impostors\u201d \u2014 so foreign and inanimate to her that she felt compelled to give them the names Bert and Ernie \u2014 she became <\/span>\u201cjust a total muddle of emotions around what I lost and what I gained,\u201d she said. \u201cBert and Ernie were really weird for me \u2014 they were larger than I\u2019d ever had before, they were hard, I had no nipple sensation anymore.\u201d (For our video interview, Thornton wore a crew neck T-shirt with a drawing of Bert, Ernie and other Sesame Street residents across her chest). It was then that she realized she hadn\u2019t appreciated her breasts enough. <\/p>\n

Thornton\u2019s exploration into the cultural significance of breasts resulted in her new book<\/a>, \u201cTits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts,\u201d which will be published on May 7. \u201cTits,\u201d she writes, is her preferred word; \u201cbreasts\u201d sounds sterile and is associated with cancer and feeding, while \u201cboobs\u201d suggests unseriousness, like \u201cbooby prize\u201d or \u201cbooby trap.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Thornton wrote the book \u201cin order to help women reappraise their chests in positive ways, and men, too,\u201d she said. \u201cActually, I would really like men to read the book because so many of them think they really know about tits.\u201d<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you feel about \u2018Bert\u2019 and \u2018Ernie\u2019 now, after writing this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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After her own mastectomy, sociologist Sarah Thornton sought to answer the question.The day before her double mastectomy surgery six years ago, the author and cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton let her breasts free. She went swimming in an outdoor pool in the San Francisco Bay Area and untied her bikini top, allowing her 34Bs to sway in the water and soak up the sunshine. It was her way of saying goodbye to them, she said in a recent interview.\u201cI was someone who kind of dismissed them as just dumb boobs, irrelevant, not important,\u201d she said. As a self-proclaimed feminist, she used to think that any obsession with breasts was vain and distasteful, driven by a superficial need to please the male gaze. Her own breasts were the focus of two sexual harassment incidents in her teens, and, about a decade ago, they became a source of fear: Breast cancer ran in the family and doctors discovered atypical cells. After much prodding and testing, getting rid of a part of her body that she wasn\u2019t particularly attached to seemed like an easy precaution to take.But months after her surgery, which included getting implants that felt like \u201csilicone impostors\u201d \u2014 so foreign and inanimate to her that she felt compelled to give them the names Bert and Ernie \u2014 she became \u201cjust a total muddle of emotions around what I lost and what I gained,\u201d she said. \u201cBert and Ernie were really weird for me \u2014 they were larger than I\u2019d ever had before, they were hard, I had no nipple sensation anymore.\u201d (For our video interview, Thornton wore a crew neck T-shirt with a drawing of Bert, Ernie and other Sesame Street residents across her chest). It was then that she realized she hadn\u2019t appreciated her breasts enough. Thornton\u2019s exploration into the cultural significance of breasts resulted in her new book, \u201cTits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts,\u201d which will be published on May 7. \u201cTits,\u201d she writes, is her preferred word; \u201cbreasts\u201d sounds sterile and is associated with cancer and feeding, while \u201cboobs\u201d suggests unseriousness, like \u201cbooby prize\u201d or \u201cbooby trap.\u201dThornton wrote the book \u201cin order to help women reappraise their chests in positive ways, and men, too,\u201d she said. \u201cActually, I would really like men to read the book because so many of them think they really know about tits.\u201dThis interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.How do you feel about \u2018Bert\u2019 and \u2018Ernie\u2019 now, after writing this book?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5679,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5677"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5680,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5677\/revisions\/5680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}