Womanshapes

Once a year, I let a stranger take pictures of them. Supine, thin paper crinkling under my back, nipples erect in the clinical air, I watch my insides ebb and yawn across a screen. That’s me, I think, but it looks alien and grey, an illegible sea of ripples and blobs. Less like a breast and more like a void in deep space floating billions of light years away.  

** 

All other mammals on Earth develop temporary breasts for the singular purpose of nursing their young: bodies waxing, filling with milk, waning again when the babies are weaned. But us? We diverged at some point in evolution. Fat replaced milk, became a permanent shape. Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Ape, Woman and Evolutionⁱ, writes that natural selection is responsible for this. Which is to say, our chests evolved to please the opposite sex—those ancestral boob-men, forefathers of us all: “If ancestral males had not shown a preference for the mutation producing symmetrical, plump bosoms, modern women’s chests would resemble the flat thoraxes of the other apes.”ⁱⁱ Like Pygmalion’s Galatea, our bodies literally shaped by male desire. 

** 

At twelve years old, I yearned for them. I hated my runty poster-board chest, the stunted shape of my body’s silhouette. I looked incomplete. My proportions all wrong, like a fledgling bird with gawky feet, stubby feathers, flightless wings.   

** 

In 2021, at a Florida high school, eighty girls open their yearbooks and discover that their photos have been altered without their consent—clumsily, their cleavage photoshopped out, shirt-cloth cut-and-pasted over their chests.ⁱⁱⁱ  

** 

By fifteen, I was a 34C. I hid them under oversized button-down shirts and thrift-store vests and men’s cardigans. Shoulders hunched, my spine a question mark. Finally, I had the body I’d craved, and I couldn’t figure out how to carry myself. I blushed when teachers called on me, the gaze of classmates burning my skin. I furled myself, vanishing in plain sight, like a new moon crouched in the shadow of the earth.  

** 

My first boyfriend liked to squeeze them hard, as if he couldn’t believe they were real. In his hands, my flesh felt inanimate as clay—soft, yielding to the force of his desire, lacking an animal will of its own. “Um,” I murmured into his chest as he humped my cleavage red and raw, his body imprinting itself into mine, crushing my ribs. “I can’t really breathe.”  

** 

At five, I gathered autumn leaves and laid them flat beneath a sheet of white paper. I rubbed them with a crayon to reveal their shapes—those intricate lines like the creases on my palm, like the thin blue veins underneath my own skin. 

** 

Nineteen, alone in the sanctum of my room, with tubes of acrylics littering the floor, I knelt on all fours as if in prayer, pressing paint-smeared breasts on a canvas sheet. Stepping back, I marveled at the signature they’d made: aqueous, primordial blobs, like the single-celled creatures from which all life evolved. The whorls of my nipples like nuclei, those ancient gods of DNA, the begetters of every leaf and shell and fungal spore, every feather and tooth.  

** 

I was drying dishes with a damp tea towel when my hand accidentally brushed against my nipple, and my body rang like a strummed major chord, a polyphonic shock-wave spreading to my toes. A revelation: they could sing! I started writing my own songs. I gave a boy lessons, my hands guiding his, his agile fingers learning it all—legato, staccato, pizzicato, double stops—and it felt so good I forgot to be shy, and I swelled, became huge, orchestral, unhinged, unafraid of being heard through the walls.  

** 

I was twenty-three when I found the first lump: rubbery and soft as a cooked lima bean. For my biopsy, I donned a crepe paper shirt, breath held as the needle seared into my breast. A pain so dazzling I shuddered and cracked, a tender mollusk impaled in its shell. A swollen gland, the doctor later told me with a shrug.  

** 

At forty, I am riddled with lumps. Some are smooth and round as peas, others fibrous and ropy like underground roots. The nurse practitioner gives me a tour, like a realtor leading me through my own house. “Feel that?” Her fingers guiding mine, drawing an invisible map on my breast. “Memorize it,” she says. “Know yourself inside out.” 

I try. At home, lying shirtless on the bed, I wander the overgrown rooms of myself—blankets of moss camouflaging doorways, chairs tangled in vines, grass poking out of electrical sockets. How do I even take care of such a place? I imagine a seed, its pale sprout unfurling under the cover of mulch, inching up walls, rooting under floorboards, a killer disguised as a harmless weed. 

** 

One in eight U.S. women will get breast cancer in their lifetime—a projected 310,720 new cases in 2024 alone.^iv More than 100,000 women will undergo a mastectomy. Roughly 25% of double mastectomy patients and 50% of single mastectomy patients opt out of reconstruction and choose to “go flat.”  

In 2016, Kim Bowles, a mother of two, meets with the surgeon who will amputate her breasts. She brings photos of the chest she would like to have—flat, tidy, smooth as a child’s. She tells him what she does not want: implants, or flaps of excess skin that might later be used to construct new breasts. The surgeon gamely agrees to her terms, but when she is in the operating room, the sedative trickling into her veins, she hears him tell her, “I’ll just leave a little extra skin, in case you change your mind.” She says no and blacks out.   

Hours later, waking up in a haze of dread, peeking under the thick white gauze on her chest, she sees what he has left her with: two sagging pockets of empty skin, like worn pillowcases waiting to be stuffed.^v   

** 

Mammalia, meaning “of the breast.” In 1758, Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus defined a mammal as “an animal that suckles its young.” He might have named us after any number of traits—all mammals, from humans to sloths to sea cows, have hair, three ear bones, and a four-chambered heart—but he chose to highlight the maternal breast, as if breast defines the very nature of us. Historian Londa Schiebinger^vi asserts that his choice of term was a political act, at a time when middle- and upper-class mothers faced mounting pressure to nurse their own young. The breast: an icon of feminine purpose, “nature’s sign” that home was where the female belonged. She who forsook her domestic duties—whether by hiring a wet nurse or attending speeches in the senate—was morally corrupt, vain, selfish. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who disposed of his five children in a Paris orphanage, preached that “she to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself accountable for them.”^vii  

** 

My breasts are selfish, craving only pleasure for themselves. Nipples inverted like sunken mouths, subverting the role assigned to them. One doctor says I should pinch them, force them to protrude. “So you can feed your baby.” I do not want a baby, but he waves that away. “Well, you might change your mind.”  

** 

A protective center (the bosom of her friends) 

Enclosed, embraced (a lake bosomed by trees) 

On the rocky shore, we shed our clothes, three women unveiled in the verdant summer heat. Self-conscious at first, but here we are, like the weather-flayed trees, bearing history on our skin. My rippled stretchmarks, Jen’s breast reduction scars, the small dent in Ellie’s breast where her tumor was removed. In the cool freshwater, it all melts away. We splash, laugh-scream, turn fluid summersaults, untethered to the weight of mammalian flesh. Diving down, we skim the silty bottom of the lake, our liquid shadows evolving new shapes: arms become wings, legs become tails, breasts undulating like soft jellyfish. Alive, alive, we rise towards the light—shattering the surface, renaming ourselves.  

**