Girl on the Net

My tits are sort-of-round-ish, perhaps not as firm as they were when I was nineteen, and they have nipples that sit a little bit lower on the breast than I believe is currently fashionable. They’re probably a bit bigger than they were when I was young, which I think makes them a bit more fashionable, and because I am a white girl who barely gets out in the sun, I never have tit tan-lines. Which is great because as far as I understand it, tan lines are less acceptable than no tan lines, in this year of our Lord 2016.

Does that paragraph sound a bit weird to you? Like I am rambling drunkenly on a subject which should by no rights even exist? Of course. Yet all you need to do is look at some old-school porn to realise that there are distinct fashions in what we expect people’s bodies to look like.

I’m not talking here about hair – beards, bushes and fantastic 80s perms all seem to pop in and out of porn fashion depending on the country and the year. Things like body hair can be changed, so although naturally it’s shit that anyone’s expected to either grow or shave their hair, to a certain extent fashions are inevitable. I’m about as fashion-conscious as a dead rat in Marks and Spencer, but I do understand that for many people fashion is fun. You can play around with your clothes, hair, make up etc: making yourself look scary-executive-badass one minute and rainbow-coloured-punk-prince the next. Ace. Likewise when you’re picking your sexy look, you can have all-over body hair one minute, and the next decide you want to wax half of it off leaving just a hairy heart shape in the middle.

But there are also fashions for what breasts should look like. And that is WEIRD, people. Really fucking weird.

Fashions in tits throughout the ages

Recently I have been watching crap 70s raunch/comedy films on London Live. LondonLive, for those who don’t know, is a TV channel for people inside the M25 that shows a combination of very old repeats and programmes about how much better London Things are than Things Which Happen To Be Outside Of London. Recently, late in the evening, they’ve been showing films like ‘Confessions of a Private Investigator’ and ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ and ‘Confessions of a Horny Door-to-Door Salesman and All The Loose-Nightgowned Women He Happens To Meet’ – you know the ones.

I remember these films from when I was young: when Channel 5 launched you’d often see surprise TV filth like this (and occasionally even raunchier softcore porn) late at night, so if your parents had gone to bed and Eurotrash wasn’t on, it would just about do for a wank.

Naturally, I am nostalgic for the things that got me off in my youth, so I watched it. And while I could rant on here about a whole bunch of things (casual homophobia! Racism! The weird scripting that means women often don’t even get to reply to questions asked of them by male characters!) the one thing I’d not noticed when I was young was the tits. Specifically the fact that they tend to be very different to the boobs you see in films today.

I have made a comparison table, because that’s the sort of thing I like to do.

It’s not true of every single pair of breasts that jiggles across the screen when the hero happens to run into the boss’s wife or what have you, but there’s enough of a difference that it struck me as odd. If I’m honest, it made me want to bury my head in my hands and weep with the sheer impossibility of it. That there are women who may be insecure about the size or shape of their boobs, who in the seventies would have been considered the height of hotness. And vice versa.

But then I thought about it some more and decided that it’s less depressing than that.

Ideal body bullshit

There are often memes circulating which point out how women like Marilyn Monroe were usually bigger than the women who are held up as super-sexy today. This kind of thing. The aim, I think, is to make people feel a bit better if their body doesn’t fit the ‘ideal’ as measured by the arbitrary standards of the day. But pushing back against an ideal by simply replacing it with another is like going vegan but taking up modelling fur.

I know much of this is going to seem tediously obvious to most of you, as it seems tediously obvious to me when I write it down. But I think no matter how right-on we are, we do still carry these ideals with us. In what we point out as sexy, in what we file away in our subconscious as the ‘right’ way to look. There are plenty of examples of ‘ideal body’ fashions changing throughout the ages – 70s men, for example, are all slimmer and less muscular than the ‘standard hot guys’ who star in films I watch now. Girl’s bums tended to be flatter back then. In the 80s big hair was more important than a thigh gap. You know the drill.

We often fight back against the idea of bodily ‘ideals’ by saying ‘I don’t want to be thinner/curvier/waxed so fuck you.’ Rightly so. But these are all things I can change, and so by entering the debate to a certain extent I am justifying the fact that I have made a particular choice. I’m accepting that there’s a choice here to make. The sheer oddness of bodily ‘fashion’ is most apparent when it appears in things you simply cannot change.

If someone tells you you need to be thinner/waxed or what have you, it’s very easy to tell them they’re wrong. But when you look at things like the changing fashions of tits, you realise that ‘wrong’ doesn’t even cut it. People who talk about getting the ‘perfect’ body are so misguided they are not even wrong. It’s not only impossible to achieve, it also only exists within an ever-changing framework. You want to get the ‘ideal body’? Define your terms: ideal for whom? In which country? In which decade? For people who identify as what gender? ‘Ideal’ isn’t even in the eye of the beholder – it’s at the whim of fashion and culture and fucking everything.

As I say, you probably know this. I know this. But sometimes there’s a difference between knowing and genuinely understanding. I could waffle on about this in words, as I have in the past and probably will in the future, but never will I come as close to genuinely understanding it as I do when I look at some 1970s tits. Who says porn can’t be educational?