Dear Reader
Ordinarily I would share commentary on this month’s section of Breastless, but summer travel beckons and I’m switching things up. Instead, I am going to share my “airplane listen” with you. (I plan on some happy escapism too, so who can recommend an uplifting paperback novel for me?)
I have not cracked the cover on Tits Up yet, so all I have to go on are some great Instagram posts from the author Sarah Thornton, some excellent press articles, including these; The Guardian, The Economist. But what I can share with you here is the intriguing book blurb:
An innovative investigation of the five strange worlds that worship women’s chests.
After years of biopsies, best-selling author Sarah Thornton made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy. But, after her reconstructive surgery, she was perplexed: What had she lost? And gained? An experienced sleuth, she resolved to venture behind the scenes to uncover the social and cultural significance of breasts.
Riotous and galvanizing, Tits Up excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation’s oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers. Thornton draws insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and “free the nipple” activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women’s chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender, and desire. Everywhere she turns, Thornton encounters chauvinist myths about this elemental body part that quietly justify deficits in women’s bodily autonomy and endorse shortfalls in their political status. Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition—to liberate breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice.
A woman after my own heart. This sounds like a vital addition to the much-needed expose’ on the what, how and why of society’s view of breasts. A battle I am glad not to be fighting alone.
Have any of you read it? Or perhaps seen Sarah Thornton on her book tour? I am excited to hear her thoughts on this and I feel sure I shall be quoting her in commentaries to come.
I wish all of you in the northern hemisphere some sunny rest and recharge whatever your summer plans. We will still gather on Zoom for Let’s Write Together! at the end of the month, but I predict that my posts will be a little less frequent. We’ll see how the mood takes me!
Thanks for being here with me - 500 of us now :-)
Be Well,
EmmaJ