Anatomy
You know when you stare into the mirror or at another person and a piece of anatomy suddenly looks completely foreign and out of place? For me, noses and knees do this. If I stare at them for too long, they start to jut out like bubbles forming on a pizza crust. Conversely, there are body parts that are universally beautiful. In this category, I vote boobs. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, unlike awkward noses and knees, the culture I came from adopted the custom of keeping breasts hidden. Darn.
As we slipped away from our American home and life, we also slipped away from the American custom of shaming boobs into privacy. Our introduction to the practice of public toplessness took place on the glorious beaches of northern Spain. Topless children frolicked in the waves while their confident abuelas kept watch, their leathery breasts stationed low on their wrinkly bellies. Young women gathered on the sand as siesta hour commenced. They removed their tops and sunk their toes in. Then they formed a circle, as women do. All breast sizes and shapes were welcome. They talked about life, shared magazines, and dozed in and out of rest. They laughed. One cried. Then they put their blouses back on and simply returned to their day.
African breasts are also publicly permitted to air out. Women, dressed only in a piece of vibrant fabric wrapped around their waist, carry stacks of firewood on their heads as they commute back to their huts. Others are seated topless near their roadside stands on hand woven mats. They simultaneously nurse their babies and complete a vegetable sale, the income from which will feed their other children later in the day.
Boobs are not just celebrated on living human bodies. Everywhere I look an artist has paid tribute to the anatomical wonder. Boobs of every shape are carved into the doors of women’s bathrooms. Vases, sculptures and even our salad tongs adorn the naked feminine figure. But my favorite to date is a masterpiece I spotted in the window of a gallery in France. It could have simply been a sign proclaiming “we stand because of the generation of women who came before us”. Instead, the artist expressed this important truth by sculpting round boobs stacked on saggy boobs, over wide boobs, atop clumpy boobs, resting on asymmetric boobs, on feet.
The excessive exposure to this anatomical part of the female body makes me feel one thing: gratitude. I’m grateful for my mom, my mother-in-law, my grandmas, my sisters, my daughter, and my great granddaughters. I’m grateful for my wide circle of girlfriends and the collective feminine knowledge that our breasts are treasured symbols of utility, fertility, beauty, legacy, and community. I’m grateful that we women possess a depth so profound that the shallow definition of what boobs should look like, as told by the Western media, is now simply laughable when I see it from the outside looking in.
