A Brief History of American Tits | Chloe Russell Kent | TEDxColumbiaUniversity

I'd spent the past year and a half researching the history of tits in the United States you heard that correctly TI TS or whichever of these hundred euphemisms you'd prefer instead tits is my euphemism of choice because it's the most disarming of the group but I would also vote for the calculator spelling of boobs which is eight zero zero eight five for those of you who missed that portion of seventh-grade math so all that begs the question why breasts clearly given our vernacular we live in a culture that harbors a deep fascination breasts represent so many powerful things fertility eternity maturity femininity sexuality yet statistically 75% of the women in this room would admit to being dissatisfied with that particular body part and if I'm being perfectly honest until I started this project I was among that 75% as well here's why it seems like that shouldn't have happened to me though when I was around three years old I decided that when I grew up I wanted two things well technically three I wanted to become a writer and I wanted to have really huge boobs which is why throughout most of the 90s if there was a pair of round objects in front of me they went right up my shirt it's true I'm a millennial I've always been told to follow my dreams I'd also been told that my body was a temple and yet fast-forward to 10 years later and my body felt more like a prison I hated having breasts first of all they were heavy and they fell into my armpits when I slept which I did not sign up for but also I was ashamed of having breasts because of the attention that it called to my body and because it seemed to me that there was only one acceptable breast shape and you know what I'm talking about large round perfectly symmetrical breasts I didn't have which is why throughout so many New Year's resolutions I continually promised that I would just learn to accept my body body acceptance for me was only a dream and here's the thing that they don't tell you about dreams it's not enough to follow them you have to chase them it wasn't until I got to graduate school and fell down this rabbit hole of information-gathering that I finally started to acquire the body acceptance that I'd so wanted and a large part of that came from gaining a historical perspective on the body so I'd like to give you the highlights of 242 years worth of American breasts I've been calling a tits tree needless to say I've spent a considerable amount of time in various Columbia libraries looking at it and one of the richest insights I found was this in her book the beauty myth Naomi Wolf wrote how the qualities that a given period calls beautiful and women are merely symbols of the female behavior that period considers desirable in other words ideal standards of beauty are less prescriptive of how a woman should look than how she should behave and in that sense breasts are a portal into a much broader set of questions about American conceptions of feminine beauty and behavior in viewing these images I'd like you to notice how limiting middle and upper-middle class body ideals especially in women's magazines where the bulk of these images come from really were there very few women of color represented and very quickly we start to see the same body types emerging over and over again and while this is by no means a comprehensive history it does chart how frequently the ideal breasts chain and the links we've gone to conform to them since the beginnings of American history our breasts have been flattened with corsets bound with gauze cinched in to bust developers and surgically altered with materials from glass balls - bees - bees wax goat's milk and Teflon these moments in American history prove it the way we shape our breasts and bodies is constantly in flux and for the sake of everyone's attention span I'm going to guide us through the tits tree in 30 year increments in the earliest years of American history the ideal body was young and virginal for more youthful looking breasts a popular medical book advised older women which probably meant women around my age to make a plaster from hemlock which is a poisonous plant we already knew with deadly because it was what killed Socrates 2,000 years before and it gets worse in the mid-1800s Victorian ideals came to the fore which equated small features with virtue so a gaunt pale body with small breasts implied a higher moral standing for paler skin women use body lotion laced with arsenic which in the next century would be reclaimed by women as a convenient means of killing one's husband towards the end of the 1800s voluptuously Illustrated Gibson girls epitomized the rise of the educated independent women who took a more visible role in public life but even an icon is seemingly liberated as she wasn't immune to conforming to the ideal body on the right you'll notice is a series ad of a bus developer and I know what you're thinking it's not a toilet plunger it was actually used to enlarge the breasts and I'm not sure that it worked but by the 1920s no one wanted anyways a new feminine ideal took hold with a flapper and while she could now vote and was liberated from the corsets her mother and grandmother wore she bound her breasts in keeping with the era's flat-chested androgynous ideal and that accordion looking contraption on the right is a bandeau bra which is also called a flattener after world war ii the population swelled the economy swells and guess what else welt technological innovations led to a new circular sewing stitch which created the cone-shaped bullet bra breast mania in the 50s and 60s was bolstered by another landmark in women's health the first fda-approved oral contraceptive it had such high estrogen levels that sales of C cup bras jumped 50 percent but fortunately women who didn't have ample cleavage or take birth control could still live up to the ideal thanks to innovations like the inflatable bullet bra on the right which needs no further comment we saw some of the bodily ideals from the 50s in the eighties but with bigger hair a booming economy created a market for all things access and the new feminine ideal became spelt toned and large breasted thanks in part to the rise of supermodels aerobics and breast implants headlines heralded the triumphant return of breasts we're still not sure where they went and with that came ads for breast enhancers like these in the pages of popular women's magazines again that is not a toilet plunger so where does this leave us now I think the two headlines I'm about to show you illustrate how quickly American Beauty ideals shift in the 21st century last year the New York Post ran this headline boobs are back still no word on where they go when they're gone not two months later they ran this small boobs are back sometimes it feels like there's no winning when it comes to women's media and breasts at its worst natural breasts get criticized for looking saggy surgically enhanced breasts are called out for appearing unnatural and visible cleavage somehow translates to a cry for attention 242 years worth of history demonstrates how often breasts have been treated as a commodity bull trend instead of a body part so it seems absurd to hate your breasts for how they look when we can't even agree on what a good pair of breasts look like in the first place now I'm not condemning women who augment their breasts nor am i suggesting that we abstain from wearing whatever becomes the equivalent of the bullet bra in 30 years my hope is that we continue to move towards a more expansive notion of beauty that doesn't revolve around taut skin that defies gravity I've looked at this picture for so long trying to figure out how to describe the expression on my face and I realize now what it is it's pride when we're kids we don't shoulder any of the body shame that comes later most of us barely notice our bodies unless we scrape the knees couldn't even name most body parts let alone tell you how they should look if I'm lucky enough to have a daughter I'd want her to know that having a body can be a challenge regardless of what you look like I'd want her to know that body acceptance like progress itself isn't linear and I'd wanted to know that not all women have large perfect breasts and that you're a woman whether you have large breasts or small breasts or one breast or no breasts and truthfully I still don't know how you go about making your body into a temple but I'd suggest this instead treat your body as you would a historic building you don't have to love every inch of it but you have to respect it protect it maintain it and understand its importance we're living with all of the privileges women have fought for centuries to get and are still fighting for and we can't control what the ideal body is today or what it will look like tomorrow so why would we accept societal notions of what's beautiful and what's valuable this is a call to not only us but our friends our sisters our wives our daughters standards of beauty are forever changing let's stop chasing them thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,549,930

Rating: 4.2767172 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Beauty, Body, Feminism, Gender, Personal growth, Sex, Women, Women's Rights

Id: sBGFc8DCUo8

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018