In our household, the division of labour is allocated so that, among other things, I do the laundry. This has given me considerable exposure to fashion trends in women’s undergarments—moreso in the last three or four years as my daughter has become conscious of such things and has demanded that our fashion shopping habits keep her in pace with her friends. (Boys, it turns out, still don’t compare underwear, and so my son feels no peer pressure to buy one brand over another.)
I find brassieres particularly puzzling. They are puzzling to me, not because I can’t figure out how to work them, but because they have undergone a curious change in the last decade or so. When I was first married (more than twenty years ago), the Victoria Secret star was in the ascendancy and even the most functional brassieres incorporated elements of lingerie. There might be a hint of lace along the edges or a tiny rosebud stitched at the point where the cups join, or they might have been made from a mixed fabric that looked like silk—without the price tag. They were never wholly functional, but included a touch of femininity—maybe even a trace of erotic possibility. I have no idea how feminists would react to such an assessment of undergarments. My job wasn’t to ask questions; my job was to keep the clothes clean.
But the brassieres I wash now are different. Their design strikes me as clunky and crude, displaying more in common with a sports bra than a Victoria’s Secret catalogue item. The cut is plain and shows little skill in its manufacture. Worst of all are cups that conceal thin layers of foam padding. The first time I washed such a bra and hung it up to dry, I assumed it was a training bra. But three considerations undercut my theory:
1) my daughter’s profile (enough said);
2) my wife started wearing them too; and
3) bra blogs confirm that these bras are “real” and if a blogger says so, then it must be true.
But why? Why give up the sexy, lacy look of the 90’s for a functional accoutrement that seems better suited to the cargo hold of a space shuttle? Admittedly, zero-gravity drift can be a problem, but a problem that will remain largely theoretical for most women.
There is only one reason I can think of to pad bra cups: bra manufacturers are trying to meet consumer demand for a nipple-free world. Have you not noticed? Nipples have become a source of embarrassment. Those nubs on the centre of a woman’s breasts are regarded more as blemishes than as features in service of a natural process. We look upon them as we might look upon acne or cysts, and so we press them into a layer of foam rubber where they disappear from view. In the case of revealing ads, like the Jordache ad featured at right, we photoshop our models to produce nippleless breasts (or maybe Heidi Klum really was born without nipples).
Nowadays, when a woman dares to let evidence of her nipples show through her shirt, those around her respond with a muted Victorian dismay. Men cast sideways glances at her and feel a stirring in their loins. Their wives blush and cool their nub-free chests with paper fans and mutter words like “slut” and “loose” in exaggerated whispers. It’s as if a long-forgotten rumour of the perfect female form has emerged again from a misty classical past: a form which prescribes two teardrops of flesh dripping from the woman’s chest, perfect spheroids of perfect smoothness whose sole purpose is to feed the whims of emasculated aesthetes.
Men know the nipple problem too, but we aren’t so sorely afflicted. Now, in the dead of winter, I wear my flannel shirts and wool sweaters and give little evidence that I might sport nipples on my chest. However, come spring, concealment might be a challenge. I have two rayon T-shirts that are particularly problematic and I may have no choice but to throw them in the trash. In today’s anti-nipple climate, even an innocuous display may be enough to provoke shock and dismay—especially in the case of my nipples which are inordinately hairy.
Why the scruples around nipples? While I can’t speak to a cause for this trend, I can offer a few thoughts for your consideration. Stigmatizing the display of nipples may, in itself, be inconsequential, and instead, may be symptomatic of a larger social trend. Nipples stick out as a reminder of their biological function. Nipples remind us further that we are animals. They remind us that we are animals of a particular sort—mammals—and we bear a strong kinship with other animals of that sort—with cows and whales and sheep and pigs and bonobos and orangutans and llamas and grizzly bears.
However, our acknowledgment of a kinship to animals can make some people uncomfortable, and this sometimes manifests itself through objections to breast-feeding. The protracted debate about propriety of public breast-feeding has most recently hopped online with the decision by the people at Facebook to remove a profile photo of an account-holder breast-feeding her child.
The acknowledgment of the nipple and its biological (animal) function is problematic for two broad categories of people:
1) It’s problematic for conservative proponents of the three “great” Western religions, all of which purport to assign special status to human beings and to set them over and against the rest of the world. The human nipple shames them because it stands out as the most obvious evidence that traditional religion misconceives our place.
For example, Intelligent Design huxters believe that we were placed here, in situ, ready to move forward as fully developed human beings. The obvious corollary is that we live in the best of all possible worlds, since an omnipotent, all-loving god wouldn’t manufacture a second-rate creation. Unfortunately, masculine nipples, along with other apparently vestigial features like ear lobes, appendices and hair, show up ID for the tripe it is.
While I regard discussions about ID to be a waste of time, the ID phenomenon provides an excellent example of an assumption which permeates dominionist religious views. It assumes a dualist world view in which spirit and matter are distinct and each connotes a value in relation to the other. We are supposed to aspire to a life of the spirit. It is up, above, elevated. Matter, on the other hand, is associated with words like dross. It drags us down and is inferior. We humans belong primarily to the world of spirit and have been granted authority over the world of material things in order to make our corporeal time pleasant; eventually, we will shuffle off this mortal coil and go back to where we belong—back to the spiritual realm. The body, with its hair and bad breath and nipples, belongs to the inferior side of the dualist equation.
2) Ironically, the other group of people for whom the nipple is problematic is the group most likely to disagree with the first group — ultra-rationalists, like secular humanists, and like the so-called new atheists. I don’t mean to suggest that men like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins take personal offense at the presence of bumps on a T-shirt. I have no idea what these men think about nipples. However, I do believe that their ideas stand in a long line from the Enlightenment down to the present day which entertains a dualism all its own. Theirs is the dualism that pits Reason against the unruly forces of the human subconscious. The nipple reminds the Rationalist that not everything true can bow to Reason. The oral fixation that haunts a middle-aged, chain-smoking man has its beginnings in the earliest encounters with his mother’s nipples. The capacity to form relationships takes its origins from the imprinting that began at a mother’s breast while gazing up into her eyes. In the nipple is longing, sometimes for simple sexual gratification, sometimes for deep psychic connection. In the nipple is nurture and need, and in it, too, is loss and separation. But none of these in a wide array of possible meanings can be parsed by a Reasonable man.
A modern brassiere can promote a standardized shape and size, perfect, free of unsightly bumps. Such a brassiere soothes us, comforts us in our need for predictability. It is scientific. It also frees us of the risk that we might respond from the dark reaches of the subconscious. Nothing could be more inconvenient than falling into a fantasy during, say, business negotiations, or drifting into a fond reverie as we’re trying to carrying on a mundane conversation. But it reinforces in a practical way the dualist myth, whether that myth gets told by the practitioners of a conservative religion, or by the true believers of a disembodied science.
Remarkably, there have been prominent voices cutting across the grain of the prevailing dualist views for more than a century. I think of Walt Whitman who asked in I Sing The Body Electric: “And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?” Neitzsche offered Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an extended hymn to the dismantling of the dualist universe. So, for example: “Thus the body goes through history, becoming and fighting. And the spirit – what is that to the body? The herald, comrade, and echo of its conflicts and victories. … Elevated is your body then and resurrected; with its rapture it delights the spirit, so that it becomes creator and evaluator and lover and benefactor of all things. … Lead, as I do, the flown-away virtue back to the earth – yes, back to body and life: that it may give the earth its sense, a human sense!”
Strange, then, that we seem to be regressing, providing clothing more befitting the attitudes that were prevalent in the first decades of the nineteenth century.