Refreshing the mammary in an autobiography of breasts

Abook with the title like this one might suggest you are getting a sort of light-hearted, even jokey kind of look at breasts. In fact, Tits Up: What our Beliefs about Breasts Reveal about Life, Love, Sex and Society is anything but.

Author Sarah Thornton is a sociologist whose other books include the bestseller Seven Days in the Art World (published in 2008, it was named one of the best art books of the year by The New

York Times), 33 Artists in 3 Acts and Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. While writing this latest book, she was a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley.

Also a former writer on art for The Economist, she successfully sued the Telegraph Media Group for libel and malicious falsehood in a 2008 review by Lynn Barber. Barber claimed she had not been interviewed by Thornton for her book; the high court in Britain found this claim to be false.

Thornton’s skills as a researcher are impressively on show here, in both the range of angles from which she considers her subject – women’s breasts – and the depth of her investigations. The book is peppered with countless stories, with the author managing to achieve an admirable level of honesty from her interviewees.

Thornton came to her subject through events in her own life.

“During a holiday dinner a few years ago, the conversation turned to my boobs. No one in the family thought I should call them Bert and Ernie,” she writes in the opening pages.

She’s referring to the fact that she had a double mastectomy in 2018 (“after seven biopsies over seven years, my doctors had reached the point where they couldn’t be sure that I didn’t have cancer”) and “without much thought” had gone for the reconstruction surgery her health insurance covered.

Now, she found herself with two “silicone aliens” and a feeling of estrangement from her own chest.

As a result, she started considering her breasts as never before, realising she had lost something she wasn’t even aware she had, “breast perception,” as she terms it, linking it to her gut instinct.

Her breasts had previously let her know if she was cold or anxious, aroused or about to menstruate. It is typical of the nuanced approach Thornton takes that her starting point is layered.

Her first experience of death was due to breast cancer, from which her maternal grandmother died when she was five in 1971.

She herself has undergone years of mammograms and biopsies to monitor her own breasts, to the point where a double mastectomy “felt like the only rational way forward”. She recounts an anecdote of being sexually assaulted as a teenager, her breasts becoming “defeated fools – boobs in the literal sense – that needed to be buried under oversized sweaters.”

So breasts are, at worst, a potential killer. And yet they are, of course, also an innate part; an underappreciated built-in antennae that she mourns the loss of in advance of her surgery, both apologising to them and asking them to forgive her for letting them go.

This scenario sets Thornton on odyssey of sorts to really consider breasts, their history, their meaning, the language we use about them, breast reduction, breast augmentation, the male chauvinist myths within which she sees breasts as being shrouded.

To ask herself the question, and report to her readers: “Why is it that we look at breasts so much but reflect on them so little?”

In becoming “a titty connoisseur,” she broke her research into five chapters in what she terms groups of breast specialists. From the outset, she informs us that she aims to cover her subject in a way that will improve women’s self-esteem about their bodies.

“Most American women hate their breasts,” a swimwear and lingerie designer tells her. They’re not wrong, Thornton speculates, and does not wish to add to that.

To do this, she visits a “titty bar,” in her first chapter, interviewing strippers, prostitutes, burlesque dancers and sex-worker-rights activists, to exploring breastfeeding and the oldest human milk bank in America in the next chapter.

Chapter three examines the fascinating perspective of a plastic surgeon and takes place in the operating room. Another chapter is set in the world of bra designers and bra fit models, and the last chapter sees her talking to body-positive nature worshippers and inviduals from other religious traditions.

As an interviewer, Thornton describes herself as an ethnographer – “a participant observer and in-depth interviewer in the anthropological tradition... as open-minded and accepting as I can be.”

What this means is the reader gets high levels of originality from the results of her research.

Thornton does not bring judgment or preconceived notions to her subjects, so you get a broad perspective and honest stories. Her voice is empathetic, brisk at times, and well-paced.

Tits Up is a book that will make any woman reconsider her body, and any man reconsider how he treats the bodies of the women in his life.

She informs us that she aims to cover the subject in a way that will improve female self-esteem