When My Body Gets In The Way

my big titted manifesto

After a long hiatus from the exercise, I’ve taken up running again mostly because I want to feel like Princess Mononoke in that one scene where she’s riding her big, beautiful wolf through the lush Studio Ghibli forest. As I’ve reintroduced mindfulness around food and exercise into my life, my goals for such things have necessarily become increasingly fantastical and detached from reality.

I can’t be trapped in the world of counting or measuring or numbers of any kind. It’s bad for me and my spirit. So I’ve moved away from the real and into the unreal, detaching from my body so that I can love it a little better from afar and, one day, maybe up close.

me

The problem of course is that I do not have a giant wolf. I only have a body. And my body keeps getting in the way.

I set out to run around four miles last Sunday — a distance that I am not at all ashamed to say is considered a “long run” for me at this point. I’m getting better and things are getting easier. I have the right shoes and self-belief and Bachelor podcasts necessary for such an endeavor. But a quarter of a mile into my run, I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it because of the pains particular to my body.

I was thinking of my tits, really, is what was happening.

Any person of considerable breast size knows the danger signs of a sports bra gone past the point of functionality. The ripped seams, the pilling fabric around the armpits, the increasing sag of the straps. A depleted sports bra says “your body has taken a toll on me to the point where I can no longer live. Your body has killed me. Your massive fucking tits have drained me of life force and function. You bitch.” At least that’s what mine says to me.

The sports bra also says “in punishment for the abuses done to me, I will now make your life a living hell should you ever decide to make use of me ever again,” which is what it said to me last Sunday. Distracted by the forceful, painful pounding of my massive breasts against my ribcage and after many attempts to scoop them up to a place of comfort, I decided to give up the gun and start walking. Breezing past me, a lithe man in an offensively yellow (the color of happiness, obviously inappropriate) tank top runs with seemingly no effort, him and his flat chest rounding the corner, leaving me feeling saggy and slow and grotesque.

I want more than anything to be a wolf and not a body. I want to leave my tits and heart and stomach and weak legs behind and belong instead to something strong and willing, a machine of an animal, a thing that never has to think about sports bras ever again.

But instead me and my tits walk the rest of the way and I call my equally large-chested best friend who I will hope will have more insight than me. They’re non-binary and have talked about top surgery. Surely they will have their own, superior wisdom to grant me about breasts and burdens.

On the call, they fight me on my assertion that large breasts likely developed as an evolutionary signal to men about fertility. Neither of us actually wants to believe that these highly disabling and only occasionally fun bodily accoutrements were dealt to us for the purpose of attracting a man who wants to fuck. “That can’t be it,” they say, and I can hear their fingers tapping away furiously into Google from across the country.

“There’s something here about retaining fat and milk in case of a famine?” and I sigh. “So, from this perspective,” they continue, “breasts function like camel humps.”

“Oh my god, it just keeps getting worse,” I say, “I don’t want my boobs to be relied on in a famine. When shit gets rough I just have to put up a sign saying, ‘here ye, here ye, come suckle on the teat of eternal life as gifted to you unwillingly by my stupid body’?” A toddler waves at me and I wave back and the mom looks at me kind of concerned. Which is weird because I clearly wouldn’t steal her baby, I literally just talked about how I don’t want to breastfeed anyone.

After our Googling we resign to just saying that it sucks and maybe neither one of us wants to fully get rid of our breasts but like certainly a B cup would be better.

I think about how I walk into every room tits-first, literally. Physically, my breasts will be the first thing to touch the new air, inaugurating me into every space in a way I have no choice about. You can see them under a baggy t-shirt, they appear obvious and garish in a tank top, and at the end of the day I have no idea how to be their friend. I don’t know any famous philosophers with huge tits¹ (although all my favorite philosophers have them), and when a girl with breasts holds a book it’s usually a meme or an advertisement. I’ve never seen a wolf with boobs before.

she literally gets a breast reduction over the course of this meme

I resent the fact that I must sequester any part of my body in order to function in the ways that I desire. I resent that my body disagrees with and at times inhibits my autonomy. I resent that in writing this, I see my own blind spots about how people in disabled bodies may feel this way constantly, and how a well-fitted sports bra would offer none of the comfort to them that it may offer to me in my goal of alleviating this suffering. I think about the way our bodies get in the way and how to move forward even when we know that this may always be true.

When I accept that my body is not my wolf I stop keeping it chained up in the yard. I stop believing that I am separate from it or that it the project of my body is to be useful to my spirit. I do not want to tame or punish or own my body. And the truth is that I cannot escape it. When I hit my stride, when the blood runs hot out of my heart and through my veins, when the sweat drips down my face and my lungs begin to scream under the stress of movement, my body is saying “you cannot escape me. I will always be with you.” And maybe it’s less of a threat and more of a promise.

1. Clementine Morrigan recently wrote an enlightening piece aptly titled “On Having Gigantic Boobs,” which is where I pulled this idea about big-titted philosophers from. In it, she discusses a history of having a dissociated relationship with her breasts, the bimbo trap, and how infuriating it is to have people insist that you simply get a breast reduction. It’s a great read.