I was 16 in the late nineties, and at uni. in the early 1990s. A tomboy as a child, I can honestly say that I never encountered any issues with feeling that I was somehow lesser. It didn't even occur to me or my female friends that we were (and of course I'm not saying there weren't times where I wasn't the subject of unwanted male aggression or misogyny).
Our role models were women being themselves and doing their thing. And compared to our parents, born in the forties, we felt that earlier women's struggles had borne fruit for us. We were happy to disrupt gender roles in ways parents didn't always understand. Porn was still in the form of grubby magazines, not that of a hand-held screen used by kids. It was an exciting time to emerge into adulthood.
These notions of woman as glassy-eyed, collagen-pumped vessels put on earth for male satisfaction come from the mass pornification of society. You only have to walk past a secondary school to see how many girls now view themselves. Thick makeup. Fake eyebrows. Massive draw-on lips. Fake tans. Identikit hair. Identikit selfies. If someone had told me when I was 18 that in the future young women would actively seek to look like plastic porn stars and those who didn't would be told to have a double mastectomy and say they were men, I'd never, ever have believed them.
The 90s did have looser gender roles and attitudes toward psychedelics, certainly in the party scene. For me, the latter helped me eschew stricter gender roles, which were still heavily marketed to us, like undernourished model’s espousing heroine chic body types. And professional porn flourished with overly plastic and collagen injected and mutilated women and men, to some extent. Women who chose not to eschew a gender role were still expected to conform to bizarre fashion and extreme weight loss and plastic surgery trends. Sex in the city was an ad for this that we paid to watch.
Plastic surgery lacked basic safeguards for kids as a field long before trans ideology took hold. Kids have been allowed to get breast implants and other voluntary cosmetic procedures, below the age of 18, with parental consent long before transitioning became a fad.
However, that was constrained by people with the disposable income required to afford paying out of pocket. Making transitioning a human right or medically necessary to assuage mental illness, or anguish as its promoted, opens the door for government institutions (eg prisons) and insurance companies to foot the bill for these procedures. Until recently that font of potential funds was a vast untapped market, for ‘medicine’.
I made the connection between trans and cosmetic surgery as a whole maybe a year or two ago, and as I was reading this piece I was considering the dissonance of the fact that breast augmentation remains the most common cosmetic surgical procedure, and at the same time there is a (much smaller numerically, I assume) trend of women having elective double mastectomies. What does this say about our culture? There are so many possibilities I could write a dissertation. And I’m a person who was an early adopter of cosmetic surgery and who now finds myself hard pressed not to keep on tinkering. I don’t think it’s okay at all...my body is more Frankenstein than human and it shows... I have regrets, much like detransitioners... but the addiction to “if I could just fix X” is a thing. In the 90s when I had my first procedure, cosmetic surgery was considered extreme but not questioned in a deep way. Now it’s not even considered extreme by nearly as many. I personally can’t imagine a mastectomy, but having had BA and revisions, I certainly sympathize with the idea that breasts are extremely fraught. And there are absolutely plenty of people who are ready and willing to make money from the emotional distress of others.
So much of what I see revolves around the exceptional self. The wretched exceptional self which it turns out demands physical interventions to maintain distinction. Is part of the answer the way young people are urged to commodify their personal brand?
Nov 9, 2022·edited Nov 9, 2022Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
This may or may not be germane but I'm reading a book right now that I think you should take a peek at: Status and Culture by David Marx. I haven't finished the book yet so I can't tell you how this relates point for point but my intuition tells me there are clues to this riddle in the human need to prove status and the particular complexity of this issue for young people.
This is a really powerful essay. For the first time - for me - I finally see how this could have happened. As a Gen X woman I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around how we went from an expansive view of what it means to be a girl to this idea that if you aren’t a certain type (stereotype) of girl than you must be “other.” I hate it.
Genuine question from a man who honestly doesn't understand the comment - how can breasts be embarrassing? I can see situations where they may be in the way or otherwise temporarily inconvenient, or they attract too much attention, but being embarrassed seems odd.
I think the issue is not what men might think think of any particular woman's breasts- but that so many men have a sense of entitlement to make intrusive personal comments to (lots of) women. This is totally disrespectful. And overall, is a form of bullying. So I am not surprised that young girls have recently been tricked by the trans bandwagon, because when they reach puberty they are sickened by the way women are generally treated in a sexist society.
Men often stare at my breasts when they speak to me, even when I am dressed modestly. It's not even subtle. The casual disrespect is infuriating, and these days I just embarrass them by telling them to stop staring at my tits (one or another, anyway) and I cut them from my friend-group--the older I get, the less interest I have in entertaining boors at all.
But younger women are more likely to internalize this particular sense of shame and violation, so it's no shock to me that some opt to remove their breasts entirely.
Edited so it sounds less like I'm eager to be rude all the time, ha.
Yeah, I'd say my breasts have caused me less of an issue than most because I'm very small-chested and can count on one hands the number of times a man I wasn't intimate with has looked at my breasts and not my face (but, like, I had a boss who did that) but it's just disturbing, pure objectification.
Thank you both for taking my question seriously, and not taking offence. Of course what you describe is humiliating - it is wrong. My wife has complained of men that address her chest, not her face, and gets angry about it. I don't understand why anyone would do it - breasts add very little to most communication, unlike eyes, lips, and hands - so I'm starting to gain some insight. I'm not sure I could be embarrassed about a part of my body because of the way some other people regard it, but I now have an inkling of how others could.
It's because they weren't part of your body, and then they suddenly ARE, and according to many, they're suddenly one of the most important parts. And people are judging you on them. What happened to the rest of you? It's a disconcerting thing even when kept in perspective by wise parents.
Thank you - that is something I never could have thought of, but it makes so much sense! Alien growths that have a power of their own and change what can be done with/by the body - all of a sudden it starts to sound like a horror story...
That’s the catch-22 isn’t it? No matter what they look like it’s wrong or weird or obtrusive in someone’s opinion and there is so much judgment. In a weird way I can almost understand why some women would think it’s easier to remove them from the equation altogether.
As a 67 year old woman (born female) and retired psychotherapist I find your writing sublime, your thinking incredible. I wish all young folks had your critical thinking abilities. I wish my son, now absorbed into gender hell, had this ability. What is most heartbreaking for me is I raised both my 'kids' to think critically. What I thought was secure attachment was no match for the power of social media. I have been thrown away.
Millennials were absolutely indoctrinated into this bullshit. We learned about gender identities in high school and college and had seminars on LGBTQIA++ issues in college for “Diversity Training”. This stuff has been brewing in universities for 12 years at least.
Curious approximately when you were born? I was born in the late 1980s... it was definitely intruding by college (and far beyond the gender studies department, which I avoided like the plague... but we had LGBTQ safe spaces and all the beginnings of weird gender crap), but it's not like I was being taught this when I hit puberty or anything.
I was born in 1993. Definitely we were not taught this around puberty, but in HS we learned gender theory in Psychology class including about transgender, gender v. sex, and 'other genders'. A few students in HS had 'alternative' identities and used they/them, ze/zir but it was not so common. By the time I entered college 2011-2015 it was more mainstream. We were instructed to introduce ourselves with our preferred pronouns or include them in our email signature. By senior year of college, we had mandated LGBTQIA+ training to complete as part of the Anti-Bias / Diversity requirement for graduation. I saw many peers start college as she/her and graduated as they/them. I think college is a time when a lot of people are figuring out their identity, the first time independent of their parents, siblings, and hometown friends so it's a very impressionable age.
I think older millenials (pre-1990) had a different experience from core millenials. I sometimes find younger millenials and Gen Z seem to have more in common in terms of interests and attitudes than with older ones (in from the mid-80s, so I'm on the older end). I did get a 2nd degree a year or two after my 1st, and I did notice that there seemed to have been some kind of shift by the time I was finishing it up; seminars were no longer quite so free flowing and feminism was of the liberal, 3rd-wave variety.
"The constant bubble-gum pink invocations of ‘girl power’ felt more like negging: "Girls can do math! Girls can rock at science! Girls can code!" Whoever suggested we couldn't?"
This is a fascinating observation, Eliza. I think 'girl power' was a reaction to the realization by mothers that the breakthroughs of second-wave feminism weren't going to somehow eliminate differences between men and women — just because your daughter could grow up to be anything didn't mean she was going to want to. And it must have been thoroughly demoralizing to see those daughters get entirely sucked into princess culture (has the book club read Peggy Orenstein's "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture" yet?); 'girl power' was perhaps in part an attempt at salvaging second-wave feminist ideals.
I'm a bit older — the feminism of my childhood was the "anything a boy can do, a girl can do better" — and while I knew that my life would be inescapably different because I was female, I never internalized any notions that talent or intelligence were distributed unequally between the sexes. I feel lucky to have grown up when I did, much freer from the market-driven influences that drove first princess culture, then girl power, and now both the hypersexualized Kardashian culture and the escape-from-female-sexuality "trans" madness.
What is so insane about that video is that the "liberation" effect seems quite blatantly to be simply the ability to take your shirt off in public. Don't like the male gaze? Just cut off your breasts! That's empowerment! I didn't think things could get much worse in our porn-saturated culture, but this nearly made me sick. And if someone passed a law that all such surgeries had to be done for free, it would disappear overnight. The surgeons who do this to women should be in prison.
Why do women want a surgeon's signature across their chest? I'm a boomer, and the 1990s burden thrust on me was my ex-husband's "transition" and obnoxious insistence on being called some version of "mother" of our two sons. Memoir: In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022) YouTube channel where I demonstrate healthy mind/body/vagus nerve moves is named Ute Heggen. I was banned from Youtube for the equation, coercion + deceit = mother erasure for 15 months, now re-instated, so a little victory. Also post butterfly shorts from the garden. The mental health practitioners didn't mention to my ex or any of those guys that we will never fully accept them as authentic, and they allowed psychiatrically ill men to dictate the technical words for the fixation, all to pull the wool over the public's eyes. Sam Kaye, of Call Me Sam YT channel, decided to de-transition to create distance from this political medical malpractice, and to reclaim his male identity. We have to be strong, firm and know ourselves.
So... first there was repression, then hard-won freedom of life choices for women, then exploration of these choices, and finally (today) simplification and commodification of these choices. Maybe I’m cynical but I wonder if trans identities are being sold to us so strongly because they’re the most lucrative life choice for pharmaceutical companies. And partially because others who have made that jump need more like them so they don’t feel alone/question their decisions.
I seriously don't know how I managed to escape the angst and trauma of puberty and accept my body, with all its serious flaws. Flaws the are due to the life-threatening experience drinking oven cleaner at 2 years old then 1 year in the hospital in and out of surgery to rebuild my tiny stomach. I somehow, despite being molested for 3 years by my father, then emotionally abused by my mother for most of my adult life, managed to have 2 children by 23 years old and maintain a normal life, married for 19 years and a successful career. I say this because I honestly feel like I should have ended up on the street at some point.
“The balkanization of identity that passes for feminism in the 21st century saddens me.” Phyllis Chesler. I couldn't agree more. So called "Intersectional Feminism" de-centered women and divided us against each other in a competition of "who is more oppressed". I'm hopeful for a new wave once women see how gender ideology has roots in misogyny--and how it even prohibits use of the word "woman". If you can't name women, you can't name sexism either-- neither exist...
What I felt from seeing the video of post bilateral mastectomies -- those smiling, carefree-looking women are relieved that their bodies are no longer stared at and sexualized by men. The freedom to not wear shirts and bras, the freedom to have bare skin from the waist up. Ahhhhh. I'm convinced that most (if not all) of the desire for breast removal is for this freedom.
I was 16 in the late nineties, and at uni. in the early 1990s. A tomboy as a child, I can honestly say that I never encountered any issues with feeling that I was somehow lesser. It didn't even occur to me or my female friends that we were (and of course I'm not saying there weren't times where I wasn't the subject of unwanted male aggression or misogyny).
Our role models were women being themselves and doing their thing. And compared to our parents, born in the forties, we felt that earlier women's struggles had borne fruit for us. We were happy to disrupt gender roles in ways parents didn't always understand. Porn was still in the form of grubby magazines, not that of a hand-held screen used by kids. It was an exciting time to emerge into adulthood.
These notions of woman as glassy-eyed, collagen-pumped vessels put on earth for male satisfaction come from the mass pornification of society. You only have to walk past a secondary school to see how many girls now view themselves. Thick makeup. Fake eyebrows. Massive draw-on lips. Fake tans. Identikit hair. Identikit selfies. If someone had told me when I was 18 that in the future young women would actively seek to look like plastic porn stars and those who didn't would be told to have a double mastectomy and say they were men, I'd never, ever have believed them.
The 90s did have looser gender roles and attitudes toward psychedelics, certainly in the party scene. For me, the latter helped me eschew stricter gender roles, which were still heavily marketed to us, like undernourished model’s espousing heroine chic body types. And professional porn flourished with overly plastic and collagen injected and mutilated women and men, to some extent. Women who chose not to eschew a gender role were still expected to conform to bizarre fashion and extreme weight loss and plastic surgery trends. Sex in the city was an ad for this that we paid to watch.
Plastic surgery lacked basic safeguards for kids as a field long before trans ideology took hold. Kids have been allowed to get breast implants and other voluntary cosmetic procedures, below the age of 18, with parental consent long before transitioning became a fad.
However, that was constrained by people with the disposable income required to afford paying out of pocket. Making transitioning a human right or medically necessary to assuage mental illness, or anguish as its promoted, opens the door for government institutions (eg prisons) and insurance companies to foot the bill for these procedures. Until recently that font of potential funds was a vast untapped market, for ‘medicine’.
I made the connection between trans and cosmetic surgery as a whole maybe a year or two ago, and as I was reading this piece I was considering the dissonance of the fact that breast augmentation remains the most common cosmetic surgical procedure, and at the same time there is a (much smaller numerically, I assume) trend of women having elective double mastectomies. What does this say about our culture? There are so many possibilities I could write a dissertation. And I’m a person who was an early adopter of cosmetic surgery and who now finds myself hard pressed not to keep on tinkering. I don’t think it’s okay at all...my body is more Frankenstein than human and it shows... I have regrets, much like detransitioners... but the addiction to “if I could just fix X” is a thing. In the 90s when I had my first procedure, cosmetic surgery was considered extreme but not questioned in a deep way. Now it’s not even considered extreme by nearly as many. I personally can’t imagine a mastectomy, but having had BA and revisions, I certainly sympathize with the idea that breasts are extremely fraught. And there are absolutely plenty of people who are ready and willing to make money from the emotional distress of others.
"Then it turns out you're just like other girls."
So much of what I see revolves around the exceptional self. The wretched exceptional self which it turns out demands physical interventions to maintain distinction. Is part of the answer the way young people are urged to commodify their personal brand?
That's very well observed, I think.
This may or may not be germane but I'm reading a book right now that I think you should take a peek at: Status and Culture by David Marx. I haven't finished the book yet so I can't tell you how this relates point for point but my intuition tells me there are clues to this riddle in the human need to prove status and the particular complexity of this issue for young people.
Adding it to the list... picking books by feel works. There's always something there.
This is where I heard about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/opinion/status-culture-book.html
this is a very smart essay on issues that very few people seem to be thinking about at all. we desperately need more people following up these ideas.
This is a very powerful and compelling essay. Thank you very much for writing this, Frederick
This is a really powerful essay. For the first time - for me - I finally see how this could have happened. As a Gen X woman I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around how we went from an expansive view of what it means to be a girl to this idea that if you aren’t a certain type (stereotype) of girl than you must be “other.” I hate it.
Breasts can be embarrassing, so maybe that's why some imagine that they will be more confident without them.
Genuine question from a man who honestly doesn't understand the comment - how can breasts be embarrassing? I can see situations where they may be in the way or otherwise temporarily inconvenient, or they attract too much attention, but being embarrassed seems odd.
I think the issue is not what men might think think of any particular woman's breasts- but that so many men have a sense of entitlement to make intrusive personal comments to (lots of) women. This is totally disrespectful. And overall, is a form of bullying. So I am not surprised that young girls have recently been tricked by the trans bandwagon, because when they reach puberty they are sickened by the way women are generally treated in a sexist society.
Men often stare at my breasts when they speak to me, even when I am dressed modestly. It's not even subtle. The casual disrespect is infuriating, and these days I just embarrass them by telling them to stop staring at my tits (one or another, anyway) and I cut them from my friend-group--the older I get, the less interest I have in entertaining boors at all.
But younger women are more likely to internalize this particular sense of shame and violation, so it's no shock to me that some opt to remove their breasts entirely.
Edited so it sounds less like I'm eager to be rude all the time, ha.
Yeah, I'd say my breasts have caused me less of an issue than most because I'm very small-chested and can count on one hands the number of times a man I wasn't intimate with has looked at my breasts and not my face (but, like, I had a boss who did that) but it's just disturbing, pure objectification.
Thank you both for taking my question seriously, and not taking offence. Of course what you describe is humiliating - it is wrong. My wife has complained of men that address her chest, not her face, and gets angry about it. I don't understand why anyone would do it - breasts add very little to most communication, unlike eyes, lips, and hands - so I'm starting to gain some insight. I'm not sure I could be embarrassed about a part of my body because of the way some other people regard it, but I now have an inkling of how others could.
It's because they weren't part of your body, and then they suddenly ARE, and according to many, they're suddenly one of the most important parts. And people are judging you on them. What happened to the rest of you? It's a disconcerting thing even when kept in perspective by wise parents.
Thank you - that is something I never could have thought of, but it makes so much sense! Alien growths that have a power of their own and change what can be done with/by the body - all of a sudden it starts to sound like a horror story...
That’s the catch-22 isn’t it? No matter what they look like it’s wrong or weird or obtrusive in someone’s opinion and there is so much judgment. In a weird way I can almost understand why some women would think it’s easier to remove them from the equation altogether.
As a 67 year old woman (born female) and retired psychotherapist I find your writing sublime, your thinking incredible. I wish all young folks had your critical thinking abilities. I wish my son, now absorbed into gender hell, had this ability. What is most heartbreaking for me is I raised both my 'kids' to think critically. What I thought was secure attachment was no match for the power of social media. I have been thrown away.
Millennials were absolutely indoctrinated into this bullshit. We learned about gender identities in high school and college and had seminars on LGBTQIA++ issues in college for “Diversity Training”. This stuff has been brewing in universities for 12 years at least.
Curious approximately when you were born? I was born in the late 1980s... it was definitely intruding by college (and far beyond the gender studies department, which I avoided like the plague... but we had LGBTQ safe spaces and all the beginnings of weird gender crap), but it's not like I was being taught this when I hit puberty or anything.
I was born in 1993. Definitely we were not taught this around puberty, but in HS we learned gender theory in Psychology class including about transgender, gender v. sex, and 'other genders'. A few students in HS had 'alternative' identities and used they/them, ze/zir but it was not so common. By the time I entered college 2011-2015 it was more mainstream. We were instructed to introduce ourselves with our preferred pronouns or include them in our email signature. By senior year of college, we had mandated LGBTQIA+ training to complete as part of the Anti-Bias / Diversity requirement for graduation. I saw many peers start college as she/her and graduated as they/them. I think college is a time when a lot of people are figuring out their identity, the first time independent of their parents, siblings, and hometown friends so it's a very impressionable age.
I think older millenials (pre-1990) had a different experience from core millenials. I sometimes find younger millenials and Gen Z seem to have more in common in terms of interests and attitudes than with older ones (in from the mid-80s, so I'm on the older end). I did get a 2nd degree a year or two after my 1st, and I did notice that there seemed to have been some kind of shift by the time I was finishing it up; seminars were no longer quite so free flowing and feminism was of the liberal, 3rd-wave variety.
"The constant bubble-gum pink invocations of ‘girl power’ felt more like negging: "Girls can do math! Girls can rock at science! Girls can code!" Whoever suggested we couldn't?"
This is a fascinating observation, Eliza. I think 'girl power' was a reaction to the realization by mothers that the breakthroughs of second-wave feminism weren't going to somehow eliminate differences between men and women — just because your daughter could grow up to be anything didn't mean she was going to want to. And it must have been thoroughly demoralizing to see those daughters get entirely sucked into princess culture (has the book club read Peggy Orenstein's "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture" yet?); 'girl power' was perhaps in part an attempt at salvaging second-wave feminist ideals.
I'm a bit older — the feminism of my childhood was the "anything a boy can do, a girl can do better" — and while I knew that my life would be inescapably different because I was female, I never internalized any notions that talent or intelligence were distributed unequally between the sexes. I feel lucky to have grown up when I did, much freer from the market-driven influences that drove first princess culture, then girl power, and now both the hypersexualized Kardashian culture and the escape-from-female-sexuality "trans" madness.
What is so insane about that video is that the "liberation" effect seems quite blatantly to be simply the ability to take your shirt off in public. Don't like the male gaze? Just cut off your breasts! That's empowerment! I didn't think things could get much worse in our porn-saturated culture, but this nearly made me sick. And if someone passed a law that all such surgeries had to be done for free, it would disappear overnight. The surgeons who do this to women should be in prison.
Why do women want a surgeon's signature across their chest? I'm a boomer, and the 1990s burden thrust on me was my ex-husband's "transition" and obnoxious insistence on being called some version of "mother" of our two sons. Memoir: In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022) YouTube channel where I demonstrate healthy mind/body/vagus nerve moves is named Ute Heggen. I was banned from Youtube for the equation, coercion + deceit = mother erasure for 15 months, now re-instated, so a little victory. Also post butterfly shorts from the garden. The mental health practitioners didn't mention to my ex or any of those guys that we will never fully accept them as authentic, and they allowed psychiatrically ill men to dictate the technical words for the fixation, all to pull the wool over the public's eyes. Sam Kaye, of Call Me Sam YT channel, decided to de-transition to create distance from this political medical malpractice, and to reclaim his male identity. We have to be strong, firm and know ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoOuW3ULLDA
So... first there was repression, then hard-won freedom of life choices for women, then exploration of these choices, and finally (today) simplification and commodification of these choices. Maybe I’m cynical but I wonder if trans identities are being sold to us so strongly because they’re the most lucrative life choice for pharmaceutical companies. And partially because others who have made that jump need more like them so they don’t feel alone/question their decisions.
I seriously don't know how I managed to escape the angst and trauma of puberty and accept my body, with all its serious flaws. Flaws the are due to the life-threatening experience drinking oven cleaner at 2 years old then 1 year in the hospital in and out of surgery to rebuild my tiny stomach. I somehow, despite being molested for 3 years by my father, then emotionally abused by my mother for most of my adult life, managed to have 2 children by 23 years old and maintain a normal life, married for 19 years and a successful career. I say this because I honestly feel like I should have ended up on the street at some point.
“The balkanization of identity that passes for feminism in the 21st century saddens me.” Phyllis Chesler. I couldn't agree more. So called "Intersectional Feminism" de-centered women and divided us against each other in a competition of "who is more oppressed". I'm hopeful for a new wave once women see how gender ideology has roots in misogyny--and how it even prohibits use of the word "woman". If you can't name women, you can't name sexism either-- neither exist...
What I felt from seeing the video of post bilateral mastectomies -- those smiling, carefree-looking women are relieved that their bodies are no longer stared at and sexualized by men. The freedom to not wear shirts and bras, the freedom to have bare skin from the waist up. Ahhhhh. I'm convinced that most (if not all) of the desire for breast removal is for this freedom.