Thanks for being here. Will you upgrade to a paid subscription to support the work I do here every week? Paid subscribers get full access to my weekend roundups, as well as a discount on Dire Straights, my new podcast with Amanda Montei. On big boobsSydney Sweeney is using her 'great genes' to sell jeans. Meanwhile, I revisit my grade-school diary, wherein I endlessly drew cartoons of enormous, heaving breasts.
The other night before bed, my 8-year-old asked me to read to him from my childhood diary—this pink Hello Kitty number with hearts and roses all over it. He wanted to hear what I was writing about when I was his age, so I read him an entry about being “sooooooooooo in love” with a boy in my fourth-grade class. After my kid went to bed, I headed downstairs, curled up with the diary, and kept reading. In a much later junior-high entry, I wrote, “Adam is one of the boys that like me. I want to go to the dance with him! I wonder if we have sex ed in 6th grade. I wish I had breast!” Breast, singular. Then I came across a drawing that had been scribbled out with such determination that it made the back of the page rise up like it was embossed. I knew exactly what was underneath the scribbles: a drawing of a pair of boobs. Not just any boobs but enormous cartoonish ones that rose out of a teeny-tiny barely-there t-shirt. I don’t even know if you can call it a t-shirt—it was more like a t-shirt fashioned into a string bikini, but with even less fabric. Cleavage on top and on the bottom, you know? I’d seen exactly that kind of image on MTV Spring Break specials, but also at weird tourist gift shops on Pier 39 in San Francisco. You know, the kind of visuals that landed on beer cozies in the nineties—right next to “Got Milk” t-shirts featuring an image of Monica Lewinsky with white liquid dripping from her chin. I drew those rounded, gravity-defying breasts over and over in that Hello Kitty diary, scribbling them out each time. I remember wondering why I was drawing boobs, because I liked boys. I was obsessed with them. Lived for them. Of course, now I see that I was drawing a cartoonish symbol of sex appeal—of straight men’s desire. It was a symbol that felt totally foreign to my own insultingly pre-pubescent body. I wanted breast. The very next day I was reminded of those scribbled-out boobs when American Eagle premiered its new denim campaign starring Sydney Sweeney. The company dropped a video on social media that opens with Sweeney in a low-cut tank top, leaning over the hood of a car, before the camera pulls back and shows her walking away in a pair of jeans. A man with a gravely voice—the kind that belongs in a commercial for beer or pickup trucks—says, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The double meaning is very much intended. Last week, mysterious posters went up around New York City reading, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.” They showed the Euphoria star wearing a denim jacket with nothing underneath and revealing a hint of under-cleavage. Now that the campaign has been announced, those posters are being updated with the word “genes” crossed out and “jeans” scrawled like graffiti in its place. They are getting a lot of mileage out of this jeans/genes concept. Sweeney—whose large breasts have been treated as an object of fascination everywhere from Saturday Night Live to MAGA rallies—wrote in a caption for her post about the campaign, “i have great jeans…now you can too.”
This is a cheeky way of making explicit the bait-and-switch promise of so much advertising. Of course, the product itself is rarely what’s being sold, but rather the feeling or fantasy invoked by the campaign. Here, buying a pair of jeans will get you Sweeney’s good “genes.” They mean her large breasts. They mean her sex appeal. I mean, it’s perfect, right? They are going after young women who liked her on Euphoria. Sweeney even referenced her character on the show in an interview this week: “Cassie would live in all American Eagle. She would love it.” But they’re also catering to Gen Z dudes by having Sweeney model jeans for their men’s denim line, too—a departure from their previous approach of hiring a woman and a man for either side of the brand. It also might be a bit of a political hedge. In the latest episode of Dire Straights, the podcast I co-host with Amanda Montei, I talked about how Sweeney has been enthusiastically celebrated by the right. Her large breasts—but also her whiteness and blondness—have been celebrated as an anti-woke “gotcha,” as though her popularity and sex appeal are a refutation of diversity, body positivity, and feminism. It’s very: bring back those bikini beer cozies (as though they ever went anywhere). As I reported last year:
This American Eagle campaign is really very tame, and yet something about its sensibility sent me flipping through mental slides of winking, sexualized commercials from decades past. Like, those 2000s-era Carl’s Junior ads where women in bikinis ate messy, drippy cheeseburgers (interestingly, and I think not at all coincidentally, the brand brought back its sexy ads just this year). Also: those suggestive Wonderbra ads from the nineties (“Look me in the eyes and tell me that you love me,” it read alongside a photo of a supermodel in a push-up bra). It sent me right back to that same era of endlessly drawing cartoon boobs while wishing for breast. I got breast(s), eventually. My dream did come true. I have all the tits I could ever want. But I don’t know that they have ever fully felt like mine. Sometimes Christopher will be checking out my body at home in a nice and obvious way, and I’ll do this little shoulder shimmy or a bounce up and down. And then he’ll make a loving face like: Oh, babe. Because he knows I’m doing that thing. An adolescent thing. A Hello Kitty diary thing. It is a performance of my long-ago fantasy-slash-nightmare about straight men’s desire more so than this particular straight man’s actual desire. He’s not looking for a bouncing tube-site GIF. It’s like that Diane Arbus quote about the gap between intention and effect. A couple years ago, I let a good friend dress me for her wedding, and she chose the kind of dress I would never usually wear. Gold and shiny, with a very deep v-neck requiring an architectural bra. Some Bond-girl shit. A 20something woman at the party came up to me and grabbed my arm. “I love your dress,” she said. “And your boobs.” “Oh, thank you,” I said. “I breastfed a baby with these!” I’d had a few glasses of champagne and it just came out like that. I laughed at myself afterward—the supreme awkwardness of it. Someone compliments your boobs and you talk about breastfeeding? I knew there was self-deprecation in my response, an undercurrent of “they aren’t what they once were.” It also struck me that I had responded to this compliment about my breasts with a fact about what they had done, what they were capable of, beyond just looking good in a $70 plunging underwire bra. More than some kind of Earth Mother “breast is best” pride, I was pointing to one of the most genuinely meaningful and pleasurable experiences in my life. And yet, of course, that meaning and pleasure was tied to giving comfort and sustenance to someone other than myself. This body. These parts? Who do they belong to? And is that not so much the experience of performing these kinds of sexual and bodily ideals: achievement and satisfaction, mixed with alienation and dispossession. You get your breast(s), but are they yours, really?
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četvrtak, 24. srpnja 2025.
On big boobs
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