One of the reasons I love coming-of-age stories, whether in movies or in novels, is because of the sexual awakenings that the teenager begins to feel. To become alive towards the eroticism of certain body parts, one’s own or others’, is both a novel and exciting event. Yet blessed be the male, for he has a lot to be excited for.
Except for having something between your legs that only extends when aroused and is otherwise a pitiful show of soggy skin, a female body owns its identity to its sexual organs. Being the offering party, the females hold the power in both rejecting the gazing eyes, and also in arousing them. Yet it’s the usual behavior of hiding the breast that they retain their power, for, as Yalom mentions earlier in her book, once the behavior becomes that of uncovering them, they shall eventually lose its ability to evoke desire.
To yearn, if only rarely, how does having the opposite sex’s body parts feels, is a common curiosity both the sexes come upon, but how would they respond should their wish come true, might vastly, and comically, differ. When asking random teenage boys and girls on the streets about what would they do if they were able to swap bodies with an opposite gender, the girls reply that they would see how having ‘it’ feels, but the boys! - one of them goes: ‘I’ll let all the homies hit!’.
While being hilarious, this witty remark points to something all the coming-of-age boys go through, and this one kid’s admirable awareness of it, which is that all of us, from puberty on, in varying degrees however, yearn for the experience of coming in contact with the other body. And we aren’t merely as curios, or selfish, to keep the experience only for ourselves should our wish be granted.
On the spectrum of varying degrees of male-yearning, I’m probably towards the extreme end. There are times where having not masturbated for a while, I become imaginatively obsessed with the female-breasts, and the very possibility of me seeing them again, albeit on the internet, is a source of great joy. But at other times, the desire takes on a more demanding stance, and I cannot help but long to imagine what feeling an actual pair might feel like. Twenty-five years on, the quest continues still.
But once the emotions simmer, I become stupidly aware of why should one yearn for, what’s apparently just another human organ, so desperately, so self-consumingly? I remember one of my friend’s remark that she sees it only as another organ, like ears or nose; to which I thought, of course you do since you haven’t yearned, just ask me. Reading Yalom’s historical book, I was hoping to get some context around my earnest desires about the breasts. To understand how to think about them, which shall help me curb the intensity for feeling for them.
Yalom begins her book in the medieval ages, where the breast was but sacred: a symbol of godliness, a nurturing organ, the motherly breast that feeds and gives life. The Renaissance, with its sheer force of paintings and arts, changes the perspective about the breast from the sacred to erotic; showing a nipple here, and a squeezing of breast there, and an endless number of naked ones in general. The Dutch, however, rescue the breast from man’s passionate desires, and domesticate it: the feeding-breast becomes the center not only of the family, but also of the society. The French Revolution, for the first time in history, politicizes the breast, and the naked bosom becomes ‘the bosom for the nation’.
Freud holds the breast as the fueling desire in the subconscious, and demonstrates through psychoanalysis, the early and lasting effects that they hold over the lives of men. The twentieth century commercializes the breast, where women become both the buyers and sellers: of corsets, bras, and lingerie, and to magazines, movies, and porn. The medical breast comes and horrifically stops us in our desires, and faces us up to how deadly these organs can be, and how painfully neglected then. The Liberated Breast, my favorite chapter, shows how little feelings had women expressed about what’s essentially their organs, and how that’s changing.
Yalom’s last chapter, The Bast in Crisis, wraps up the whole book in dignity, understanding, and awe: how the breast ‘has been and will be the marker of society’s values.’
Ratings: 4/5 **** September 15, 2022_