Jennifer Horgan: I hate to say this but I hope my daughters will have small breasts
Women and girls should be able to love their bodies but we have to deal with feelings of inadequacy or the exhausting spotlight of unwanted attention — the apparent fate of those with 'small' or 'big' breasts respectively.
Taoiseach Simon Harris wishes for Ireland to be the best place in the world to be a child. It’s a fine wish, possibly the finest.
Wishing things for our children reminds me of one of my favourite poems, , by Philip Larkin. It was written on the birth of Kingsley Amis’ daughter, Sally, for whom Larkin wishes not the ‘usual stuff,’ but that she be ‘ordinary’. Ordinariness, he writes, offers her the best chance of ‘catching’ happiness.
It’s a bit uninspiring when you think about it. To be happy, Sally must duck beneath the radar.
I love the poem, but would he have written the same for a boy?
I also hate that I find myself at least partly agreeing with it. The inevitable abuse of women in the public eye is proof that Larkin’s is a solid game plan.
What a bleak thing to wish for — not that there’s anything wrong with being ordinary. No, but there is something wrong with wishing to be ordinary above all else.
And then, an even darker thought arrives on the back of Larkin’s wish. A true horror of a thought — knock, knock, knocking louder, demanding entry. One I’m ashamed to admit and even more reluctant to share.
Somewhere, bubbling up from my subconscious I find myself making another, vicious little wish — that my daughters might have small breasts.
Be ordinary, my daughters, and have small breasts.
How awful, how sad, and how unjust.
I am a feminist, and yet I find myself wanting my daughters to have smaller chests to make their lives easier, to keep them safe. A woman should never have to change to fit the misogynistic moulds of our society. And yet, the thought is there. Ringing as clear as a bell — the truth of it.
I know why I think it too, as much as I may wish now to unthink it. Or rephrase that — as much as I wish my life hadn’t caused me to think it, even for a second.
At 13, I didn’t understand the burden of a big chest because it wasn’t my reality. I saw my small chest only in terms of deficit. I performed the usual magic tricks to give myself a fighting chance among better endowed friends. I stuffed my bra with toilet roll until I understood to buy padded ones, more pad than space for actual cleavage.
I felt inadequate. Boys seemed to find girls with bigger chests funnier, more interesting, fascinating in fact.
It took a few decades before I realised what my friends had gone through. My jealousy clouded my empathy. I understand now that they often struggled to find clothes and underwear that offered them enough coverage or support, and that they were often made to feel self-conscious.
Yes, of course they got plenty of attention, but a great deal of it was unwanted. A big chest carried the bigger weight of other people’s assumptions. In the 1990s, certainly, if you had a big chest you were deemed ‘up for it’ in a way that flat-chested girls weren’t.
It was as if nature and, in turn, society, had decided what you were for, and it had very little to do with your intelligence or your acumen.
Of course, big breasts are beautiful and attractive, but boys in the ’90s expected and demanded more from girls with curves, and far earlier too.
Too often, big busts propelled people into a sexual maturity they weren’t ready for. That male gaze was a spotlight that never went out, a bulb fizzing throughout our puberty and beyond. And it must have been exhausting for the girls beneath it.
It was not something I imagined. Science reveals people’s assumptions based on chest size. Psychologist Krzysztof Koscinski revealed the truth of how we respond to bigger-breasted women. As part of an experiment, his team recruited 163 young women who were willing to undergo a battery of physiological and psychological assessments. They found no correlation between breast size and fertility or sexual activity.
They then invited 500 men and women to examine images of women with small to large breasts. This is where things got interesting.
Reporting on the experiment in , David Ludden, PhD, describes how the 500 “rated the large-breasted version as most sexually attractive and also more open to casual sex than when the woman’s breasts were medium or small”.
"They believed large-breasted woman to be less faithful, less intelligent, and less diligent than either the medium or small version."
Relating breasts to character, morality, or intelligence is repulsive.
It’s not something we hear much about in the media, but writer Jackie Adedeji spoke out about it last year. She said:
She also shared how as a child her teachers separated her from her class when changing for sport at school. They explained that her body was too ‘mature’ for the boys to handle, leaving her feeling like she was abnormal, that her body was at odds with the world.
There are even darker shades to the issue of the female shape navigating the world.
In certain cultures, the mothers of young girls carry out painful procedures on their daughters to flatten their chests. They physically abuse their loved ones. Why? To save their daughters from harassment and rape, from men noticing the onset of puberty too soon.
Other women, more and more women it seems, are choosing to change their natural shape by surgery. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) says breast reductions are the second most popular aesthetic procedure. It says there were 5,270 breast reductions in 2022, up 120% from the year before and higher than pre-covid.
I wish it were different, and I’ll end this by hoping it is different now, for young girls and women out there.
It’s possible that more open sex education in our schools, and in our homes, is helping young boys to develop more respectful attitudes to girls, whatever their shape. It is possible girls are more confident in themselves regardless.
Philip Larkin wished for Sally Amis to be ordinary. I understand the sentiment, but I am ultimately going to disagree. He may be right, and the poem is wonderful, but wishes should be aspirational and that wish is too depressing to bear. Larkin describes the world as it is, not as it should be.
I wish for respect and kindness to be ordinary, a given, so girls and women, boys, and men, can be whoever they want to be. I wish this as part of what Harris wishes for — that Ireland will soon be the best country in which to be a child.
Larkin also penned the line, “What will survive of us is love.” What forms us is love too. Let’s make that our starting part, our very first wish, our most constant thought — and go from there.
