Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male Fantasies

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February 23, 1997

Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male

Fantasies
By NATALIE ANGIER

Throughout Western history, breasts have symbolized anything and

everything to men
A HISTORY OF

A woman's breasts bear the paradoxical burden of being

THE BREAST
esthetic organs. They are modified sweat glands that
By Marilyn Yalom.
secrete what is essentially enriched sweat, a lactational
Illustrated. 331 pp.
charge without which the human race, until very recently,
New York:
could not have survived. At the same time, breasts in
Alfred A. Knopf.
Western culture have long been considered the paired
$29.95.
centerpieces of female erotic beauty, a woman's ''natural
jewels,'' in the words of the culture critic Anne Hollander,
and the things that make men ''stupid,'' as the humorist
Dave Barry has put it. Imagine if the pancreas had to be pretty while releasing
insulin. Or, just for fun, imagine if fashion and female taste dictated the display of
a man's reproductive organs through a bit of pelvic decolletage.
In ''A History of the Breast,'' a fascinating cultural, political and artistic history of
our most symbolically freighted body part, Marilyn Yalom shows how the breast
dialectic has been in full swing for centuries now, although the terms of the debate
have shifted depending on the needs and mores of the era. There have been ''good''
breasts and ''bad'' breasts, giving breasts and withholding breasts, breasts bared
defiantly and breasts bared submissively. Sometimes the maternal breast has been
in the ascendant, as we see in the many Renaissance images of the nursing
Madonna, Maria lactans, who gently offers a breast to suckle the baby Jesus and,
vicariously, the hungry soul of every Christian. At other times the sexual breast has
reigned, an image of enticement and even aggression, when harlots are depicted
with their breasts practically spilling out of their bodices, as if social and moral
chaos were about to erupt, or goddess figurines sport snakes where their bosoms
should be.
Ms. Yalom's stately romp through history is variously enlightening, amusing and
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Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male Fantasies

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enraging, and by the time the French Revolution arrives and the female breast is
assigned yet another iconic responsibility -- as an emblem of liberty, fraternity and
egalitarianism -- one is tempted to mutter, why don't they get it off our chests
already?
A senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University and
the author of several previous books, including ''Blood Sisters: The French
Revolution in Women's Memory,'' Ms. Yalom doesn't quite fulfill her promise to
''make you think about women's breasts as you never have before,'' and her
narrative sometimes is more an accretion of details and fleeting observations than a
consistently argued thesis. Ultimately, though, any failings of this book are not the
author's, but history's (as I will discuss later).
Ms. Yalom emphasizes that not every culture sexualizes the female breast, and that
in Africa and the South Pacific women have gone about with their breasts
uncovered and their men not only unstupefied but rather indifferent. She confines
herself, then, to Western history, focusing on ''certain moments when a specific
conception of the breast took hold of the Western imagination, and changed the
way it was seen and represented.''
In the beginning was the breast, she writes, and the breast was sacred. No infant
could survive without it, and thus it is hardly surprising that some of the earliest
artifacts from the Stone Age are bone, stone and clay figurines of females with
enormous busts (as well as thighs and buttocks). Breasts were best not only big but
in abundance. The fantasy of the multibreasted woman, a staple of Indian art, also
found expression in the West, particularly in the famous ''polymastic'' statues of
Artemis of Ephesus, dating from around the second century A.D., which show the
goddess with 20 or more pendulous accessories assumed to be breasts.
The ancient Greeks largely replaced the worship of the breast with a celebration of
the phallus, and indeed the breast took on threatening undertones, particularly with
the legend of the Amazons -- the name theoretically derived from the Greek words
''a'' (without) and ''mazos'' (breast). The Amazons were said to be a tribe of
powerful warrior women who chopped off one breast to draw the bow more easily.
As for the other breast, it was used to nurse any female children they bore; male
infants were disposed of. ''The missing breast creates a terrifying asymmetry: one
breast is retained to nurture female offspring, the other is removed so as to facilitate
violence against men,'' Ms. Yalom writes.
During the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church's dim view of corporality
resulted in artistic portrayals of the human form that scarcely distinguished between
male and female. But with the Renaissance and the renewed emphasis on the flesh,
the breast returned with fresh lessons to convey. It became synonymous with
spiritual nourishment and maternal sacrifice, and images in religious art, the author
says, drew ''the explicit parallel between the blood flowing from Christ's chest
wounds and the milk from Mary's breast.''
Yet even as the Madonna del Latte image paintings proliferated, the erotic breast
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sprang into view. In the 15th century, Agnes Sorel, mistress of King Charles VII of
France, was painted, like the Virgin, with one breast bared -- not to suckle souls,
but ''served up like a piece of fruit for the delectation of an observer.'' Poets wrote
paeans to the breast, littering their work with metaphors from botany -- breasts
were ''buds,'' ''strawberries,'' ''apples'' and ''cherrylets'' -- or from astronomy and
geography: breasts as ''orbs,'' ''globes,'' ''worlds'' and ''hemispheres.'' Importantly,
eroticized breasts in paintings were often shown with a man's proprietary hand
cupped on them. ''The hand on the breast . . . spoke for the sense of possession that
men believed was their due,'' according to Ms. Yalom.
The breast became increasingly politicized. Ms. Yalom deals at length with the
debate over the widespread practice of wet-nursing. When the state and the medical
community decided in the 18th century that women should suckle their own young,
rather than farm them out to hired paps, the ''domestic breast'' came into vogue.
Artists depicted ordinary women in the act of breast-feeding. Jean Jacques
Rousseau argued not only that breast-feeding would attach a mother more deeply to
her child but that fathers, too, would become more engaged in the family, resulting
in wholesale societal renewal. By the end of the 18th century, breast-feeding had
become such a cult that the French Government ruled it would give no state support
to a family unless the mother nursed her children.
Undoubtedly aware of the market value of their ''natural jewels,'' women have gone
to great lengths to enhance and emphasize their breasts. Ms. Yalom traces the
evolution of corsets and brassieres, and of gimmicks like the 19th-century ''bust
developer'' -- a three-part program consisting of cream, lotion and a metal object
resembling a toilet plunger.
ONLY in recent years have women begun to claim their breasts as their own, as
they did in the 1960's and 70's by dispensing with bras altogether, or by declaring,
as some women do now, that breast-feeding can be a sensual pleasure. Women can
also find a distinctive humor in breasts, one that has nothing to do with the kind of
adolescent humor found in Playboy cartoons. Witness the 1991 ''Bosom Ballet,'' by
the performance artist Annie Sprinkle, in which she uses her elegantly gloved
hands to squeeze her naked breasts up, down, apart, to the side and together; or the
photographer Cindy Sherman's depiction of herself as the nursing Madonna, milk
dripping from a breast prosthesis strapped to her chest.
This exhilarating burst of female takes on the breast underscores what is so lacking
in the historical material: women's voices and women's vision. Ms. Yalom rues the
fact that despite her best efforts, she found very little in the record to indicate how
women have felt about their breasts: whether they took pleasure in them, the extent
to which they chose to display their breasts or if they had any say in the debate
over wet-nursing. Hence, much of the documented epic of the breast is a
voyeuristic one, told from the perspective of those who lack the organs yet still
claim ultimate authority on the subject. Let's hope that women keep talking, if only
to say, as Marilyn Yalom does in paraphrasing Freud, ''Sometimes a breast is just a
breast.''
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Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male Fantasies

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Natalie Angier, a science reporter for The New York Times, is the author of
''Natural Obsessions'' and ''The Beauty of the Beastly.''

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