By Andrea Scarpino
Here’s the thing : no one wants to talk about breasts, at least not without giggling or pointing or making jokes. We all seem to adore them—children, women, straight and gay men alike—but when it comes down to actually having a conversation about them, things get pretty wonky pretty quickly.
I know this as fact. When talking about my now two-decades-long struggle with breast pain, I’ve watched listeners shift uncomfortably in their seats, watched doctors cover their smiles—and worse, laugh heartily without trying to hide their laughter. Even my mother changes the subject pretty quickly. Breasts may be just another body part like arms or legs, stomachs or livers, but they carry so much metaphorical and symbolic weight that we can’t ever seem to understand them as such.
And here comes a book dedicated to all things breast : their evolutionary history, our fascination with them, their double-identities as baby feeding machines and sites of sexuality, their illnesses, their ability to absorb and store chemicals. Florence Williams can’t escape from breast jokes and giggles, of course, but that may be part of the book’s charm : she knows her subject matter is uncomfortable, and she gives us permission to laugh—I mean, we’re going to anyway.
As expected, much of Breasts is dedicated to breast cancer, which has grown at a rate that should alarm us. And in that, I learned I’m lucky to have made it this long cancer-free, what with my early onset puberty, extensive exposure to radiation as a child with physical disabilities (x-rays, MRI machines), extensive soy consumption (a vegetarian since my teenage years), extensive exposure to chemical pollutants (in virtue of living on our heavily polluted planet), no pregnancies.
But much of Breasts also glances sideways at our construction of disease. According to Williams, it was 20th Century surgeons who pathologized small breasts, even developing a term—micromastia— which they likened to a deformity. The same goes for menopause; Williams writes that drug companies invented “a new pathology called menopause in the same way the surgeons had invented one called micromastia.” All the better to sell us implants and hormone replacement drugs! The social construction of illness at its finest!
And much of the book helps make sense of how complicated our biology really is, how sensitive breasts are to our environment, which helped our species survive (keeping babies alive even through times of famine, for example), but which now, given our high rate of pollution, threatens our survival. As Williams makes clear : as go the breasts, so goes humanity. And breast health isn’t looking very rosy. Inuit women’s breast milk is so toxin-filled it could now “technically qualify as hazardous waste,” more and more men are developing breast cancer and at younger ages, more girls are entering puberty earlier than they ever have before.
And more and more people are like me—without cancer but still struggling with “unspecified endocrine disorders” and “other signs and symptoms of the breast” (diagnoses from my medical files). Our Earth—we’ve really screwed it over. And in doing so, we’ve screwed over our breasts, our bodies, our future as a species. Or we haven’t—the science linking breast diseases to toxins, Williams makes clear, isn’t as cut-and-dry as we would like it to be.
Still, there is much to fear from all the toxins we’ve created and pumped into our Earth, all the toxins we pass on to our babies in the womb and through breast milk, all the toxins we eat and drink and breathe. And there’s much to fear, I’ve learned from reading Breasts, in not understanding breasts as well as we should. They’re not just body parts, Williams makes clear, but sentinels. Warnings.
Planet of the Blind 