Book Review | A witty biography of the most popular human body part

Way back in the Renaissance, French kings were all about commissioning paintings of their mistresses. These weren’t your average “Hey, let’s hang this in the hallway” kind of paintings. No, these were “Check out my lady’s gravity-defying boobs” masterpieces. Meanwhile, in the same paintings, you’d find the wet nurses — boobs out and proud, doing the heavy lifting (literally!) of feeding the royal tots. It’s like an ancient episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, but with more nipple.

Then, along came Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s, strutting into Hollywood and making jaws drop everywhere. She was the ultimate bombshell, starring in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and posing topless in the inaugural issue of Playboy. Can you picture Marilyn thinking, “Well, this is one way to get things off my chest”? Boy, did that issue fly off the shelves!

Breasts, tits, boobies — whatever you call them, they're always in the spotlight but rarely taken seriously. Too big? Taboo. Too small? Taboo. So when Sarah Thornton, author of Tit’s Up: What Our Beliefs about Breasts Reveal about Life, Love, Sex, and Society, named her silicone implants Bert and Ernie after her double mastectomies, it was both hilarious and peculiar.

But why ever not? If “tits up” means something’s gone kaput, why can’t we reclaim the narrative? After all, the English language boasts over 700 terms for the breasts — most of them coined by men. Time to flip the script, hey!

Thornton’s book is a hilarious deep dive into the five fabulous facets of boobs — hardworking tits, lifesaving jugs, treasured chests, active apexes and holy mammaries. Along the way, she skewers anti-prostitute, anti-porn feminists for infantilising sex workers.

Thornton also spills the tea on breast augmentation — turns out boobs lift like lollipops with silicone implants making up 40 per cent of plastic surgeries. And bra math? Every brand — Wacoal, Natori, Calvin Klein — has its own secret formula, like algebra with underwire. Remember the mythical bra-burning of 1968? Turns out, it wasn’t about setting lingerie ablaze but tossing bras into “freedom trashcans” to protest the Miss America pageant’s objectification of women. Bra-burning? More like bra-tossing, but hey, “trashcan-tossing feminists” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

Dr Shubhda Chaudhary is a research fellow at Centre for India-West Asia Dialogue

Tits Up: What Our Beliefs about Breasts Reveal about Life, Love, Sex, and Society

By Sarah Thornton

Bluebird

pp. 321; Rs 899