As a child, I remember looking at my Barbie and wondering when I, too, would look like that. I would suck in my waist and try to expand my childish breasts. Of course, as an adult I realized that normal female human beings do not look like Barbie.
Besides, being ethnically Asian and not part of the Beverly Hills Sweet Sixteen I need a plastic surgery party kind of social class, it was not meant to be. I was never going to have a chest that might inspire comparisons with missile heads or melons. Men and women let me know about my deficiency in this respect.
Yet I've been on both sides of just enough and not enough. As a mediocre gymnast in high school, my meager cleavage was a blessing. I have a good physique for a female gymnast. Gymnasts move on after they hit their twenties and develop womanly figures, and some even develop some real cleavage. When I was still pursuing gymnastics, I got on a scale every day. As one male gymnast pointed out, if you don't have much cleavage you can't afford to get a gut.
Now, I'm much too old for gymnastics, but in my current hobby of belly dancing, there's not enough jiggle on top to make any sort of shoulder shimmy worth watching. While belly dancing originated in North Africa and West Asia where women dress conservatively, in Europe and America, belly dancing is performed in what is little more than a fancy bra and a skirt. Cleavage matters. I have no jelly bowls to jiggle.
As a young adult, I've suffered through bad bras, and as a post-college woman, I've been offended by online crassness when I was still dating. A guy wants to see a full-length photo and even then, more than a few will ask you what your cup size is. They expect at least a B and hope for a C if you're Asian.
As being ethnically Asian defines me, having breasts that require a bra defines me. I am to some men, my bra size.
Even so, I can't imagine the kind of pain and self-image reassessment that Angelina Jolie went through before she arrived at her decision. She is an attractive woman and she must know that some of that attraction has to do with her breasts. When the story broke about Jolie's NYTimes opinion piece, I remember thinking about what some waggish film commentator wrote about her as Lara Croft, something about her running in a T-shirt. For some men, all women are just their breasts. I once watched the Oscars with a mixed crowd and a pre-med student kept commenting on all the women--whether they were or were not wearing a bra. Maybe some men filter those thoughts before letting the words leave their mouths. I hope not.
As one of my colleagues noted, there was some lamenting online about the loss of Jolie's breasts. I am sure that she must have known this would happen. She has chosen to have reconstructive surgery. Will people now cattishly compare the now and after?
The kind of mindset that equates women with their breasts almost justifies the kind of modesty you find in North Africa and West Asian countries. Consider that female breasts are not the historically the sexual obsession of all cultures. There used to be a joke about the difference between Chinese and Japanese women showing their physical assets. Chinese women showed a little leg. Japanese women showed the back of their neck or a white foot and ankle. Cheongsams and kimonos aren't made to show cleavage.
In Japan, the concept of female sexuality is more mutable. The first novel in world history, Genji Monogatari, was written by a woman. At one point, the protagonist's good friend opines that it is a shame that Genji wasn't born a woman. That's not an admission of homosexuality, but how in the Japanese culture things aren't always what they seem. A beautiful face is a beautiful face but could easily belong to a man or a woman.
In Japanese traditional theater, all the actors are men. That wasn't originally so. Kabuki started out with female actors, some of whom might have also been soliciting. Eventually, the women were replaced by boys and when male patrons were still brawling over the boys as women, the boys were replaced by men and the onnagata tradition began.
One of the most popular and celebrated onnagata is Bando Tamasaburo V. Watching him on TV and on stage, you can learn how to be womanly in a traditional Japanese sense. You don't need cleavage to be feminine. I've met heterosexual men who were lovestruck by Tamasaburo in his younger years.
Even the samurai tradition, if Western aficionados would admit it, has an element of homosexuality that can fall into a gray area as illustrated in the 1999 Japanese movie "Gohatto" (御法度), or "Taboo."The Nagisa Oshima film isn't so much about homosexuality but the desire for a beautiful face that could be a woman's. You have to wonder why Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei Matsuda) refuses to cut his bangs. Would that make him more masculine and in this all-male group, less powerful? Yet for this essay, what's important is that he inspired lust not because he looks like another man, but because he could pass as a woman.
How hard is it for a woman to realize that she'll never be as beautiful as a man dressed as a woman? That topic was touched upon in the 2003 Takeshi Kitano "Zatoichi." I knew that feeling when I saw Tamasaburo as a woman and again when I was in Hollywood one day. I was rushing in between work and classes. I had not brushed my hair or had time to put on lipstick. Yet the most beautiful woman in the room was a man. He obviously had to try hard and I wasn't even trying. That either makes you give up and gives you time to consider what makes a woman?
In Western cinema, women like Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Ashley have been able to make it without a bountiful cleavage and been considered beautiful. Yet in more recent years it seems as if pornography has crossed over to become part of pop culture with Madonna posing for a special limited edition pornographic book. Breast augmentation surgery has become more common place. Now small breasts can be considered a physical defect.
In another real streets of Hollywood experience, I remember taking a woman to a one-woman stage show about breast cancer in Hollywood. She said, "Why would anyone want to talk about that?" What she said was true. Even at a time when it was finally PC to talk about AIDS and HIV, past the Larry Kramer and ACT-UP generation, people didn't want to talk about breast cancer. But we do need to talk about breast cancer, and women shouldn't feel that their identity as women depends upon their two breasts.
Instead of talking about Angelina Jolie's breasts, we should be talking about how expensive it is for the average American woman to get the genetic test for BRCA1 and BRCA2. We should talk about how some 458,000 women each year die from breast cancer and how few women can afford the choice of reconstructive surgery. We should talk about breast cancer or how to talk about breasts without falling into a snickering boy peeping Tom mentality.
In America, we have the technology, but we don't have affordable healthcare, something that is available in other countries such as Japan and Canada.
We need to rethink our values. Angelina Jolie gave us something to talk about and it was undoubtedly a courageous thing to do. Let's talk about things that matter to hundreds of thousands of women all over the world. I no longer want to be Barbie, but I also don't want to be defined by my cup size. Angelina Jolie noted she had options, but those medical options aren't available to too many women in America and around the world.
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