For those wondering if breasts can be political, the only sane answer is “of course not”. Can’t we leave off objectifying breasts for a hot minute? And besides, breasts are born centrists, favoring neither left nor right.
That is before the outfit Lauren Sánchez, journalist and fiancée to Jeff Bezos, Amazon tycoon, wore to the Capitol Rotunda for the swearing in of the 47th President of the United States. Sánchez breezily went her own way with the dress code, exposing her bra and the upper half of her breasts.
What followed added some Carry On Camping sniggering to an otherwise heavily solemn occasion. It certainly could not go without notice for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook tycoon, for whom Sánchez’s cleavage was as dangerous as a deeply dug bear trap. Any man who is both a public figure and before the world’s cameras would have chanted “eyes up, eyes up” with the determination of a Zen monk. But Zuckerberg is in many ways not a man: he was set in the aspic of wealth when he founded Facebook aged 19 (see also his neck chains and rapper T-shirts). Plus, all those Instagram Reels do rather fry one’s attention span.
So a million memes were born of Zuckerberg — with the restraint of an easily distracted teenage boy — leering downwards at another tech mogul’s partner, as his own wife Priscilla turned her shoulder.
For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook tycoon, Sánchez’s cleavage was as dangerous as a deeply dug bear trap.
Meanwhile, with equal and opposite force, Sánchez was reprimanded online and on TV shows.The American broadcaster Megyn Kelly said it was absurd that she “could not even keep them covered up for a day”. If this strikes you as a scene that could have been replayed in the Colosseum of ancient Rome, substituting Nero’s wife, or the court of Louis XIV, with the low corsetry of a Versailles mistress, you would be right. This scene was deeply conservative. And so in fact the answer to whether breasts can be political is a double yes.
Some historians of the 20th century have speculated over the “hemline index”, that skirt length rises in line with economic buoyancy. But there is another association: the eras when large breasts are fashionable are repressive for women. In the 1920s women were heady with emancipation, flatter chests were in vogue the better to actively break free of literal and social Edwardian corsetry. But in the 1950s women needed to be sent home from the workplaces they had infiltrated in the war, hence Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
Marilyn Yalom, a Stanford historian, wrote in A History of the Breast that “men needed to be reassured that the nightmare of war was over and that the breasts they had dreamed of were now available to them”. The message for 1950s women: “Your role is to provide the breast, not the bread.”
The eras when large breasts are fashionable are repressive for women.
Again, after the feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s, the early Nineties were a boob bonanza. Pamela Anderson’s augmented breasts were reigning supreme on Baywatch, and Elizabeth Hurley practically wrote the Sánchez playbook, stealing the show and launching her career at the Four Weddings and a Funeral premiere in 1994 in a Versace gown holding her boobs together with a safety pin or two. The same year Eva Herzigova became the face of the “Hello Boys” Wonderbra campaign. The craze for breast surgery was, argued Yalom, “an unconscious attempt to resuscitate the Fifties’ nonworking, maternal bosom”.
And now, the breast is back, in some quarters at least.
A key feature of the “trad wife” phenomenon online is pillowy, maternal 1950s breasts, in contrast to the stronger, more athletic 21st-century silhouette of the Obama era when many female celebrities had their breast implants removed. Evie Magazine, the bible of the religious conservative woman in the United States, recently launched the “Raw Milkmaid Dress”, low cut along the breast almost to the nipple.
When the White Lotus actress Sydney Sweeney appeared in a full-cleavage outfit on Saturday Night Live last year, her breasts were instantly politicized and championed by the conservative right, who equated big boobs with a retrograde ogling era. Example of the debate: one newspaper asked, “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” “Hello boys” had become “hello Proud Boys”. Such was the weirdness of this appropriation, Sweeney responded with a sweatshirt reading, “Sorry for Having Great Tits and Correct Opinions”.
So Sánchez’s breasts appear at a surprising cultural moment. The word “cleavage” after all, was coined first for political division. Sánchez wore a trouser suit in Emmeline Pankhurst white, cut to reveal her Emmeline Pankhurst white bra, making her breasts practically a pair of suffragettes throwing themselves in front of a galloping horse. Many on the left would argue that in the Capitol Rotunda, built as a temple to the boob, Sánchez should wear whatever felt right. But are we moving into an era when many conservatives respond: a big cleavage feels very right, very right indeed?
Helen Rumbelow is a London-based writer
