Oof it's hard to be the owner of a magnificent pair of generously sized boobs sometimes. There are the tedious negotiations one must engage in to make any top that should be worn sans bra to work very much avec one. There’s the back ache, which is real. There’s the fact that they are greedy limelight-hoggers, prone to distract attention from your fabulous new earrings, expert eye make-up and dazzling conversation. Not, of course, to be ungrateful for the bounty bestowed on us by genes/God/a well-chosen doctor, but owning a bombshell bosom can be a drag.
I write this as someone who has topped out at a rather cartoonishly proportioned 28G. Quite fabulous, in hindsight, not that I thought it at the time. With the Hello Boys! Wonderbra and lads-mag era long ago discarded – and years spent watching perfect itty-bitty boobies on catwalks – my rack felt inelegant, uncool, either matronly or camp.
Still, even the most lavishly endowed among us have probably never found our boobs to be at the centre of socio-political discourse. But such is the majesty of The White Lotus, Euphoria and Madame Web star Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage that it became a hot topic online for a hot minute after she presented Saturday Night Live in a plunging dress last month. Such has been the fuss (Sweeney was spotted wearing a sweatshirt with the words: 'Sorry for having great tits') you’d think that she was just a gorgeous pair of boobs with an accomplished actor and prodigiously young producer attached.
So yes, Sweeney’s are tits of influence. So much so, in fact, that they even reached the Capitol. Kind of. A US politician posted a (now deleted) jokey tweet of a stunned Joe Biden at the State of the Union Address appearing to ogle Sweeney.
For some conservative commentators, Sweeney’s boobs signified the death knell for much-maligned ‘woke culture’– which is an awful lot of power to project on to a pair of breasts, whatever their size. The argument being that we diversity-welcoming left-leaning snowflakes are scared of objective, obvious hotness and outraged by push-up bras?
‘Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?’ asked writer Amy Hamm in Canada’s National Post. ‘Yay! Boobs are back!’ proclaimed Bridget Phetasy in The Spectator, adding, ‘For anyone under the age of 25, they’ve likely never seen it in their lifetime – as the giggling blonde with an amazing rack has been stamped out [of ] existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.’ That particular quote received a lot of blowback on X (sample: ‘it’s true there’s been no way to see boobs on the internet for 25 years’; ‘are you people OK?’) and there has been a slew of clapback think pieces since then, the general thrust being – stop being so insane about Sweeney’s boobs.
One of the kickbacks has been around the fact that boobs can’t be ‘back’, they just ‘are’. Hmm, agree and disagree. Agree because obviously body types shouldn’t be subject to trends – that way danger and homogeny lies. However, any realist will admit that beauty standards are as subject to the capricious whims of trends as hemlines – that’s why hairlines were plucked in medieval times and Brazilian butt lifts have boomed since 2015.
Recently, Megan Fox appeared on the Call Me Daddy podcast where she was radically transparent about the surgery she’s had done. She spoke of her love of big boobs and relayed telling her surgeon, ‘I don’t care what’s on trend. Give me 1990 stripper titties; that’s what I want.’
But back to Sweeney and the ridiculousness of her boobs becoming such a point of debate. I get it – boobs are just great! No need to overthink it. And she seems to get it too. If you think she’s feeling weary from carrying the weight of a million opinions on her chest, fear not. Sweeney has been out since SNL in all manner of fantastically resplendent plunging gowns, from the vintage Marc Bouwer she wore
to the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party to Miu Miu at the GLAAD Media Awards. Because, as she knows, the only thing better than a great pair of tits is not giving a hoot what anyone thinks about them.