PSA: It turns out none of us actually know what our boobs look like. Now Twitter has shown us and...well... honestly we have a lot of questions.
There's no denying that boobs present a bit of an enigma for the female race. For example (whisper it) does anyone actually know their bra size? Chances are that by your mid-twenties chances you've been given at least six different possibilities. Some of us may have even found ourselves wondering after coming out of conflicting fittings whether it's physiologically possible to be a B and a D at the same time.
It doesn't help, either, that Instagram still takes firm objection to the female nipple despite the fact that - spoiler alert - really it doesn't look any different to the male nipple, or that women are forced to express milk in office toilets. As far as we have come in liberating the female body from weird patriarchal double standards, every now and then there's something that makes us think 'In 2019 -really?__' and this month, it's that quite a lot of us actually happen to have no idea what goes on inside the female breast.
Luckily, one Twitter user has enlightened us all by posting a diagram including milk ducts. Let's just say it was not at all what we were expecting...
Behold! Actual female breasts. Of course, for some social media users the image hit the 'TMI' trigger, sparking comments like 'Whoah my trypophobia just popped off please stop' and even 'I DON'T WANT BREASTS ANYMORE' and 'I will never unsee this' (I can't blame any of those people, those thoughts crossed my mind too).
But whatever the reaction, the tweet made an impact - since being posted on the 21st of April it's quickly gone viral, amassing 36 thousand retweets, almost 59 thousand comments and over 10 thousand likes.
Ok yes, it might be a bit of a weird thing to pop up on your feed while you're browsing for @Netflix updates - but once we got over that, the question we've all been left plaguing ourselves with is 'how on earth did we not know what milk ducts look like?'. I mean, they literally have been sitting on our bodies for the majority of our adult lives and I don't know about you, but the fact that they looked anything like this is nothing short of a revelation to me.
One user hit the nail on the head by writing 'I have seen so many diagrams of dicks throughout my public school health education and literally never once what the anatomy of a breast looks like' while another pointed out 'Maybe it’s only freaking people out because it’s not normalized because of the patriarchy showing us a man’s biology in class.'
We have to agree, because whatever your feelings about the tweet - there's no doubt that it's highlighted just how far the education system still has to go in teaching female anatomy.
We're probably all mostly familiar with the inner workings of a penis (as everyone on the thread has swiftly pointed out). But when it turns out literally 36 thousand people are flummoxed by a few milk ducts isn't it time to think about making some tweaks to the biology syllabus? After all, a big part of destigmatising anything is having proper education about it available.
Perhaps if more people actually knew what goes on inside a boob (milk ducts and all), they would freak out about women using them in public to breastfeed - which, yes, is literally their intended purpose...