"I can't breathe"

Google are promoting anorexia 2.0 to an audience of billions

Guest post by Victoria Smith. Photoshop by Lily.

According to Wikipedia, breast ironing is “the pounding and massaging of a pubescent girl's breasts, using hard or heated objects, to try to make them stop developing or disappear”:

The practice is typically performed by a close female figure to the victim … who will say she is trying to protect the girl from sexual harassment and rape, to prevent early pregnancy that would tarnish the family name, preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV/AIDs, or to allow the girl to pursue education rather than be forced into early marriage.

As anyone who has been through female puberty will know, there is a difference in how the world perceives you before and after you develop breasts. Your position in relation to others changes, leaving you more vulnerable to harassment and objectification. In certain cultures, you will be deemed a grown woman, regardless of your age and development needs. 

None of this means your body is the problem. Girls who undergo breast ironing are not being liberated from oppression; those around them – often believing themselves to have the victims’ best interests at heart – are committing abuse. However long-standing the practice may be in some parts of Africa, the UN considers breast ironing to be gender-based violence.  

You would think that if something similar were happening in other cultures, that, too, would be condemned. If, for instance, wealthier girls in predominantly white societies were crushing their breasts in order to be their “true selves”, we’d call it what it is: self-harm. Yet breast binding – “the act of flattening breasts by the use of constrictive materials” – is not considered problematic, even though it can lead to “chest and back pain, rib bruising and fractures, shortness of breath, overheating, and skin damage”. According to a Google piece for Trans Awareness Week, “there is freedom that comes when your inside and outside align”. Breast binding is a way for people to “affirm who they are” (even if they can barely breathe). 

It is not clear how or why breasts themselves – as opposed to social responses to them – should impede such self-realisation. If African grandmothers are wrong to believe that breasts are incompatible with a girl getting an education, why aren’t Western teenagers are equally wrong to believe that 32Ds are incompatible with defying traditional gender roles? After all, you’d have to be a massive racist to think mainly African communities are following sexist, regressive rules while mainly European/North American ones are engaged in some complex, sophisticated act of gender discovery. Not when the principle is the same: crush your tits, expect people to see and treat you as a person and not just some girl. 

It’s not that I expect a tech giant to care all that much about the nuances of patriarchy and female body hatred. I just wonder why Google are so keen to regard breast binding with a wholly uncritical eye. This is not about acceptance; you can validate the feelings of others without endorsing a harmful solution. Yet rather than showing empathy for those experiencing trauma of body dysphoria, Google are using it to market a product and an ideology. Who wouldn’t want “the freedom that comes when your inside and outside align”? This is an advertising slogan, promising something for which every adolescent girl longs. The tech industry is known for being misogynistic and porn obsessed – profoundly so. And now here they are, pushing a wokewashed version of the idea that one shall not be judged by the content of one’s character, but the size of one’s breasts. Thank you for this gift, giant American corporation.

I write as someone who has experienced adulthood on both sides of the tit divide. In early adulthood, anorexia left me flat-chested; post-anorexia, I went to the other extreme. If you were to ask me when I enjoyed the “freedom that comes when your inside and outside align”, I’d say it was when I had no breasts at all. Apart from nearly dying of starvation bit, it was great. I felt I could be seen as a thinker, not just some dolly bird. When I finally acquired 34FFs in my mid-twenties, I immediately noticed an increase in street harassment. I felt incensed that I was not being seen as my true self. I still feel this, to a certain extent (if anything it gets worse. I am now both a dolly bird tit person AND a middle-aged woman. My outside conveys both “slag” and “bigoted Karen”, even though my inside is pure Cambridge intellectual meets Cumbrian charmer. No, I don’t know what that would look like, either). 

If I were to tell you that I miss what my breastless body said about me, you could tell me I was harming myself – and you’d be right. You could also say that the meanings imposed on my body are the things that need to change – and you’d be right again. Yet you cannot say this to someone who wishes to use a binder, at least not without being called a bigot. A transgender identity is understood to transcend the usual compromises female people make with the body they have and the ways in which others see it. It has no relational context; it demands nothing from others. Binding may look like just another instance of female people making themselves smaller in order to avoid all the misogynist assumptions made about breasts and brains, but it’s far more complex than that. 

Or at least, that’s what Google wants you to think, presenting binders as meeting “a critical need for trans people around the world”. Perhaps one day gc2b binders will reach the Cameroonian communities in which breast ironing is rife – problem solved! There’s no need for the UN to worry about gender-based violence if you can convince people to do the damage themselves, using language which suggests it’s not damage at all. 

Call me unsophisticated, but I think if it looks like harm, then that’s what it is. Then again, what would I know? I might think I’m intelligent, but have you seen the size of my tits?