I Attended a Breast Positivity Panel as an Act of Self Care
During the month of February, there appears to be a greater weight of importance surrounding self-care, presumably due to the month-long fanfare bolstering Valentine’s Day in tandem with a need to treat our bodies kindly during the coldest and darkest winter months. As an act of self-care, a friend and I had the opportunity to go to a panel hosted by Dame Products and CUUP, covering topics of breast health, body positivity, and navigating your body through the world.
This panel—Boobs Deserve Better: A Conversation by BodyTalk—is just one event in a calendar of workshops, horoscope readings, yoga classes, and happy hours, all held in a pop-up space nestled between Nolita and Chinatown. Dame Products branded the pop-up as their “Intimate Space”, selling their branded sex toys and wellness products in the front, and reserving a multipurpose space for various events in the back. After speaking with Dame’s marketing director Jocelyn Floro, it was apparent that Dame was encouraging everyone’s self-care practice by facilitating events in a space where people could explore their bodies in conversations around pleasure and reproductive health.
I went into the event tonight fully aware that they had catered their space to millennial cisgender women, and I am their target audience. The table full of Recess CBD beverages, the CUUP bra fittings in the back, and the goody bags with natural deodorant and a branded baseball cap did feel a bit cliche paired with the soft pink and blue hues of the space; it fell in line with most of the start-ups geared toward millennial women in New York.
However—when sitting down to the panel—it was clear that Dame made a concerted effort to include a range of women from varying backgrounds, but all who, like many of us, have internalized memories from childhood due to their breast development. Each speaker brought a different perspective to the table. Speakers included comedian and podcast host Remy Kassimir, founder of Naaya Wellness Sinikiwe Dhliwayo, Dame Products founder Alex Fine, founder of Aurore Erotica Carly Pifer, and Consumer Marketing and Intellectual Property expert Rebecca Batterman. One is a comic, one works with children and physical wellness, one is the CEO of a sex and wellness company, one is a figure in the erotica industry, and one is a businesswoman who recently had a mastectomy after an unexpected bout of breast cancer at 34.
They cover what it’s like to be recognized at a young age for their bodies, as well as acknowledging that nipple hair is common and that the nipples you see in porn are often iced before filming to achieve that specific hardness and texture. Rebecca Batterman speaks of what it was like to have two separate physicians give her a breast exam and ensure her that everything was fine, only to have a sexual partner raise concern enough for her to get a mammogram and find out her breast cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes. This brings up the importance of advocating for yourself in the healthcare space. It also serves as a humbling reminder that our bodies are malleable and will change as we grow, and that may include saying goodbye to the breasts that you may have resented as a teenager.
In conversations around what it’s like to develop as a teen, Carly Pifer discusses how men weaponized her body against her growing up or leered to the point of discomfort. She states that she gained a sense of agency from this, and learned that she could take her appearance into her own hands and use her body in a way that she feels is appropriate for her, and not per the prescription of a male gaze.
Many of the panelists note that, when navigating a larger chest, it’s common to go through the phases of wanting to flaunt it, and then wanting to conceal it. Sinikiwe—being the only woman of color to speak—points out that not only is her body curvy, but in tandem with her race, she has to navigate her work and having a platform in a more sensitive way do to the nature of how she’s perceived by the kids and clients she interacts with.
Unfortunately, the lack of diversity at this event was noticeable; not just surrounding race but the lack of representation of those with breasts who may not identify as women, or those who received their breasts via hormones or elective surgeries later in life. They also did not speak to what it may feel like to be undersexualized, in part due to small breasts. I went with a friend of mine who pointed out that, while it was really empowering to sit in that room and hear people speak so freely about their bodies and their shared experiences, it was isolating feeling as though she couldn’t relate. She notes that she often remembers “noticing other people get noticed” for their bodies and that inevitably feeds into a sense of comparison and competitiveness growing up.
A big takeaway I have from this event was that over-sexualization and undersexualization are not mutually exclusive, and that need to compare our bodies to fit into the mold of what is “sexy” is fueled by the observations of others. If one person is sexualized for their body while the other receives little attention, and that person has a significantly different body type than the other, it’s an instinctual reaction we learn growing up to compare our appearance to those we look nothing alike.
While this event had its imperfections, it sparked a lot of really important conversations. These topics bring up what it means to advocate for yourself in the healthcare space, the importance of loving your body, the correlation between sensuality and body development, and the need for more representation in spaces like these. I’m curious to see if this series will return for February 2021, and I’m more curious to see how they’ll address these topics further next time around.
