Has anyone come across this tumblr? I really like it.
“Okay, so we want two sexy women on the front cover. Both with tops that don’t cover much and you know what? Maybe one of them is pants-less. Yeah! And have them pose in a really sexy way. Woah, woah woah! What is that? Did you just draw nipples? That’s too far man. Children read these things."
“Boobs Don’t Work That Way” is a “blog about tits and the impossible things artists make them do,” according to the homepage. And it delivers! Each of the 22 pages features numerous renderings of women and their breasts, or I should say, their impossible breasts. Because let’s face it, friends, Real Breasts Don’t Work This Way.
Conversations about our breast-obsessed culture are not new or radical. We know we love breasts, and it doesn’t take a lot of looking around to be reminded of this fact. Breasts are all over the place! On billboards, commercials, movies, magazines, and oh yes, on many of the women we encounter every day. For a lot of us in women’s bodies, we’ve experienced having a conversation with a man and noticing his eyes conversing with our breasts, rather than our faces. I noticed this for the first time when I was about thirteen.
What “Boobs Don’t Work That Way” does that I love is expose some of the absurdity of our breast obsession. Artistic depictions of women’s breasts are often realistic, but this tumblr gives us a cache of the ones that are NOT. And it is refreshing to see someone make fun of these pictures! I mean, they’re so ridiculous! If I were an alien from another world, what would I think if I saw all these pictures? Would I think women have globes of flesh attached to their chests, devoid of nipples? Would I think these globes are perfectly round and humongous compared to their waists? Would I think these globes were detachable? Some of these breasts look like they’re about to fall right off the women who possess them.
And what is particularly interesting about that point what it brings to mind about embodiment. Women who have breasts experience their breasts are part of their bodies, as part of their embodied selves. Women bring their breasts everywhere with them (maybe if they had a choice, they wouldn’t?). Yet pictures like this one obscure this reality. These breasts are for display and affect, and give no indication that they are experienced for any reason other than to tantalize the viewer.
Unruly Bodies 
I love this. Boobs, boobs everywhere, yet not a nipple to be seen.
As a self-proclaimed nerd I love nothing more than sitting down with a pile of comic books and reading the day away; however, the absurdity of the breasts on the female heroes and villains always left me feeling lacking.
Why didn’t my boobs defy the laws of gravity? Granted I was only fifteen years old, reading these comics, but I still longed for a pair of honkers that would lift up in the air, defying the laws of physics.
Eva, you’re 100% correct these images obscure reality; they obscured mine and when discussing female, busty superheroes with some of my heterosexual, male friends I found their opinions on the topic disappointing. My male friends expressed desire for women who had unrealistic breasts, perfect globes of flesh with no variance or individuality.
But where does that leave every single woman on this planet? Breasts are varied and individual from person to person; I would hold the claim that plastic surgery is as close to the ‘perfect’ breasts that my friends were looking for.
But plastic surgery by nature isn’t real and I bring this scene from Mean Girls to illustrate my point, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO07InCjcLs.
Following this train of thought I am reminded of women who survive breast cancer but need to have a breast removed.
Simply by removing a breast these women are immediately removed from the category of “perfection” and what is considered desirable.
If these images of ridiculous breasts, more basketballs than boobs, obscure our vision of what breasts are then what are some of the ways we as women, the ones who actually have breasts, can challenge the perception of “the perfect breast”?
I think this is great – it really turns the conception of the sexualized female body against itself as a resistant knowledge. I think that it’s difficult to create a form of resistance to things such as this because people are always going to take the images as they desire. An interesting piece such as this is illustrated in a series that was produced in Finland called “Tom of Finland”: http://tomoffinlandfoundation.org/foundation/N_Tom.html. The pieces of the men are highly exaggerated depictions of gay men with body parts that are clearly central to the pictures. In some ways, I believe that these images are supposed to be empowering because they are actual representations of gay men when there weren’t – and at that, it is a different brand of gay man than typically seen. However, it could be read solely as erotica which takes away the power of the piece as a reconstruction of the body.
What I think is so fantastic about tumblrs like this (eschergirls is another great one) is that they represent a backlash that had no wide voice prior to a couple of years ago. The female body in comic books has been drawn like this for decades, going back even to the 1940s, because nobody ever called the artists on their b.s.! The emergence of women’s voices through the internet, both as fans and producers of comics, seems to at least be creating a discussion about this stuff that might lead some of the worst offenders to reconsider their methods.
One of the most frequent hand-wringing questions I’ve seen in men’s discussions about comics is “how do we get more girls into comics?” (and it seems to always be girls, not women). The list that inevitably follows usually includes story-based comics, manga and graphic novels where female characters are integrated into the plots as more than sex objects and are drawn in realistic (or at least less exploitative) ways. What’s funny and disappointing is that the conversation doesn’t often move past that to ask “why aren’t more comics done this way?”