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Remember a few years back when boobs were declared over? The data points supporting this claim were tenuous but nonetheless of some note. There was the Pornhub study from 2017 indicating that millennials, according to analysis of the adult Web site’s search-term stats, were not as interested as their elders in looking at women’s chests. There was the fact that, since at least 2018, the breastaurant chain Hooters has experienced a steady spate of location closures. And then there was the rising popularity in the twenty-tens of Brazilian butt lifts, signalling the hastening shift of America’s erotic focus from the bosom to the posterior. “Anyone here find that big boobs aren’t cool anymore?” a woman in her late twenties asked the Reddit sub r/bigboobproblems in 2020. “Ass is in right now,” another user responded, before reassuring the original poster that “boobs will be popular again eventually.”
In recent months, it seems that that moment has finally arrived, and the so-called swell in mammary status has had a lot to do with the rise of the TV and movie star Sydney Sweeney, whose ample bosom has attracted seemingly endless media attention. “How the Breast Was Won,” a New York Post headline blared, in March of last year, praising the actress for managing to turn the national conversation back to the female chest. (“The State of the Union is . . . boobs,” the article trumpeted.) “Boobs are back,” the same publication announced in June, touting the return of the pushup-style bra apparently beloved by stars such as Sweeney, while Slate noted that “In Sydney Sweeney, America has rediscovered that women can have boobs.” (The actress herself indicated she was in on the joke by appearing as a Hooters waitress in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch when she hosted the show, and wearing a sweatshirt decorated with the words “SORRY FOR HAVING GREAT TITS AND CORRECT OPINIONS.”) Right-leaning publications, meanwhile, suggested that the enthusiastic attention paid to Sweeney’s breasts had everything to do with the shifting political climate. In the National Post, Amy Hamm wrote that the actress’s “overflowing cups” are a welcome sign that we are “starting to envisage the death of woke,” and, in The Spectator, Bridget Phetasy lauded the return of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack,” which had been nearly “stamped out of existence” by humorless political correctness.
Unlike these conservative pundits, I don’t find the return of hubba-hubba-style culture a reason for special celebration; leeringly objectifying women is at best sophomoric and at worst predatory. (Keep it in your pants, losers.) Looking at what looking at breasts means, though, is still important. The long-held hemline index, a theory that correlates the strength of the economy with women’s skirt lengths—minis in a bull market, midis in bear—doesn’t quite fit our current sociopolitical moment, but it could make more sense to consider what might be called the boob index. What does it say about the times we’re in when vocal attention is paid to breasts in the public sphere?
I had occasion to think of this question earlier this week, when, like countless others, I watched the former news anchor Lauren Sanchez attend Donald Trump’s Inauguration along with her fiancé, the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Sanchez, who is fifty-five but has seemingly enjoyed access to the kinds of dermatological and cosmetic interventions that can keep women of her class looking much younger, tighter, and sleeker, arrived at the Capitol Rotunda wearing a white formfitting Alexander McQueen suit over what appeared to be a revealing white lace bustier.
It goes without saying that Sanchez, who is fond of skin-baring getups, should be allowed to wear whatever she wants to wear and flaunt whatever she’d like to flaunt, and, indeed, some applauded what they saw as her vampy, no-fucks-given, “Latina auntie” energy. (As a reminder, this is a woman with such powerful joie de vivre that it led Bezos to allegedly refer to her as “alive girl” in a clandestine text exchange that took place when the two were still married to other people, according to the National Enquirer.) And yet much of the reaction to Sanchez’s cleavage-heavy look was negative. She was referred to as “trashy” and “inappropriate” by X users (a bit more lightheartedly, more than one compared her to Sue Ellen Mischke, the buxom “Seinfeld” character who wore a bra as a shirt). The former “Selling Sunset” reality star Christine Quinn, herself no stranger to elaborately provocative outfits, tweeted that Sanchez, “in lingerie with her chesticles hoisted like NASA was launching them into orbit,” was “peak Selling Sunset season 2 energy.” And Megyn Kelly, the conservative radio personality, bluntly opined, and not for the first time, that Sanchez “dresses like a hooker.” “No one should be talking about your tits, sorry,” Kelly said on her SiriusXM show. “They should be talking about the Inauguration.” The frenzy around the look reached its peak when Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was captured on camera appearing to sneak a peek at Sanchez’s bosom. (It’s hard to know for sure what exactly was happening on the ground, of course. In one version of the clip, a woman in the row ahead of Sanchez seems to bend down, as if to pick up something from the floor, and perhaps that was what drew Zuckerberg’s eyes, though his randy schoolboy’s smirk certainly supports the lone horndog theory.) Later, Zuckerberg upped the ante by liking Sanchez’s Instagram post from that night’s Inauguration ball (interestingly, Sydney Sweeney also threw the post a like), prompting an X user to wonder whether “zuck [will] lose his amazon prime.” The whole thing was giving gross teen sex comedy, but with tech moguls.
Compared with Sanchez’s getup, the buttoned-up Adam Lippes coat and wide-brimmed Eric Javits hat worn by Melania Trump to the Inauguration were tasteful, even demure. (“Just when I was luxuriating in the beauty and class of @FLOTUS45, in walks Lauren Sanchez wearing only a bra,” an X user posted.) However, these are hardly tasteful or demure times, and it was Sanchez, and the ogling Zuckerberg, who seemed to me much more in step with the present moment’s eagerness for brutal directness. (And, with her brusqueness, Megyn Kelly, too, fell in line.) At the Inauguration, Trump spoke of his plans to work against the looming spectre of national decline by ushering in a new “golden age of America,” one that depends, however, on some rather old chestnuts: xenophobia, voracious American expansionism, and, lest we forget, women being women and men being men. (“It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” Trump said.) Our tech overlords—Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos—were there at the rotunda to support the forty-seventh President’s message. In a recent interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg said that he feels that “a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and lacking in masculine energy. “Having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” he told Rogan. Zuckerberg has just recently emerged from his own masculinist makeover, which turned him from a pale coder to a buff and bronzed bro, and his openly suggestive glance at Sanchez’s exposed chest seemed like an appropriate capstone to Trump’s Inaugural Address. At long last, we were back: women once again equalled boobs, men once again equalled hard-ons, order was being restored, decline was being averted, God bless America. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
