The Big Bosom Battle

First it was Dior and now it's the doctors: they're trying to do away with bosoms.

A bevy of gynecologists (the boys who know women inside out) got together in Oregon recently and one of their number, Dr. Goodrich Schouffler of the University of Oregon, gave them several varieties of free-wheeling hell on the subject of breasts. Many American women are developing "a highly-dangerous bosom complex," he complained. Over-emphasis on what the good doctor refers to as "a semi-respectable sex appendage" is, he insists, making neurotics out of girls whose frontal developments are still in the experimental stage. "The array of bosoms now available to the naked eye is simply appalling," the medic moaned. So, he concluded, down with bosoms and up with necklines.

We'll admit our Freud is a bit rusty (it's been a long time since we took that Rohrschach) but it seems to us that the doc is letting his id run away with his libido. And, far from being only "semirespectable," we think the female front is as impeccably correct as Anthony Eden and much more appealing. It is one of the better things in this vale of tears.

The doctor says that the present interest in breasts adds up to a complex. Well, we guess it's a complex if he says so. He's the doctor. But what's bad about it? The headshrinkers define a complex as a tendency to think a great deal about a certain subject, and what's so bad about a tendency to think about bosoms? It beats meditating on Krushchev, income taxes, the Abominable Snowman, and the Kansas City Athletics. As for this complex bothering unendowed girls, let's (as the politicians say) look at the record. Five hundred years ago women didn't wash their faces (it says so in Forever Amber), and when some smart dame figured out that a clean face might appeal to a man more than a dirty one and began to wash, the doctors probably started hollering about "face complexes." But we think clean faces added an indefinable something to that illusory quality called feminine allure, even though some of the faces looked better when you couldn't see them too clearly. Same thing with this bosom business. The have-nots are always complaining, whether it's faces, bosoms, or other natural resources.

As a matter of fact, the small-bosomed babe never had it so good. Two of the most popular stars in Hollywood today are Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn; neither is a 36-D by any means, but both have interesting faces and attractive assets. (Jane Russell, it should be noted, has yet to win an Oscar.) And, thanks to the dressmakers and brassiere manufacturers, anatomical deficiencies go quite unnoticed. What nature has forgotten they stuff with cotton. If anybody is entitled to squawk it's not the underendowed girl but the poor'guy who marries one of them and then discovers that he's been short changed. But it's his own fault for not taking inventory before the Big Sale.

Another place Dr. Schouffler errs is in thinking that this interest in bosoms is something new. He blames modern journalism and entertainment for it, and there's where he's out in left field somewhere. People have been interested in bosoms for a long, long time, even in the doc's state, Oregon. The earliest pictures we know anything about, the murals in the tombs of the Egyptian Pharoahs, feature the intriguing curves of the "weaker" sex. One called "Banquet Scene" dates from the reign of the 18th Dynasty pharoah, the great Akhenaten, about 1350 B.C., and depicts a group of happy men being waited on by a clutch of babes as bare as any who ever served the blue-plate up to tired businessmen at the old Chesterfield Club in Kansas City (and you must ask us to tell you about that sometime).

Where, we ask, would culture be without bosoms? Has the good doctor ever taken time out from gynecologizing to visit a museum or an art gallery? Can he seriously imagine Goya's "Nude Mama," Titian's "Venus of Urbine," Carracci's "Galatea," or Rembrandt's "Danae" in brassieres? Take the Venus de Milo – put a bra on her and what have you got? Nothing but a slightly potbellied lady who bit her fingernails too much. We're sure the artists and sculptors will go along with us when we say that the brassiere and art are natural enemies, like the mongoose and the cobra.

The truth is, the greatest ages in human history have been those in which breasts were joyously unconfined. In the Golden Age of Greece, the bosom was openly admired and appreciated. The lawyers of today lack the showmanship of the orator Hypereides, who won an acquittal for his beautiful client, Phryne, by having her dramatically bare her bosom to the jury.

Then you take maypole dancing. Modern maypole dancing isn't what it was. Maypole dancing hasn't been the same since the Puritans made the female dancers cover up. Back in the enlightened medieval age (in England, for instance), the maidens danced with bosoms bared around the May-pole in honor of the traditional "Maid Marian," the girl friend of a guy named Robin Hood. The dancers would then leave the Green hand in hand with the young men, to go "under the greenwood tree" and build little love-bowers. These temporary unions were blessed by the renegade Friar Tuck, and the resulting offspring were known as "merrybegots," a word expressive of good clean fun.(concluded on page 42)

Bosom Battle(continued from page 23) Why, we of the pro-bosom faction have just about everybody on our side, including Shakespeare and Pericles, and Dr. Schouffler has practically nobody but the Watch and Ward Society. The anthropologists (they're with us all the way) point out that there is no neurosis among the Polynesians, the Ashanti tribes, the Balinese, and other peoples whose females wallop about with no brassieres. They have no "complexes." Their women are not "frustrated," nor do they go around moaning "Foul!" just because their men give the eye to the girls with the best-proportioned busts. They that's the way the ball bounces, and they accept it.

Not only are bosoms perfectly respectable among the Polynesians, they have more than one utilitarian use. Without them, the moetotolo, the male "sleepcrawler" who covers his body with cocoanut oil in order to facilitate escape, would be at a great disadvantage. It's kind of a game they play down there below the equator, and it's much jollier sport than scrabble or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The moetotolo slips into the hut of a girl who attracts him and lies beside her in the dark; often the only way he can be sure he has the right party is by a rapid but superficial manual examination. If the girl likes the boy – or the examination – she keeps quiet and he stays. If not, she shouts "Moetotolo!" and the whole family wakes up and chases the poor chap. If caught he is taunted for tautala lai titi – freely translated as "presuming beyond his years." This is all accounted good, clean fun among the happy, healthy, non-neurotic, long-lived inhabitants of Samoa and the Trobriands. Anthropologists like Dr. Margaret Mead find it praise-worthy; so do we.

Finally – and we say this in a whisper – this bosom de-emphasis movement the doc is trying to start is pretty subversive. We wouldn't be a bit surprised if his speech isn't being carefully studied right now by the FBI and maybe the Department of the Interior. For he has attacked something that is as American as apple pie or baseball. Not only that, but if this thing he is trying to start really gets rolling it will break up such foundations of our economy as the moving picture industry, advertising, dressdesinging, burlesque and bathing suit making, to say nothing of such by-products of bosom interest as bifocal lenses, marriage, coeducation, beauty contests and psychoanalysis.

Speaking of moving pictures, they were not, as commonly supposed, invented by Thomas A. Edison. They were invented by the ancient tribes of England, the Picts, Britons and Dacians, and instead of a silver screen, they used the female breast. Once a year a great festival was celebrated in honor of the goddess Anu, the goddess of the dark blue night and blue sea. For this festival the maidens of the tribes tinted their breasts blue with woad-dye and covered them with esoteric drawings and tatoos.

No man was permitted to witness the creation of these drawings, but later when the girls came out and danced, men were allowed to enjoy the pictorial designs on the bosoms – the first moving pictures. Naturally in those days the most popular star was the maiden with the largest screen surface, a kind of cultural foreshadowing of CinemaScope, SuperScope, VistaVision, Cinerama and Todd-AO.

The entertainment industry as a whole could hardly hope to survive any widespread adherence to Dr. Schouffler's ideas. The first to go would be that art form that has been called America's only original contribution to culture, the strip-tease. Burlesque and the night club business couldn't hope to last without those wiggle-waggling honeys who, after all, are only doing for that larger jury, the American public, what the beauteous Phryne did for the Athenian tribunal in Greece's Golden Age. Even television would be hard hit if bosoms came under the interdict. What would those panel shows like "What's My Line" and "The Name's The Same" do for double entendres? Who would employ female weather forecasters? Who would introduce Jackie Gleason? And who, pray tell, would hire Faye Emerson?

No, we're afraid the doctor's ideas, if put into practice, would result in mass unemployment among entertainers, TV panelists, strip-teasers, brassiere and sweater industry workers, eyeglass-makers, advertising people, bathing suit designers, preachers and psychiatrists. To say nothing of the men and women in Dr. Schouffler's own line-gynecology. There'll be one hell of a drop in that business if we go around covering up bosoms. Joblessness will cover the field of obstetrics and gynecology like a blight; the maternity wards will close their doors, the pediatric clinics will stand dark and silent. The people who manufacture baby buggies, diapers, safety pins, rattles, blue and pink booties and marriage certificates will be jumping out of windows. Doctors and nurses will join the breadlines.

We just can't go along with this bosom deceleration. We agree that there's a lot of interest in the things, but we say there never can be too much; such interest is healthy and adds to the gaiety of nations. We throw in with the anthropologists, the historians, the artists, the classicists. We're with the ancient Greeks, the Polynesians, the English merrybegots, and the Ashanti. We take our stand with Minsky and the U. S. Supreme Court. The constitution protects our "pursuit of happiness" and we're never happier than when we're pursuing a fully-developed 100% 38-D American girl. It's a healthful hobby, keeping us indoors, out of the cold drafts of winter and the hot sun of summer. It beats bird-watching. Dr. Schouffler says it's bad, we say it's good. We also say:

Give up this nonsense, Doctor. You're not a well man.