“‘I have grown up finding my breasts  unattractive. My breasts have always sagged. I remember my grandmother commenting on my fourteen-year-old topless chest, ‘you look like you’re already the mother of a dozen kids’. It was drilled into me that my body was for the pleasure of a man, and thus it needed to be desirable or it was completely worthless. I scrutinized them and found that my areola was too dark, or that they were covered in stretch marks, or that they never stood up like they were supposed to do. Being plus sized, I also half lamented that they weren’t even big enough to fit into the ‘big beautiful women’ body standards.

I was struggling to squeeze them into the boxes of desirability that had been defined by the popular culture. I honestly believed no one would ever find them attractive. My first boyfriend made me aware that my breasts hung low and far apart from each other, such that it looked like ‘a rail track could pass between them’. I would never have a cleavage as a result. With him, I always felt a bit guilty that I couldn’t live up to his expectations.

But when I first intimate with a woman I loved and asked her what she thought about my breasts, she said nonchalantly, ‘they’re beautiful’. I could see she meant it. It was a discovery for me; to realise how much I loved breasts, my own and that of others, no matter what they looked like. Conical and tiny, wrinkled and saggy, with big areolas or nipples pointed downwards. The self-pity vanished and in it’s place came the resounding assurance that yes, my breasts are desirable. I do still juggle with doubt and shame in sexually intimate situations with men, but it is a learning curve, and I’ll get there someday.” 

They said, “I’d love to be drawn in an aesthetic that reminds you of the sketching scene in #Titanic.” I tried to draw them like the French girls.

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