I came across an amazing post.  It dates from 2008 but touches upon a topic that is, quite unfortunately, still very much an issue today as it was back then: the objectification of the human body.

I say “human” and not “female” because I think it’s time that we stop creating boundaries between men and women.  I do not have the data to back this following statement up, but I feel that there is a lot more objectification of women’s bodies than of men’s bodies.  But even if this is true, men’s bodies are also increasingly objectified.

We must therefore speak up not just for the women in the world, but also for their fathers, their brothers, and their sons.

One of the things I appreciated the most about this post by Samara Ginsberg is how she doesn’t devolve into an angry tirade; rather, she keeps her reflections both objective in the way she portrays some of the horrific and terrifying things that happened to her as a teenager because of her large breasts, as well as focused on identifying the underlying root cause and addressing it.

It might be TL;DR for some of you, so at the very least read this quote:

For any girls or women who think that they would like to look like a glamour model, I would like to say that you are fortunate not to. Not because there is anything at all wrong with being petite with big breasts in itself, but because a woman who looks like a Nuts pin-up is constantly assumed by most people to be an airhead. Your life will be much easier if you have a more average figure. Consider how healthy your self image would be by now if you had endured being groped, being automatically regarded as unintelligent, being seen by other women as the enemy, being regarded as nothing more than your body, every day of your life. You can’t take the breasts off. They’re not like accessories that you can choose to put on when you feel like having lots of attention and take off when you feel like being respected or just simply able to run around without having to wear a sports bra made of reinforced concrete. For the love of God, why would you wish that upon yourself? (…)

It’s not my problem that my breasts “don’t suit my personality”. The problem is that there is a personality type associated with having big breasts in the first place. We don’t need implants and breast reductions. What we need is to cure our society’s complete obsession with breasts. We need somehow to do away with the idea that breast size is directly proportional to sexual attractiveness, and that a sexually attractive woman is somehow deserving of harassment and contempt. Surely breasts aren’t the only beautiful thing about an attractive woman? As a heterosexual female I appreciate that it’s difficult for me to comment meaningfully on what makes a woman sexually attractive, but really, it’s the equivalent of a man’s attractiveness being judged solely by the size of the bulge in his pants, which is surely not an attitude that anybody with any aesthetic taste or basic respect for their fellow humans would take.

And now that I know I have you hooked, check out the full post here.