Why have large breasts become "must haves"?

[Hullygully]

I know someone on here will know the sociological history.

Even in my generation we didn't want them, indeed tried to hide them. Now they are de rigeur (inc implants). What has wrought the change?

This comes from a thread about implants and the whys.

When I researched breast implants I was looking in to 'natural look' breast implant.. the kinds that do hang.

I really don't know. Fake breasts look like bums in clothes and fake hair, fake nails and fake tans and fake eye lashes just look weird. It is most odd. What I do know is that if you are bigger chested it is impossible to buy clothes cut that actually fit larger breasted women on the high street.

I also think large breasted women have been around for a long time but women's clothes and bras have always been made for smaller women and for a long time you couldn't get pretty big bras or fashionable larger sizes and many shops still stop at a D cup or size 16.

The reality is many women are big and many small and if we only look at what sells we get a skewed view because we can only buy what's available. I find it oppressive and controlling.

Sorry I've gone off on a tangent.

"Ok, but why are wags and celebs the ones to aspire to? Literally, just because they are famous? Because of all those hello type mags glorifying their lives? "

Yes. When you're in some boring housing estate with a job cleaning offices and you see a wealthy footballer's wife in a mag reclining on her vast sofa in her vast mansion for having made no more effort than showing up at the right nightclub with the right-shaped boobs, blonde hair and willing to please .... you could be forgiven for thinking 'that looks like a nice easy way to get on in life'. Never mind that the poor cow is feeling suicidal because said footballer is on his fifth affair with an identikit blonde that looks a lot llike her only with a fresher face.

Hello Magazine etc. is not filled with female scientists, captains of industry and academics reclining in their sumptuous homes, let's face it.

I remember being a child and liking my mothers breasts (to look at) and to be happy at the thought that one day I would look like that. My mother was only a b/c cup so not huge, during adolescence my breasts never got past an a-cup and since having kids (and being three stone heavier) I'm still only a b-cup, which does make me sad. But I wouldn't get implants because a)it's a stupid amount of money (imo) and b)it wouldn't achieve what I wanted, larger but natural breasts.
I am mulling over trying breast enhancement pills, depsite the fact they are probably a huge con, but better to have tried and failed, than not tried at all. And if they don't work, then I shall keep on doing as I do, wearing bust enhancing bras and being greatful for the fact they are nice to look at (if you ignore my stomach).
And I am bringing my daughter up to have a much better self-image, reliant on brains. As a child I was praised for being pretty but not intellignece.
My daughter gets told she is both but with her abilities and willingness to try being the things she recieves the most praise for.

"Cogito - I think the trend for changing eye shape in parts of Asia is about the effects of colonialism, racism and misogyny."

Fair enough. They want to look like Westerners. Our girls want to look like a Barbie doll. Similarity is that everyone thinks they're going to get an advantage out of surgically changing their appearance.

As the reluctant owner of extremely large breasts on a slimmish frame (30J/JJ) I really don't get this fashion. I think it setms from porn and has come to the masses via a conspicuous consumption - look what I can afford type thing.

Oh, and I still don't fit the fashion - too big and they are too low cos they weigh a lot. So not perky and round.

Kitten, I don't think that your desire for large breasts is because you want to look less serious anymore than my desire for smaller breasts is because I want to lie around in woodland looking consumptive reading John Keats poems or become a top barrister.

But breast size is connected in society to representations of certain character traits.

Big fake pert boobs are desirable because of porn, like having a bald beaver.

I think you might be onto something with the porn Sassy.

Fake, plastic looking women = less human; a commodity.

Yuk.

I think it's to do with the cult of skinniness. Large breasts are mostly fat and extremely thin women do not usually have large breasts.

For many years if a woman was to have large breasts, she would have the rest of the "buxom" body to go with it.

Implants were invented and lo!! Women found they could diet themselves to starvation AND have big tits too.

Then lots of quite young women, who had small breasts because they were YOUNG and SLIM started having implants because they felt unattractive compared to the skeletons+silicon they saw in the movies.

I am 47, was a 32A at 16, now am a 32E without being overweight. (Gawd knows what I would look like if I had had implants at 18.) I think small breasts look very youthful and am quite envious of them, but I expect that's my age talking.

But why did the slim + big tits image become so desirable?

SGM 15:23
I agree; it's the backlash - get your labia done at the same time

clothesofsand You are right. As the owner of 30GGs, I can state categorically that large breasts have a lot of negative connotations.

Slim + big boobs is how women look in cartoons.

Not that I think women are doing it because they have been reading too much batman but it's a certain type of idealised female form which was picked up somewhere by someone and off it went.

Do cartoon women (manga etc) usually have pubes?

Not that I have read much manga either

breasts may well be mostly fat, but many overweight women I know have very small breasts - there seems to be some correlation with PCOS type conditions. I wonder if the constant use of "curvy" as a eumphemism for fat makes them feel the need to have implants to gain said curves.

There are also plenty of scrawny women like me with big breasts and wide hips, and no, they don't look anything like the fake ones that the "dollybird" types aspire to. It makes it damn near impossible to get tailoring to fit.

Hmmm let's see, could be something to do with class divide and the rise of slebville. People want the wealth too so they emulate the look.

Look at what is feeding that wealth, football for instance, wc are not shut out of football. Not in the same way they were when access to wealth meant access to an education.

Thankfully it's not dominant. Not in most people's rl, in tabloids yes it's everywhere as it sells.

kittens I'm not silly and my boobs are GGs. When I get into my healthy BMI (on target for end of March) I'll probably go down to double Fs. I'm just naturally booby. I'm also far from fertile. I only had my one and only child after attending a fertility/recurrent miscarriage clinic. So that blows that myth out of the water.

I agree with the poster who said it's all to do with celebrity and having too much time and money on your hands. I am trying to impress on dd (11) that celebrity is NOT something that one should aspire to. She wants to be a writer, but she doesn't see the appeal in being famous. She just wants to see her books in print with merchandising and movies and such :)

'Must Haves' for who exactly...

Cogito, your early post really jumped out at me:
"I think it's just fashion. Same as high heels, hemlines, tattoos, haircuts or anything else.... all it takes is for some celebrity to set the trend and people will try to emulate them. Boob fashion goes in cycles. Top-heavy Jordan's a body-shape icon for a lot of young women at the moment. It was flat-chested Twiggy in the sixties. Busty Marilyn and Jane Russell in the fifties. Flat-chested flappers in the twenties. Fifties girls would have stuffed socks down their bras. Eighties girls went for chicken fillets. Today they can have something more permanently inserted.

"I saw something on QI the other night about the correlation of (female) hemlines and (male) hair-length with economic conditions. In times of plenty (sixties, noughties) hemlines rise and hair gets longer. In times of hardship (thirties, seventies) hemlines come down and hair gets shorter. Maybe there's a similar correlation between chest size and affluence?"

It strikes me that there's a very clear correlation here, but with social attitudes towards women: 20s = period of female emancipation, women have newly got the vote, are going out to work in increasing numbers; 50s = "new wave" fashion, backlash against the economic freedoms gained by women during the war (when women did all sorts of work, from skilled manual labour in shipyards through to code breaking at Bletchley park), massive emphasis on getting women back into the kitchen, Doris Day as the icon of suburban housewife; 60s = again period of relative emancipation, driven in part by the revolution in control of our own fertility brought about by the pill; 80s = yet another bloody backlash ("new romantic" fashion).

But why do wmen buy it?

why?

Why?

Why?

Are they thick?