Breastbinders, the new corsets for women

[Driechdrizzle]

Not going to call them chestbinders, because that hides what they are and what they are doing to women's bodies. They're for flattening and disguising women's breasts.

So many things to question about the trans movement, but why are none of these "woke" people noticing the glaring misogyny in women/female people using painful and harmful contraptions on the female parts of their bodies to modify or reshape them? I'm sure they'd disapprove of "cis" (their word) women getting plastic breast implants to fit a pornified ideal, so why is there this acceptance of erasing or removing breasts?

This article is a case in point. The writer it is planning a double mastectomy which the writer is dreading unsurprisingly because the chest binders are causing injury. They caused shoulder dislocation which the writer is claiming it's because of an autoimmune disorder. The binders were also making the writer's hands go numb.

There's also this:

This is the binder that comes out on days where I’d normally have to force myself to leave the house in a sports bra and a baggy shirt because my whole body hurts. This is a step up from that and it allows me to take breaks from the more intense binding I usually engage with while mitigating the feeling of wanting to give myself to the sea.

www.autostraddle.com/shapeshifters-bespoke-binders-put-fun-on-your-chest/

Old school feminism, radical feminism was in part about helping women/female people accept and love their bodies. How is this attack on breasts and female bodies progressive? It's no different from Victorian women being laced into corsets to give them 17 inch waists, dislocating their ribs and shifting their internal organs in the process and causing them to faint. I do not get it in the slightest, apart from the fact that patriarchy wants female humans to be in pain the whole time and some of us are only too happy to comply.

"All this handwringing about women doing what they want with their bodies."

All this handwrining about the patriarchy (men) getting women to hate parts of their bodies so much they want to erase or remove them. Why can't you see that?

" There should definitely be a younger age limit on it, but this obsession with keeping them just seems like the flip side of men's obsession with their size."

That has to be one of the stupidest most dishonest arguments I've ever seen on a feminist board. "Keeping them" as if breasts are just objects that can be unscrewed and removed. They are flesh and blood, part of your body if you're female. They belong to you, they are you. Talking about and examining this hatred of breasts is the opposite of men's objectification of women's breasts. Treating breasts as an inconvenience that can easily be removed is also objectification of breasts. It's binding and unnecessary mastectomies that are the flipside of pornification. Again, why can't you see that?

"If women don't want to have boobs attached to them,"

Attached makes it sound like breasts aren't part of women's bodies. Of course they are.

"theyy should be treated as if they know their own mind."

We're all allowed to make commentary on cultural trends. This was not going on twenty or thirty years ago. Why aren't you asking yourself what has changed?

"Boobs do not make you a woman"

Women have breasts (not boobs, why are you using objectifying misogynistic language?)

"Legs are kind of essential Vix/Kitten."

You do know that before we had baby forumula factories, or in parts of the world that still don't, breasts are also "kind of essential". You haven't thought about this at all have you.

The human race has only survived because of women's very essential breasts. How else were babies going to be fed?

I know dreich

I read some stuff in my time on here but never read anything more chilling than that

It really shocked me
Like our breasts are not part of our bodies but something abstract

It's like asking if we'd like to keep or discard any other parts of our body. It's my body, I don't want to discard any of it other than hair and nails which can be cut without hurting me. Nothing to do with men leering at boobs, everything to do with feeling a sense of bodily integrity and wanting to avoid painful and unnecessary surgery.

Extreme alienation from our bodies is what men's sexual objectification, pornification and sexual assaults on us does to us. Blaming our breasts for our pain rather than the men who harm us.

Agree, littlbrowndog, it's chilling.

It must be medically easier to have testicles removed. It's been happening in animal husbandry for centuries routinely. Is that more common than binding? If not, why not?

Testicle removal isn't all that difficult, any farmer that raises livestock can do it, I've done it myself.

I think that the underlying issue with this business of if someone doesn't want them, let them do what they want, is that wanting major surgery like that is really a sign of an underlying mental health issue of some kind, and so doing it is harm rather than a cure. It's like helping an anorexic become thin.

We've normalised that kind of treatment of the body though and allowed doctors to do it, so it's difficult to see that it's very different from other cosmetic procedures. And there are other cases too where it's a fine line between what is medically responsible and choice of the patient, for example allowing any woman to choose a c-section delivery, which also happens in the US.

False ‘we’ there Goosefoot.

I can’t really see how an elective C-section and removing healthy breasts can be compared . There are so many stories on here from women who have suffered the most appalling birth trauma having to endure a huge amount of stress in subsequent pregnancies trying to get an ELCS agreed by medics. I’m also fairly sure I’ve read something that C-Sections are marginally safer for the mother, whilst vaginal births have better outcomes for babies. If we believe the mother has bodily autonomy until the baby is born (and I do, otherwise all sorts of issues are created) then I do think she ought to be able to request a CS. That’s never going to come without a discussion with doctors as a bare minimum.

The removal of healthy breasts, often at a very young age, because of a mental health problem is a completely different issue. I have the utmost sympathy and compassion for women, like those on this thread, who find their breasts an unwelcome part of their body but that doesn’t mean those breasts should be cut off. Surely counselling would be a healthier way to make peace with your body?

Body parts, whether breasts, testicles or anything else,, are not disposable fashion accessories to be 'kept' or 'discarded'. There is no 'obsession with keeping them' just normal, healthy relationships with bodies, or abnormal, unhealthy ones.

While it is understandable that abnormal, unhealthy relationships develop in young people growing up in a world of selfies and saturated by pornography it is never appropriate to encourage people to deal with these understandable struggles via binding much less irreversible, unnecessary surgeries.

I have told my story before, I will no doubt do so again, because far too many people simply do not seem to understand that all surgery is a risk.

I had a small lump in my leg which was suspected to be a lymph node (it wasn't as it turned out). I had a biopsy. The simplest, most routine of surgery. The kind of surgery that is done as a day patient. I picked up an infection in surgery. The infection spread. By the time I was rushed back into hospital it had spread from almost down to my knee and up to my navel. My leg was swollen to twice its normal size. The site of the surgery was black, gangrenous, blistered.

I was drip fed antibiotics, at least six different kinds (I lost count). I had to have the black, gangrenous area cut away leaving a wound large enough to fit my fist in. The wound took four months to heal. It took maybe three years to rebuild the quadricep muscle. 18 years later I still have no sensation in the wound area.

I was extremely lucky. I did not die. I did not lose my leg. I made a near fill recovery, with full use of my leg bar a couple of movements I find difficult. I did not lose my job. My employer paid me my full wage while I was off work for those four months. My free at the point of delivery NHS paid for all my treatment, for the district nurse that came to my home to change the dressing every day. I lost not one penny. Not everyone is lucky enough to have such an employer or live in a country with free at the point of delivery health care.

I cannot stress enough that this was very minor, very routine surgery. The more major the surgery the greater the risk. Sooner or later a woman or girl will die as a direct result of having her perfectly healthy breasts surgically removed. That is a when, not an if. It will happen. It might happen to a girl as young as 13, the youngest age I know for a cast iron fact this surgery has been performed on in the good old USA, land of the free and home of the brave cowboy cosmetic surgeon.

If you are encouraging girls to see their breasts as removable accessories. If you are telling girls that they can 'become men if they choose'. If you are promoting gender ideology at all, in any way then you, you personally will be partly responsible for that death.

Your attitude is shameful.

That read as a bizarre non sequitur to me too.

That was in response to Badger's comment about Goosefoot's post, by the way.

I agree with Arnold completely. Surgery is always risky. Mastectomy is not a minor surgery at all, and the recovery can be brutal. Breasts are a normal part of female bodies, and discomfort with them is not unexpected in a society where men treat them like toys designed for their enjoyment but the solution to that is not to strap them down or have them removed.

Comparing elective mastectomy to C sections just gets more bizarre the more you think about it, and makes me suspect that anyone comparing the two as if they're in some way equivalent must have very odd attitudes towards both.

I have friends who have had mastectomies, double or single, sometimes also reconstruction, after breast cancer. I absolutely agree that this is major surgery, the removal of a whole body part. There is the very real risk of infection, there is also the risk of blood loss. Two friends lost a lot of blood and had to go back into surgery.
That this is being sold to young girls as a perfectly reasonable way of opting out of femininity is horrifying. At 16/17 how many of us know that we definitely want children ? Or that we want to be able to breastfeed ? To damage the fertility of children with blockers or cross sex hormones, to amputate a healthy body part, I think it is criminal.
The girl we know is 17. She now has no breasts and is on cross sex hormones so her voice will have changed, she will have facial hair. If she changes her mind, what then ?
What is now described as “gender non conforming” was just normal when I was a teenager. I found some teenage pictures the other day, almost all the girls with short hair- quiffs, mohicans etc. All in men’s overcoats from charity shops, men’s jeans, huge jumpers. Both boys and girls with makeup on, or none. This was the eighties, how have we gone from a place where there was space for girls to just be girls, in whatever they wanted to wear, to this weird labelling of everything as “gender” ?
I looked at The CBBC doctor, she looks like the girls I knew at school. Short hair, shirt and trousers etc. Normal ! Why must looking like this this come with a side order of body hating ? Surely this is what porn, and fetishistic men have done to women and girls, and we should be railing against it en masse.

Yes exactly vix kittens and Arnold.

Summed it up

I really hope the NHS is not performing these operations on these confused souls. Misuse of funds, if so.

Operations under anasthaesia always carry a small risk of death too.

17 is so, so young SirVix.

I really hope the NHS is not performing these operations on these confused souls. Misuse of funds, if so.

The teenager in our extended family was turned down by the NHS (or maybe they just said she had to wait, not sure which) and a fucking idiotic older family member paid for it to be done privately, and I am so furious with them that the next family get together is going to be interesting.

Yes, 17 is so young. Too young to vote, get a tattoo , get married without parental permission. Still a child in many ways. Not an adult.
She is not in the UK, but is in Europe.

OP, I agree. They are the opposite of celebrating and accepting women’s bodies

Won't happen if puberty blockers are used - makes surgical intervention a lot less difficult too....

WHAT am I reading ? The usual crap about blockers ? Oh yes, lets give pre pubertal children drugs that damages their bones, lower their IQ and destroy their fertility, because it’s all about the aesthetics donchaknow.
Who cares about the collateral damage when you can have a child who still has a pre-pubertal body at 18.
WHY would anyone want that, I ask myself ?
😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

*damage, not damages. Too angry to type !

How about instead of promoting medical experiments on perfectly healthy children we instead promote getting those children who are uncomfortable with the unchangeable reality of their sexed bodies the mental health care they need for as long as they need?

Just a thought.

*Won't happen if puberty blockers are used - makes surgical intervention a lot less difficult too...."

Please stop promoting hateful harmful practices against female bodies.

You mean amputation, not "surgical intervention". Please use the right words.