- Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, & Witches Tell Us about Breasts
- WW Norton (2024)
The many names — and silly slang — that we use for breasts makes for a pretty long list. Just about every iteration (tit-eration?) comes up for examination in San Francisco sociologist Sarah Thornton’s new book Tits Up. I’ll try to write this without descending into non-stop jokes and puns, but I’m making no promises!
Thornton was inspired to take a deep dive into social cleavage after undergoing a double mastectomy. As she prepares for her surgery, Thornton takes her breasts for one last swim, thanking them for all their hard work. As she writes, if boobs could talk, they just ask to be freed from the confines of her bikini top.
Her new implants, nicknamed Bert and Ernie, take some getting used to. But after the surgery, she has something of an epiphany. How much have we, as a culture, missed about the significance of breasts? You might think breasts are everywhere, staring you in the face, but there are legions of boob tales yet to be told. Strap in friends; we’re headed into a juggernaut.
After more than 60 interrogations, Thornton whittles breast experts into five separate categories. This strategy is a good way to tackle the many functions that breasts occupy. Across different seasons of life, breasts are a source of sustenance, of desire, of the everyday and of course, a muse through the ages in art, religion and culture.
To clear a path for her examination, Thornton lays out some hard truths about the nature of breasts, ranging from their biological function to their erotic implications for the French aristocracy. The book demonstrates there are many ways to view and understand what breasts mean.
(All topics I’ll explore with her in a discussion at the Vancouver Public Library Thursday evening.)

So, to get to understanding, let’s start with viewing. In the book’s introduction called “Reclaiming a Part of Womanhood,” Thornton explains that in her time as an art history student, she was exposed to 30,000 years of naked breasts, whether in grand gestures like that of French painter Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People or more everyday struggles, like the project of finding a bra that doesn’t make you go crazy.
As Thornton indicates of the famous Delacroix painting, women were not given any real power in the new democratic reality, in spite of Lady Liberty’s forward-facing charge. Things like voting, owning property or no-fault divorce would not come for many more years.
In detailing what each chapter will entail in the book’s introduction, Tits Up feels like bit of a thesis, but the different avenues that the writer goes down quickly removes any whiff of the academic from the proceedings, beginning with a trip to a historic and hardworking strip club called the Condor Club in San Francisco.
In 1964, a woman named Carol Doda took her top off at the Condor and changed history. Doda, the first topless dancer in the U.S., was arrested for her work, although later cleared of any charges. But her naked breasts opened the floodgates, and soon topless dancing took off.
The performers who hone their craft on the Condor stage come from a variety of backgrounds, but they’re united by the need to make a living. Stripping, laps dances and other forms of sex work are some of the few areas where women make more money than men. Breasts as the “salaried assistants” of the performers are not passive playthings, but active breadwinners.
“When I set out to study the erotic performance of women’s tits, I didn’t expect it would lead me to prioritize the decriminalization of sex work as a political issue,” writes Thornton.
“I think the most fundamental issue inhibiting women’s autonomy — our right to choose what we do with our bodies — is the state’s policing of sex work.”
The call for autonomy runs throughout the book, popping up in some unexpected ways.

The war of the nipples
“Useless as tits on a bull” was one of my grandfather’s favourite expressions. But it turns out to be surprisingly relevant.
“For centuries, physicians like Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) were obsessed with the mystery of the male nipple,” Thornton writes.
The why and wherefore of male nipples is still something of a headscratcher; in most mammalian species, humans included, nursing our young is an ability that belongs solely to females. This comes up for examination in Thorton’s chapter entitled “Active Apexes.”
In fashion circles, “apex” is the term given to nipples. Meaning “the highest point,” this mountaineering term makes a certain kind of sense. As Thornton explains, there are legions of slang terms for tits, but very few euphemisms for nipples. “For reasons not yet clear to me,” she writes, “nipples are more threatening and distasteful than boobs.”
Stranger still is the ongoing war over male and female nipples.
Nipples develop in utero before sexual differentiation. But the difference in how they are perceived and policed goes on for the rest of a person’s life.
“No one thinks that a man with discernable nipples is inviting sexual attention or being impolite or disrespectful,” Thornton writes. “It may seem trifling, but I am increasingly convinced that hiding this fundamental mammalian marker is integral to women’s inequality and disempowerment.”
Breasts: an anchor for how we understand humankind
To trace how perceptions of breasts have shaped social and cultural history, Thornton cites the work of Londa Schiebinger, a Stanford professor who wrote her doctoral dissertation on gender and early women scientists.
Schiebinger’s research into how the word “mammals” came to signify the human race centres on Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, zoologist and medical doctor. Linnaeus developed six categories to group almost all living organisms: Mammalia (mammals), Aves (birds), Amphibia (reptiles and amphibians), Pisces (fish), Insecta (insects and arachnids) and Vermes (invertebrates and worms).
The scientific term homo sapiens grouped humans into the natural world. But the term mammalia applied only to women, meaning that the women were closer to animals then men.
“Linnaeus’s shrewd nomenclature gave scientific validity to, and effectively revitalized weary belief in, male supremacy,” Thornton wrote.
“Men were positioned as wise homo sapiens [Homo sapiens means man of wisdom], reflections of divinity, whereas women were associated with mammals, anchored to the earth by their breasts.”
Nothing makes this anchoring more apparent than breastfeeding.
Nursing isn’t neutral
The experience of breastfeeding a baby is a curious one, varying wildly between a sweet bonding activity to a veritable horror show (mastitis, infections). There is also nothing quite like having a child, fresh off teething, bite down hard on your nipple. It’s a shock to the system, let’s say.
Whether it’s too little milk or too much, formula or not, breastfeeding is a battleground. Tits Up takes on this decidedly imperfect system from different angles, beginning with human milk banks.
While the term ‘bank’ implies a certain sterility to the notion, these repositories are anything but. They are life-saving places for mothers who can’t nurse, places for women who have lost children to donate their milk, and there are critical differences between for-profit companies and non-profit organizations.
The struggle over breastmilk versus formula, the role of pumping and the racial divide in breastfeeding makes for some decided complexity, but breasts have a way of wriggling away from the forces that would control them. In this, Thorton cites the concept of allomothers.
A term primarily used in anthropology, allomothers means “other mothers” and pertains to members of a society who perform some of the same tasks as biological mothers, including breastfeeding. It is the norm in other species including elephants, dolphins and primates.
In human cultures, allomothers are common in Indigenous societies the world over. As Thornton explains the practice takes place in more than 90 per cent of documented Indigenous cultures. In non-Indigenous societies, women have organized their own versions of allomothers, by creating nonprofit milk reservoirs in order to help the next generation of humans. As Thornton writes, “It is a non-profit exchange wherein both donor and recipient are perceived as peers with different relationships to luck or opportunity. Here, human milk is not a commodity but a personal gift, a political gesture, or community offering.”
For all the uses and abuses breasts are subjected to, they keep on trucking, feeding babies, making money, holding up entire industries.
“When I started my research, I did not realize how deeply colonized our breasts are by patriarchy,” Thornton writes in the book’s final chapter.
“I didn’t think a boob book would take issue with so many laws or that it would lead me into terrain that was historically uncomfortable to mainstream feminism. Sex work, breast-feeding, plastic surgery, fashion, femininity, spirituality, and the pursuit of beauty are all issues that have been snubbed by the women’s movement.”
I’m not sure if I fully agree with this summation. The women’s movement has arguably contended actively with all of the issues that Thornton cites in her book. But diving deep into the subject of breasts and witnessing the sheer amount of cultural and social weight applied to them makes me realize that we need much more than a supportive bra or a good place to breastfeed.
Maybe a breast revolution would be more fitting. Up with tits!
Join Dorothy Woodend in conversation with Sarah Thornton on Thursday, Oct. 10, at an evening event co-presented by the Vancouver Public Library and Vancouver Art Gallery. The talk is open to the public and registration is required.
Read more: Health, Gender + Sexuality
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