Put Your Breasts Away — This Isn’t Europe

Boobs at Barton Springs

I’m at the age when I’m more worried about my breast health than breast sexiness. I don’t put on swimsuits and wonder how my boobs look in them. I wear swimsuits that are functional.

If I’m swimming laps, I wear something that keeps my girls from flopping out. If I’m at the lake with my son, I wear a suit minorly more sexy than a full-on mom suit. But the boobs stay covered because I’m not in Europe and I’ve grown weary of oglers.

I recently visited one of my best friends in Austin, Texas. I’ve known this woman over thirty years. We were walking along Barton Springs, one of Austin’s local treasures. This natural spring pool is three acres in size, and it is fed from underground springs. It’s heaven on earth.

My bestie and I walked around its periphery, catching up, talking about our kids, marveling at our fortune of getting to see each other after three long years.

We noticed a lot of bare breasts on our walk. Wow, I said. I’m not used to that. I don’t think you’re allowed to go topless in the Midwest.

We noticed all the women going topless in Barton Springs had tiny breasts, the kind that didn’t require bras. There were no big meaty breasts, saggy breasts, buxom breasts, stretch-marked breasts, wide nippled breasts. They all seemed to come from the same carton. Perfect little breasts with perfect tiny little nipples. I hate the word perfect. It’s hostile.

We could have pulled down our suits and exhibited a different genre of boobs but we were there with our kids and flinging out our own breasts seemed unsafe without sunblock.

These bare-breasted women, who all sat together, had the exact same boobs. I admit, full disclosure, maybe I am small boob blind. Maybe these women’s breasts exhibited a variety of differences that I couldn’t see cause I’m limited.

Me and my bestie don’t have those perfect tiny boobs. I didn’t even know they existed until I was in college. I remember the first time I was introduced to that genre of breasts. That memory is fused in my mind.

I was taking step-aerobics classes with these two Ph.D. candidates. They were very competitive with each other and I think they liked me because I was funny and they didn’t consider me competition. They were ambitious. I was complacent. They burned like nuclear energy and I burned more kinetic.

They were also both masterful at the step aerobics class they brought me to. I was a beginner. I was contrast to their magnificence. Did I care? Not at all. I enjoy being impressed.

The slightly more alpha of the two, Natalie, embraced me, wanted to bring me everywhere like a kid brings a blankie. In our step class, she positioned herself in front of me and told me to watch her so I could keep up. I started to pick up some moves but I was clearly the fish out of water, one step behind.

You did good she said to me at the end of class. I gushed sweat and she patted one tiny glistening bead off her lip with a cocktail napkin. She was the kind of beautiful that compelled people to mention her beauty–like not mentioning it made them look stupid.

On the first day Natalie picked me up from my college job, in a library office I shared with others, my co-workers were stunned by her appearance. Natalie had stop-time looks. God made her move in slow motion to allow viewers the necessary time to take her in.

Jesus! One of my fellow office mates said. You know her?

Oh my god, said another, look at that woman. Who looks like that?

Women in Iowa City, where I worked, are extremely beautiful so it wasn’t like she was the only pretty girl in town. Her beauty merely elicited a verbal response. Maybe because there was a Ph.D. tucked underneath it. And, she was a musician. Okay, she played the tambourine, but in a band.

I’ve always had beautiful friends. Part of the reason is they don’t rattle me. They live in their world. I live in mine. We’re like foreigners to one another. Exotic. We make each other laugh, strangers in each other's strange lands.

When we finished our step class, we were barely down the hall to the locker room before Natalie and her slightly less Alpha friend started undressing. By the time we arrived at the locker room, they were topless. Their breasts were the breasts of Barton Springs. Of course, I wouldn’t know that for thirty years.

I was a swimmer so I was used to showering in my swimsuit next to other swimmers to wash the chlorine out. Our swimsuits were our second skins and we needed to care for them, lengthen their nylon lives.

Following our step-aerobics class, there was no second skin to wash off. Those women didn’t shower in their tiny shorts and sports bras. They would clean their attire in a washing machine later, I imagined. They got totally naked to shower which I know sounds redundant but it wasn’t to me, who was accustomed to partial nudity.

I’m a when-in-Rome kind of gal though, so I stripped down and showered beside them, fully exposed. My larger, less tame naked breasts made me feel like a different animal than they were, like I belonged in a separate exhibit.

I didn’t know breasts could look like theirs. That’s why my brain fused the memory of them so securely in my mind’s eye — because it was new information.

I noted these competitive women shared a body type. They were like two winners on the starting line, perfectly lined up. Their bodies were equally unmessy and under their control. In retrospect, even while they showered, they looked like they were competing. That part doesn’t elicit any envy from me.

Meanwhile, thirty years later, in Barton Springs, I wondered if smaller breasts were freer, less vulgar, and less over-sexualized. That’s why those women felt comfortable freeing them, allowing them into the public eye.

In my opinion, they are equally sexy and feminine, but they were winning the free-the-nipple movement. I hope one day I live in a world where being topless doesn’t have anything to do with gender or breast size. It’s just done because it’s hot out and the girls want to breathe.

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