That breasts garner much attention is nothing new. Conversation starters–and stoppers or pause-markers, if you will–heterosexual men seem infatuated with looking at or touching them; women, the breast keepers, obsessed with maintaining perk, an even appearance, or boosting size by way of padded bras, floral tops, or implants. Yet with all the attention they draw, Williams has discovered that the number of scientists studying the organ pales in comparison–as in, the field is almost nonexistent–to those studying any other part of the body.  Which is a little strange since it is the only organ in humans that stands the chance to never fully develop, it’s glandular graduation only maturing once a woman becomes pregnant. Since the breast has such a limited function and only partially develops with puberty, you would think scientists would sense sirens going off in hopes of someone to pioneer a field a study where the questions column grossly outnumber the answers. But that is but one area Williams touches upon in the book.

After titillating the reader with the breast’s past, tracking its evolution and understanding its plumbing, eventually the read is led to the hot topic of breastfeeding. Williams reveals that the original creep away from breastfeeding, going as far back as the Medieval Times and earlier, began as a “fashionable” thing to do among wealthy society women. Back in the day, it was discovered that if a woman wasn’t breastfeeding, she wasn’t producing Prolactin, a hormone that suppresses ovulation. Being fertile was extremely important in those days, what with the Black Plague and other air-borne diseases that were wiping out populations. Moms who didn’t breastfeed back then hired wet nurses to do the dirty work, but this fertility trick didn’t seem to work as wonderfully as hoped as babies not breastfed by their biological mothers had a higher mortality rate than those who sucked at mommy’s teat.

Along with this bit of historical information, Williams shares that more recent studies have shown that those who were breastfed as babies versus those raised on formula were seen to have higher IQs, are 77 percent less likely to acquire NEC (a serious gut infection common in preemies that causes the lower intestine to shrivel up, rendering the organ useless, thereby requiring the intestine to be surgically removed, the child then required to spend the rest of their life attached to an IV since they will no longer be able to adequately digest food–25 percent of babies who get NEC die from it), and have lower obesity rates than their store-bought formula-fed counterparts (since formula transmits 70 percent more protein to these bottled babes, triggering higher levels of growth factors and insulin secretion, leading to an increase in fat deposits).

After reading the information I’ve provided above, though, you may think that Williams’ is preaching pro-breastfeeding propaganda. You would be wrong to think so: Williams reveals that a higher level of chemicals is found in the bodies of children who were breastfed, as moms exposed to and ingesting the many chemicals our society, both modern and passed down from their moms and their moms’ moms (hello DDT, an insecticide used during the WWII era), passed down from breast to baby. PBAs are another chemical to worry about as well. But Williams points out that all this worrying is a bit unnecessary: Formula feeders catch up to the breast-fed in regards to chemical saturation by the time they reach midchildhood, so no matter your decision in how you feed your baby in its formative years, you can relax in knowing that your child will ingest hundreds of thousands of chemicals no matter how you slice it.

Sound depressing? It gets worse: Williams’ research posits that though genetics play a large role in determining someone’s risk to acquiring breast cancer, no one in 100 percent immune. And while there seems to be a link between solvents and the beast of the breasts, there is no concrete evidence that chemicals cause breast cancer in humans.

Williams does provide us with some hope, though. If but one reason to jump on the pro-breastfeeding bandwagon is the research found linking women who have had children before the age of 35 less likely to get breast cancer than women who have never had kids or had them later in life, after 35. Something about the glandular maturation of the breast that only happens once it starts making milk for baby, the breasts sole anatomical function is what could save our lives–and, therefore, our breasts.

The universe may be killing women one breast at a time, but Williams’ finds gives it to you straight through interviews with the leading researchers in the field and the anecdotes she weaves in based on her own research and experience as a breastfeeding mom, adding a good dose of humor to deliver the hard information she feeds the reader. But read it you should, ladies, if not to learn the history and function of your mammaries, then at least to learn how the outside world is attacking the human form’s most iconic feature.

Obviously, if one is feeling self-conscious about the way they look–especially in the sack–you aren’t going to feel too awesome about yourself, whether you’re in bed or out and about. The thing about sex–and less-than-awesome feelings of self-assuredness, empowerment, confidence–is that it usually happens in the bedroom, with (usually) one other person who (usually) gets to see you naked. There are no clothes to hide behind, no special tricks to conceal the places we’ve learned to so stylishly cover up when we’re out in the real world. Oversize tees come off, as do the padded bras (if but one reason I am against false advertisement: in the end, your lover is going to find out that you’re not exactly the measurements you seem to be while fully clothed).

Now, I’ve been known to apologize to lovers on occasion for not having a more ample bosom for them to look/lick/hold/touch/what have you (sorry, Mom) when we’re being intimate. But you know what? None of them–I repeat, NONE OF THEM–minded. In fact, I’d say about 90 percent of the men I’ve been with actually PREFER smaller chests. Or they were just saying that to make me feel better about myself so that we could go ahead and get it on already, in which case it worked.

But ladies, really, breasts are just an accessory to sex.  Sure, they play a role in foreplay and sexual stimulation (for some, not all, mind you), but they have nothing to do with actual intercourse, i.e., penetration. That 70 percent of the women surveyed for this poll claim their sex life has improved since they got larger racks is really all psychological. I mean, I am no head doctor, but it doesn’t take a Ph. D. to understand the correlation here: If you feel you are missing out because you’re self-conscious that a part of your body doesn’t look how you think it ought to, of course you’re going to have less fun in bed–you’re too busy worrying about what your partner is thinking about how you look.

The poll also shows that 61 percent of women who underwent breast enhancement also now, post-procedure, enjoy MORE sex than before their surgery. Another duh here, if you will.  If you’re down on yourself because a certain body part (or parts) doesn’t look how you think it should (thank you, Star, People, OK, Us Weekly for constant skin-baring photos of the superskinny celebrity variety, and for poking fun at those in the spotlight for those not meeting the “fit” or “thin” quotient. Really, you can be quite mean) and then suddenly said body part is looking how you think it should, well of course you’re confidence as well as the desire to get naked is going to make you feel more willing to undress.

All this to say that, really, no one’s opinion about your body matters except your own. While this opinion still may lead some to go under the knife, Tuff Titties hopes you have the courage to see yourself, to see your body as the temple it is and not feel the need to alter it for someone else to find you attractive. Self-confidence–not C or D cups–is one of the sexiest traits someone can have, so before you decide to undergo surgery in hopes of finding–or keeping–a sexual partner, please try to change the habit of negative thinking and remind yourself that you are special, beautiful, unique just the way you are.

If you will recall, this site was started in hopes to champion women of all ages and breast size to love themselves just as they are, to not feel pressured by the media into looking a certain way, ways that would lead one to buy padded bras or invest in implants. On this day in 2012, my message has not changed, but my breasts have.

I hear you asking, If she didn’t get implants, how did her breasts change? Well, to be quite honest, they’ve shrunk. Okay, maybe they didn’t shrink per se, but they are, indeed, smaller now than they were three months ago. I hear you asking another question: How can you tell they’re smaller? My answer in two parts: 1) When something physically changes in/on your person, you know. 2) If answer No. 1 is not so obvious (you’d be surprised at how unfamiliar and unacquainted many people are with their bodies), you sure as hell know when certain articles of clothing are suddenly loose or baggy. Not that I’m looking to round out any shirts or dresses anytime soon, if ever, but when I noticed that there is now ample wiggle room in a few of my 34A bras, well, I’d be lying if I say I didn’t feel just a little bit deflated.

But you are the voice of women with small breasts everywhere! you exclaim, How can you say such things?! It’s a tricky thing, this subject, because the reason behind my Incredible Shrinking Woman act is weight loss. I hadn’t planned on losing weight, I am not someone who goes on diets, but thanks to the recent death of a close friend followed by a big move to a new city, well, food just doesn’t interest me the way it once did.

Just to be clear, I still eat three meals a day. But I am also more active now: I bike around my new city of Toronto and practice yoga daily (not knowing anyone here, I have a LOT of free time on my hands). But I was at odds with myself upon realizing that I had 1) lost so much weight, and 2) lost so much from an area of my body that didn’t seem to have much to spare in the fat department.

As a woman, when entertaining ideas of losing weight, we all fantasize about losing it in that one area we think calorie-counting will remodel: our stomach, thighs, butt. But a little thing called genes determines how and where we actually lose weight, and I’m not talking DKNY. Before we are even born, blueprints have been made–without our approval–on how we will gain, store, and lose body fat.

Turns out, my blueprint would like me to forever be your flat-chested girl. And I’m okay with that. It just took a day or two to digest this information (there are so many other, more padded places I could have lost weight! I thought to myself).

So why am I sharing this information? Sharing something so personal, admitting that Tuff Titties, too, can succumb to the feelings of supposed “short-comings,” of inadequacy our society so monstrously thrusts upon us? For that exact reason: No one is completely immune to thinking that they would look better if they just lost five pounds from their (insert name of “unsightly” body part here). Or maybe that is just human tendency to think the worst of ourselves.

Maybe we wouldn’t think so badly of ourselves if we didn’t have babes like bikini-clad Jennifer Aniston, buxom-bosomed Angelina Jolie, super-skinny Olsen twins, or perfect-10 Brooklyn Decker-types to stare at obsessively on TV and film, in magazines, on billboards or wherever else this species boasting these “perfect” bodies dwell. These advertising gimmicks work so well, playing to our self-conscious sides, making us all feel bad about something about ourselves. It’s up to us to be more loving, more accepting of ourselves.

Tuff Titties is still the beautiful, caring, loving, mindful woman she was a half a cup ago. There may be a little less protruding from her chest area, but having a smaller rack doesn’t change who she is deep down inside. Nor would it change you if you noticed your gals give way, or if they grew more bountiful if you notice your weight moving in the opposite direction. Or any other part of your body that may morph due to your diet and/or exercise regimen.

We are all different. Why shouldn’t we embrace our unadulterated looks? It’s what makes us UNIQUE. Buddha bellies, saddlebags, fupas, arm waddles, love handles–these terms we cringe at, consider to be flaws will certainly haunt us forever if we look at them so negatively in order to maintain someone else’s view of beauty that never took into account just how different 7 billion people’s bodies are. (That’s a lot of bodies!)

So lose the judgment and get on with the lovement. I love my small tits and big butt, the beauty mark on my upper lip, the scar on my back from a surgery I had long ago.

What do you love about yourself?

If you’ve fallen victim to the cancer of the beasts and have had a mastectomy, getting fit for your filets is now easier than ever. ”Previously, women have had to go through a grueling two-and-a-half-hour fitting,” says Wendy Carter, a nurse who specializes in obstetrics for breast cancer survivors.

Referring to the messy and uncomfortable plaster-cast process, Carter, of Hagerstown, Pennsylvania, knew there had to be a better way to fit women for their forms. She came up with the idea to use a scanner to take a 4-D image of a patient’s breast wall and remaining tissue, sending the digitized “photo” to a prosthetic artisan to create the new breast(s), and in 2010 Ability Prosthetics of Gettysburg (Carter’s employer) made her vision a reality.

Cutting the sizing down to a mere two minutes, the same falsies are still available to women as before: a foam bra insert that is covered with a material that resembles skin, or a prosthesis that attaches to the breast wall that creates a more natural look.

Carter’s scanner is similar to a regular bar-code scanner, utilizing a cameralike device to take multiple images from various angles, allowing for a full picture. ”The end product is a prosthesis that can be worn in three ways,” says Carter. “Under your favorite bra, or from material that is a silicone like substance attached to your body with a medical-grade adhesive, and third, you could wear it in a pocketed, post-mastectomy bra.”

Thankfully there are women like Carter who got us ladies’ backs. Now is there anything she can do about those awkward, unpleasant mammograms? Just saying.

“There will be a lot of F-words,” promises HBO vice president of programming Mitch Frankel. “And if there’s an occasion to show a woman taking her shirt off, or not wearing a shirt, or putting a shirt on when she previously had not been wearing one, this show will be taking advantage of that.”

How exciting. I mean, we’ve all been waiting for this day to come, or rather, for this show to come. Just cut out all the dialogue and substance and just give the people what they want: Tits and f-bombs.

“That’s really key to the whole enterprise,” admits Frankel. With the show’s main man already cast, an actor whom HBO reports was popular in the ’90s but lacking in recent hits, the new series is hopeful in adding  three to five females to the cast who are comfortable with showing their bare breasts on camera.

And Frankel promises the swear words will go tit for tat. ”You can expect S-words, C-words, M-words, W-words – I don’t even know what that last one is, but we’ll have it,” he says. Apparently we can also expect the f-word to drop 200 to 300 times in one hour-long episode.

How wholesome.

And if you are not yet convinced that this will be enlightening family programming, this series is said to be boasting multiple simulated sex scenarios ”in various positions, not just doggy style like in many HBO shows,” says Washington Post critic Tom Shales.

“They’ll do it in an artful way, in service to the plot, with great actors,” says Shales (of course they will!), though, he adds, scenes will be kept short, making them difficult to masturbate to.  ”But not impossible,” he adds, winking.

Well, with all the gratuitous breast shots that seem to be the focus of this show, I’d hope one would be able to masturbate to the abundance of chest pieces on display, otherwise I’m not really sure there is a point to all this. Is there one? It just seems a horrific way to regularly sexually exploit women, reducing them to a sum of their parts. But since the channel already has a soft-core show on rotation (hello, True Blood), the folks at HBO need to continue to boldly go further, continuing to “break new ground” in order to keep viewers interested.

Sad face.

This impetus was first put into effect three years ago to help customers figure out which bra or style might be best for their body type, an idea that was apparently suggested by the employees themselves, according to Change CEO Susann Haglund. ”I don’t get why this would be seen as demeaning in any way,” says Haglund. “I am sure there are those that feel that way, but it is completely voluntary to wear a name tag with your cup size.”

Not so, says a former employee involved in the suit who worked for the chain for a year and a half. “When you start you get receive a document which states that ‘name tag with size is always worn’, so to me that doesn’t reflect that it was voluntary,” she says. “It isn’t great when you’re out on town and people greet you with your name and cup size. It feels sort of private.”

Frustrated with this invasion of privacy, she left the company and contacted the Commercial Employees Union, which states that this is a clear case of discrimination and could be in breach of Swedish law. Efforts are now in play to have the name tags removed.

As the lawsuit pushes forward, Haglund still denies that employees are forced to wear the name tags in question. “It doesn’t say anywhere that you have to wear them and it was a very old document that she [the former employee] cited,” she says. “There’s nothing like that any more.”

But a current employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, begs to differ. “We have never been told we can remove them. We have mystery shoppers here, and if we don’t wear our tags with name and size it gives us loads of demerits.”

Demerits for not displaying your cup size? Sounds a bit ridiculous to me, almost as ridiculous for being asked or expected to tell the world just how big your breasts are. The anonymous rebel rouser puts it best: “We have dirty old men coming into the shop looking at my cup size. Why should everyone get to know that? Guys selling underwear don’t have to show their size.”

Touche.

That’s right:  You can treat your girls to some new cups for under a buck–or pound as UK chain 99p Stores have just debuted “the best-value bra in the country.” “Everyone is looking to save money wherever they can and this bra has hit the market at the right time,” says Hussein Lalani, commercial director of the chain store.

Available in sizes 32-36C (though not quite sure if this entails cups in A and B sizes or if 99p is offering only C cups–after all, this is England, where the average chest piece clocks in at 36D) in black, white, and natural, it seems comfort–or style–has not been compromised in the attempt to create an affordable bra. ”I was a bit apprehensive at first because I’ve bought low-priced bras before and they were very uncomfortable,” says model Lucy Cusack , one of the first women to try out the new bra. “But this one was actually really pleasant, and I could see myself wearing it to work.”

Having had many a 99-cent appliance crap out on me (can opener, spatula, dish rags, et al), I’m a bit skeptical about this product’s shelf life once it’s made its way into one’s regular rotation. But then again, we all have bore witness to how sultan of cheap chic Forever 21 wares fare once they’ve been through the washing machine one too many times. So don’t plan on the 99p bra to outlive your designer duds.

Remember: You get what you pay for.

Upon waking up in recovery, Dinora was aghast to find that her breasts had merged together, creating one where nature intended two. Just how does something like this happen? Apparently the surgeon cut across two “pockets” of breast tissue which allowed the breasts to conjoin in the middle, creating the uniboob. And in creating Dinora’s own magical creature, the surgeon also cut through nerves and muscles, leaving the patient with shooting pain in her ribs.

Not only did the surgeon botch Dinora’s breasts, but she also went ahead and gave Dinora corrective surgery on her eyes without Dinora’s consent–now she is unable to fully close her eyes, a disfunction that no surgeon will be able to correct. Dinora must take medication for the rest of her life to keep her eyes moist.

Though Dinora did receive reconstructive surgery to fix her uniboob, she regrets not doing her homework and doing a full background check on the man who would use a knife to open up her body. “My biggest mistake is that I didn’t check any of her credentials,” says Dinora. “I found out later that she had done really bad surgeries on some other people too.”

“There is a misconception among consumers that as long as a doctor is certified in a medical field that he or she is qualified to practice plastic surgery,” says Malcolm Z. Roth, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. “This is absolutely wrong and it is dangerous for patients. If you are considering a plastic surgery procedure it is critical that your doctor is a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. This is the best way to be certain that he or she has completed the necessary training and meets certain standards to practice plastic surgery.”

So let that be a lesson to those of you looking to make your bosom more bountiful. If you must go under the knife, I’d hope that you at least Google the name of your surgeon to see that they are legit. Unless you’re looking for a magical creature of your own.

The authors of the study poured over more than 1,000 images spanning 48 years of both men and women, and while they found that men, too, have become more sexualized, they were shocked at how dramatically more provocative women’s images have augmented over time. In order to determine if a photo should be deemed lewd, it was given ”sexualization points.” To receive such points, the subject’s lips had to be parted or his/her tongue was showing, the subject was only partially clothed or naked, or the text describing the subject on the cover used explicitly sexual language. In the 2000s alone, “there were 10 times more hypersexualized images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualized images of men than of women,” says Hatton.

“What we conclude from this is that popular media outlets such as Rolling Stone are not depicting women as sexy musicians or actors; they are depicting women musicians and actors as ready and available for sex. This is problematic because it indicates a decisive narrowing of media representations of women,” says Hatton. “We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy.’ But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”

Hopefully you understand the import and/or implications of such a study, as there have been dramatic finds in related research that has linked a range of negative consequences with similar sexualized images, such as violence against women and girls, and sexual harassment. They also have helped to instill in the male gender anti-women attitudes, according to Hatton & Co.

“Such images also have been shown to increase rates of body dissatisfaction and/or eating disorders among men, women and girls; and they have even been shown to decrease sexual satisfaction among both men and women. For these reasons,” says Hatton, “we find the frequency of sexualized images of women in popular media, combined with the extreme intensity of their sexualization, to be cause for concern.”

Whether dames be sporting colossal cleavage, bountiful booty, or their best sexpot pinup pose, it looks like Tuff Titties has been onto something and is not the only one in her quest to point out the absurd and distasteful in today’s media. But I can’t help but wonder how you, dear readers, feel about the sexified images that harass you through the magazines you read, the billboards you see, the tv shows and movies that invade your living room? Do you think these hypersexualized images our society has become saturated with affects our attitudes toward women?