Althouse

"I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to."

Said Marjorie Taylor Greene, quoted in "'I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump/How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president’s loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic" (NYT).

"Each night, Ms. Timpf sits at his right-hand side, playfully challenging him while staking out an alternate style of physical humor — one that centers her own experience inhabiting a woman’s body. I met Ms. Timpf on a Tuesday morning in August, on her second day back at 'Gutfeld!' after a reconstructive surgery in which the tissue expanders inserted behind her chest muscle during the mastectomy she underwent in March were replaced with permanent breast implants. She wore baggy jeans and a tight gray T-shirt, which she had second-guessed that morning. “Would I be better off wearing a looser shirt?' she asked. 'Something about breast cancer is — I don’t want to say embarrassing,' she said. 'People are like, Are you breastfeeding? And you have to be like, I just cut my tits off.' She added, 'It’s a weird thing, which is part of the reason why I’ve decided to be so open about it.'... She will have her nipples reconstructed over the next year. It will be her first tattoo. 'I don’t think that those are small things,' Ms. Timpf said. 'I think that those are big things.'"

"I’m letting go of the body that was sexualized, that was abused, that I believed was necessary for me to be attractive; to be loved; to be successful; to be happy.... Today I am loved, I am feminine, I am attractive, and I am successful. None of that is because of my implants. I will still be all of those things when I wake up and they are gone. There is so much and joy in that knowledge and freedom in letting go of what was never me in the first place. Today, I’m my authentic self. Today, I’m free."

Said Alyssa Milano, quoted in "Alyssa Milano removes her breast implants: 'Letting go of the body that was sexualized and abused'"(NY Post).

Wrote Doreen St. Félix, in an X post screencapped in an Instapundit post by Ed Driscoll.

Here's the link to the Facebook page, where the image is quite large and clear and it's easy to read the comments. The government's caption is: "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending."

"I literally built my entire career around that. Was everything a lie? Was I secretly insecure this whole time, and just using body positivity to make money so I could finally afford a boob job? No."

Dao got the implants for “fun,” she explained. After six years and more than 900 videos of “flat-chest content,” she “got bored.”... Dao’s followers are flooding her comments with anger and disappointment, but all the analytics show is that the engagement is through the roof....

I don't understand the choice of the word "but." The "flooding" of comments is engagement. It's a bad use of the human capacity for emotion to get angry at someone like this and to reward her with the attention she sought by doing the thing that made you angry. When will we ever learn?

Weird photo, but since I don't want to suddenly thrust naked breasts in your face, I'll send you over to X to see it: here.

On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.

ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....

TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.

ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....

TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.

ROGAN: But she's pretty hot.... 

TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.

ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.

TRUSSELL: Natural heavies. It's worth it!

"It’s impossible for me not to wonder if I might be happier now had I saved it and continued to live with my body as it was. Like most people who pursue cosmetic surgery, I believed I’d made a decision for and by myself. But what if no one had ever commented on my breasts, or the prior lack thereof? What if I hadn’t seen 50 million TikTok videos of young women with flat chests in baggy T-shirts? What if my doctor had told me that I might be depressed for a month and my scars might look much worse than the pictures in his portfolio? Would I still have done it? Less often, and less practically, I worry, too, that by giving up breast tissue, I’ve sacrificed some future, as-yet-discovered version of myself: What if one day I want to dress like Sydney Sweeney but no longer have the rack for it? Never mind that I’m a homebody writer and almost 40. Never mind that I stopped showing any cleavage 15 years ago. I’m more than capable of feeling regret for not doing things I never wanted to do in the first place; I do it all the time."

Writes Katie Heaney, in "My Breast Reduction From Hell/After my divorce, I wanted to make a change. Then the complications started" (New York Magazine).

"Now, they want Bs. He often does five breast reductions a week, mostly on young, postpartum mothers.... Small breasts may not draw as much attention on the subway or the street as bigger breasts do, but they are also a fashion. Whereas big breasts signal motherhood and sexual availability, smaller breasts can convey youth, girlishness, puberty, thinness, androgyny.... They can also indicate class. In March, a meme circulated on X... 'MEN,' it said. 'Which do you prefer? The aristocratic elegance of the small breasted woman OR the Nietzschean pro-sex, pro-beauty large breasted woman?' Thornton agrees that smaller breasts signal the self-assurance of affluence whereas breast augmentation can signify social ambition — a desire to attain wealth and status via the attention of men.... For a woman to withdraw from the male gaze, to assert herself in her refusal to be ogled, to relieve her own pain, to be able to comfortably train for a marathon or dance at her own birthday party — that is liberation. But it’s a personal, individual one, said Thornton. 'If women are going to have an emancipated rack,' she said, 'then men need to change.'"

I'm reading "The Power of a Smaller Breast/Breast reduction is all the rage in cosmetic surgery. Are women asserting their independence or capitulating to a yet another impossible standard of beauty?" (NYT).

"... people often just feel male or female, and some more strongly than others. This can manifest in different ways. Some of my young patients draw themselves as a certain gender and have a 'wow, this is me' feeling.... [I]t’s hard to describe this transcendent feeling in words. But it is the foundation of our gender identity, the scaffolding we’re born with...."

Writes Jack Turban, a psychiatrist, in "Not Everyone Thinks About Gender the Same Way. Here’s One Way to Talk About It" (NYT).

"'I’m not just cute,' she purred, inviting prospective voters to connect with her on Line, Japan’s popular messaging app. 'I’m sexy, right?' Ms. Uchino is backed by the Party to Protect the People from NHK, a renegade group that is supporting close to half of those running for governor. The group has permitted its candidates and some others to post campaign posters featuring photos of cats or cartoon animals on the official election signboards...."

"... including 'topless women on stage simulating sex acts' in an uncomfortable, sweltering environment. He claims that Madonna demanded the air conditioning be turned off and he became physically ill in the heat. Lipeles also cites Madonna's tardiness.... 'Forcing consumers to wait hours in hot, uncomfortable arenas and subjecting them to pornography without warning is demonstrative of Madonna's flippant disrespect for her fans'...."

From "Madonna hit with new lawsuit alleging unwanted exposure to sexual content and emotional distress/California concert attendee Justen Lipeles is the latest to sue the pop star over her 'Celebration' tour" (Entertainment Weekly).

Writes Sarah Thornton, quoted in "We Must Defend the Bust/Breasts are subject to capricious restrictions and contradictory norms. What would it take to set them free?" (The New Yorker). The New Yorker article is by Lauren Michele Jackson, writing about Thornton's book "Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, & Witches Tell Us About Breasts." Thornton was writing about an artist named Clarity Haynes.

"Trump came across as a loser in her account — a narcissist, cheater, sad Hugh Hefner wannabe, trading his satin pajamas for a dress shirt and trousers (and, later, boxers) as soon as Stormy mocked him. The man who was the likely source of the 'Best Sex I Ever Had' tabloid headline, attributed to Marla Maples at the time, no doubt loathes Stormy for having described their batrachian grappling, as Aldous Huxley called sex, as 'textbook generic.' Like a legal dominatrix, Stormy continued to emasculate the former president after her testimony, tweeting: 'Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh … wait. Nevermind.' The compelling part of this case is not whether Trump did something wrong with business papers. The compelling part is how it shows, in a vivid way, that he’s the wrong man for the job."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her new column "Donnie After Dark" (NYT).

"Augmentation also skews more working class nowadays — actually, I would say conspicuous boob jobs skew working class. In one study, a segment of British working class women, for example, see fake tits as a form of consumption that gives them status and signals that they are independent women in command of the male gaze. And then similarly, a contingent of Brazilian women who began their lives in poverty want people to know they have implants as a form of financial accomplishment...."

Said Sarah Thornton, quoted in "Why Are We Obsessed With Breasts? After her own mastectomy, sociologist Sarah Thornton sought to answer the question" (NYT).

Thornton's book is called "Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts."

Her mastectomy — which was done as a precaution against a hereditary form of breast cancer — included breast implants — large ones that she later had replaced with smaller ones.

WaPo reports.

The New York Post collects 93 looks from The Golden Globes — all displayed on one page.

My general impression is that women are hiding within great rolls and flows of fabric and armoring their breasts inside stiff structures.

My specific impression is that Karen Gillan (#28) is wearing the dress of the future. I don't know how that was made, but I'm thinking: A.I.

I actually started watching the Golden Globes. We signed up for a free trial of Fubo so we could watch the Packers game, and with old-time-y "live" TV again, we rediscovered the lost art of channel surfing and ended up on the GGs. It was the opening monologue, some comedian I didn't know, and he was terrible. He absolutely did not belong there, taking shots at the stars, as if he were Ricky Gervais. Who turned down this work before they got to him? He referred to Barbie's "boobies" and we, the home audience, saw Greta Gerwig giving him the stinkeye, like Who the hell are you? You're nobody and now you've ensured that you will never be anybody. 

So I guess you don't need to learn the poor guy's name, but, for reference, it's Jo Koy. Here's the whole disaster:

"Having Marie Kondo’d these rags, I had more room in my bag and could either dress normally en route home, or carry all the souvenirs I’d buy with the $128 I saved being my own suitcase."