My Lil' Boob Thang: How Size is Mistaken for Value

“Trust me, size really doesn’t matter.” I tell him as he fidgets with himself and glances uncomfortably at my astonishingly large sex toys and diverse collection of dildos. He smiles but I know he doesn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have either. Just as we grow up believing that good sex game comes from having massive, fully erect, European Porn Star dimensioned penises, we are also strongly conditioned to believe that wide hips, big butts, small waists, and big boobs are the only acceptable form of femininity. I watched my friends be told they were attractive for their wide, “child-bearing” hips and immediately shriveled up inside at the thought of someone inventing a name for my narrow hips next.

That’s what I believed when I was 16 too– that puberty being unable to immediately change the way my chest looked meant that I had somehow failed at growing up, being a woman, being fertile, and potentially being a parent in my future. I thought the boys I went out with were doing me a favor, settling for something ugly and incomplete, that it was okay for them to treat me badly. My women friends cried with me about the stretch marks on their chest and hips, we cried about our boobs being asymmetrical, too saggy, too big and causing lower back pains, never fitting quite right into different bras, always hurting too much before our periods, and so much more.

But to the world outside our safe little circles, it was all about the sizes we grew into. Men from outside our circle would make us feel unsafe for being too big, then immediately ridicule the rest of us for being small. Some of my closest male friends called me names behind my back, within their own circle, and my female classmates joined in. Men made me feel like I could never be seen as someone they shared chemistry with, because I was so small, I was practically “one of the guys.” Apparently size did matter, and the women I grew up with only solidified that fear when they cruelly discussed their hook-up’s proportions or talked about how they were disappointed or bored when their partner’s penis didn’t feel hard enough or stay hard for long enough.

The comments didn’t just stop at the size of boobs or penises though. I heard comments about how a good vagina had to be tight and firm but still accommodate a big penis comfortably. But when I had my first few gynecologist appointments and the doctor called me ‘petite’ or ‘small’ down there, it felt like yet another insult to my proportions and never a thing of flattery or great accomplishment. 20 years later, some words and phrases about my body’s sizes and proportions still make me violently ill, even when it’s a compliment. I focused so much energy in my life on building a louder, funnier, more infectious personality, all because I felt a need to compensate for my petite vagina, my small tits, my small hips, and more.

I can only imagine how all this talk of sizes and proportions affects other women and the men around me too. Of course, you’re going to feel a pressure to be even more exciting in bed and attractive in person when the world makes you feel like you have to apologize or be ashamed of the size of your parts. Where I learned to be funnier to distract from my sizes, some of the women in my life turned to kinks that gave them more control and more power in the bedroom. Some men around me worked on being funnier or more romantic, while others merely became more controlling, abusive, or aggressive to cast a shadow over their own myriad insecurities.

We want to believe our sex lives are some simple, uncomplicated thing, but it’s also a result of so many different kinds of fear and shame that the world has pinned on us, and our aggressive desire to scrub that shame off of our skin. While it has taken me years and years of sexual exploration to understand that it is not a personal failing when my vagina doesn’t feel comfortable in certain positions or moments, and that my sudden lack of lubrication is also sometimes an indicator that my body doesn’t want the man who is so aggressively pushing himself and his company on to me. But sometimes it also just means that I’m stressed, intimidated, overwhelmed, or need a little more foreplay to get as wet and comfy as I want to be.

So as I sit here now, as an experienced adult with the knowledge that my boobs are just sacs of fat, I know how much logic can save me and yet do so little to free me from shame. I know how genetics play a huge role in the proportions we develop, or how my diet and exercise and genetic metabolism affect the way my body stores fat or gains weight, which affects the way my boobs grow with time too. I know that keeping my pec muscles strong will keep my boobs a little perky, but I also know that time will inevitably make them sag as I age. None of this will change how afraid I am of being rejected for the body I have built for myself, the body I am genetically coded to have.

So when my partner looks at me and worries about being smaller than my exes, or panics at the thought of me seeing him naked before he’s hard and ready to go, maybe I won’t tell him that size simply doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll just take off my shirt and hold his head near my chest, that chest that he insists isn’t too small for him, and I’ll just say “I know.”