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the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.
    The female body is commonly believed to be enveloped in insu- lating fat, just so that she is more cuddly, Nature and Hugh Hefner being alike bawds in this traffic. It is true that women wear much fewer and lighter clothes than men do, but it is not so easy to determ- ine whether the layer of fat results from the necessity to insulate such exposed portions or predates it. Men’s habit of wrapping their nether quarters in long garments has resulted in a wastage of the tissues which can be seen in the chicken legs which they expose on
    any British resort beach. 1 Men have subcutaneous fat as well as
    women, but women build up larger deposits in specific sites. In fat people most of the fat is accumulated in the subcutaneous layer: what the pseudo-fact that women have subcutaneous fat really means is that women ought to be fatter than men. Historically we may see that all repressed, indolent people have been fat, that eu- nuchs tend to fatten like bullocks, and so we need not be surprised
    to find that the male preference for cuddlesome women persists. 2
    The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom. The actual gland that forms the base of the

    The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms.
    Gregory, ‘A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters’,
    1809, p. 64

    breast is a convex structure extending from the second rib to the sixth beneath: the fat which gathers around it and forms the canyon of cleavage is not itself a sexual characteristic; in cases where the owner of huge breasts is not fat elsewhere the phenomenon is usually caused by endocrine derangement. The degree of attention which breasts receive, combined with the confusion about what the breast fetishists actually want, makes women unduly anxious about them. They can never be just right; they must always be too small, too big, the wrong shape, too flabby. The characteristics of the mammary stereotype are impossible to emulate because they are falsely simu- lated, but they must be faked somehow or another. Reality is either gross or scrawny.
    A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck: it endears her to the men who want to make their mammet of her, but she is never allowed to think that their popping eyes actually see her. Her breasts are only to be admired for as long as they show no signs of their function: once darkened, stretched or withered they are objects of revulsion. They are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck, to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty, or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices. The only way that women can opt out of such gross handling is to refuse to wear undergar- ments which perpetuate the fantasy of pneumatic boobs, so that men must come to terms with the varieties of the real thing. Recent emphasis on the nipple, which was absent from the breast of popular pornography, is in women’s favour, for the nipple is expressive and responsive. The vegetable creep of women’s liberation has freed some breasts from the domination of foam and wire. One way
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    to continue progress in the same direction might be to remind men that they have sensitive nipples too.
    The next curve in the joker’s hourglass is the indentation of the waist. The waist is exaggerated in order to emphasize the outward curve of breast and buttock: it is hardly a natural phenomenon at all. In all those eras when it was de rigueur women have had to wear special apparatus to enforce it, and, in much the same way that a heap of brass rings really does elongate Bantu ladies’ necks, the waist came to exist. Nineteenth-century belles even went to the ex- tremity of having their lowest ribs removed so that they could lace their corsets tighter. One native tribe of New Guinea uses tight girdles for both men and women, and the flesh tends to swell above and below the ligature, so that men have