- The Guardian,
- Monday October 16 2000
Is there a better word to describe the current and previous Wonderbra campaigns that trade on "naughty but nice" visual puns - such as those to be found on the brand's UK website, which juxtapose a model's breasts with fluffy marshmallows or pink powder puffs? I think not.
Titillation is the perfect method for addressing a somewhat juvenile culture that still enjoys an imaginary snigger at the thought of a curvy girl's titties, a culture whose representations of sexuality rarely rise above the level of seaside postcard humour.
Curiously enough, back in the days when Sid James was sniggering at Barbara Windsor's mammary glands, bra commercials were prim and proper, promising straightforward anatomical realignment and/or absolution for the cardinal sin of being female. Bras would cross your heart, or lift and separate - nothing more. But we live in an age in which the consumer demands ever more choice (or so manufacturers would have us believe). And so now, apparently, women must be able to move their breasts up and down, together and apart, at will.
The new Wonderbra Variable Cleavage design, according to the publicity featuring "supermodel" Adriana Karembu, allows women to select the effect they want. The bra has "extra volume uplift pads" and special strings to adjust the cleavage: a tug on the cords pulls the bra in tighter - a case of lift and coagulate.
The subtext of this cantilevered cleavage, of course, is not that women should be free to wear their breasts at a jaunty angle - the way they might wear a beret, say - but that all women should have the right to bigger (meaning better) breasts. The logical conclusion is most readily visible in the US, where modification of the body is more common and acceptable, and where a greater number of women bypass the modified brassiere and opt instead for surgical enhancement - the "boob job".
It's interesting to note that this supposed desire for higher, bigger, firmer, rounder breasts is not, as might be assumed, a universal ideal. Indeed, it is both culturally and historically specific. Take a glance at any French women's magazine, for example, and you'll see that French women are not interested in having breasts that are higher, bigger, etc. Indeed, quite the opposite: naked breasts are both more common in French advertising and generally smaller than in Britain. Nor is there anything intrinsically sexier about bigger breasts or more ample cleavage - like most other facets of the female form, boobs are subject to fashion, and fashion always tells us something about the times.
No, the key to this discrepancy lies in the obvious fact that British women are not fluffing their pillows for themselves, but in order to arouse, tease, interest or pleasurably excite (often superficial) male counterparts. But why would British men currently feel the need for the return of bigger breasts, for clouds of deep, soft, comforting cleavage in which to bury themselves? It's just a hunch, but this mammary mania seems to indicate a deep crack in the heterosexual British male's self-image.
For all their rampant flaunting of macho attitudes, men's magazines cannot mask the poverty of contemporary masculinity. The boob boom is simply the latest quest for totems of heterosexual masculinity in a post-patrician world. Look at the plethora of dodgy gangster films produced in Britain and TV programmes such as Men Behaving Badly, stuffed with laddish jokes about drunkenness, football and men's untidiness. Look at the non-fiction bestseller lists, dominated by books like The Guv'nor by Lenny McLean and Peter Gerrard, and Pretty Boy by Roy Shaw, both of which celebrate a fast-vanishing world of macho criminal values, inhabited by monosyllabic "real men" - a less complex era with more sharply defined gender roles, when men were men and took nonsense from nobody, especially women and queers.
Could it be that in an age in which traditional male roles - breadwinner, householder, strongman etc - have been eroded, heterosexual men feel the need to redefine their sexuality by demanding that women exaggerate their own? Or is the new Wonderbra Variable Cleavage model merely giving the little lady what she wants?
