Questions...

Today I am embarking on a project I have been wanting to for over a decade, one that until recently seemed impossible to tackle without heaps of money. How do you sway people's perceptions about beauty and body image - what's normal, what's sexy, what's functional? Where did these perceptions orginate anyway, and are they harming our world or enhancing it?

In particular, I'm talking about breasts. Women's breasts - big ones, small ones, droopy ones, perky ones, even ones that are missing. We'd be hard pressed to find a body part on the female anatomy that stirs so many images and emotions in both men and women of all backgrounds. From adoration and fawning over by men in strip clubs, to self-loathing and disgust among extremist feminists and women who feel they don't "measure up", to fear in breast cancer survivors. Imagine thinking about elbows the same way we think about breasts....constructing garments to make them look a different way, dedicating magazine spreads to show beautiful ones, keeping ones considered ugly constantly covered.

Of course this analogy sounds ridiculous. But remember it was only a generation or two ago that women in China suffered bone-crippling bindings to feed the fetish of small feet. The destruction of a body part's natural function in order to appease some arbitrary definition of beauty...is this not what we are doing when we go under a knife to insert foreign matter into our chests? How and when did large round orbs become the beauty ideal?

Theories abound on why the human animal developed to include external mammory glands. And there is no denying that breasts, in both men and women, are erogenous zones primed to be part of our sexual selves. But clearly there has been a tipping point sometime in the past two decades where the natural form and function of the human breast has given way to the Barbie caricature. When girls ask for augmention surgery for their sweet 16th rather than a car...when, as PC as it is, both men and women turn their head in disgust at the sight of a woman breastfeeding in public...when lesbians risk developing cysts and infection by binding their chests so tight, thinking this flattening is their symbolic gesture against the sexualization of the breast. How did this happen, and when will we collectively say "enough"!

It's natural to love breasts. Love natural breasts.