What Is It About Boobs?

Has this happened to you? One day, it happened to me. 

I looked up and realized: I had boob mugs, boob cups, boob pins, a boob puzzle and a boob throw. I had boob-print beach towels, aprons, dish towels, sweaters, plant pots, stickers and a busty hat. Most of these items were gifted to me, but I’d also just started doing ceramics and found myself making boob vases, as well.

Once, when some of my ceramics were displayed at a local art show, a dude who saw my work shouted, “Hey, where’s the scrotum vases?” I do like a good scrot, but it just hadn’t occurred to me to make one out of clay. Making boob things, on the other hand, feels like second nature.

Humans have been depicting boobs almost as long as homo sapiens have been capable of making art. One of the oldest examples of figurative art is the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels which boasts breasts many times the size of her own head.

In the thousands of years since, breasts have played a lot of roles. They are both erotic and pure, feminine and strong, an object of desire and a source of the world’s best infant food. 

At times, they could also make a political statement, such as in Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading The People,” in which a bare-chested woman proudly holds the French flag aloft. 

It wasn’t until the early 20th Century that women artists began to more regularly portray their own bodies in art and in so doing, tended to make boobs look a lot less “sexy” and more real—dimpled flesh; gravitational pull!

And now? In 2024, here we are sipping coffee out of boob-shaped cups and wiping our hands on breast-imprinted tea towels. 

The question is, why?

My Inquiry Begins

Seeking answers, I cast my net wide. My first inquiry went out to Urban Outfitters. A clothing store for the Gen Z set, I figured it would have its finger firmly on the pulse of its demographic. I asked the company over the course of four emails what the inspiration was for their stock of boob merchandise like throws, cups and hooks. There was no answer. 

Maybe it’s too uncomfortable for a big retailer to comment on its breasty products—stances on female empowerment could impact the bottom line (which is gross). But the silence made me feel like I was being perceived as the Boob, I mean, Bob Woodward of bare chests, digging up the dirt and attempting some gotcha moment.

Add to Urban Outfitters, Confetti Riot and Hali Hali, makers of artisanal housewares and the many boob-ish tea towels in my drawers. They outfit kitchens with things like boob-print aprons, potholders and pouches holding reusable straws—but they also didn’t get back to me. Were they afraid I was going to throw them under the bust?

The silence made me think of something my waxer said when I put the question to my inner circle. As she ripped out stray hairs, she posited that boobified home goods didn’t really mean anything; that they’re just something quirky and goofy; a trend that will pass. Simply put: Boobs sell.

But there had to be more to it than that. And so I contacted Carolina Pasti, a top-caliber breast curator (she put up “Breasts” at the 2024 Venice Biennale) to see what she thought of the trend. Our conversation moved quickly from the lofty (abstract sculptural milk depictions) to the workaday (squeezy boob stress balls). But ultimately it led to some regrettable information—the topless beaches in Europe aren’t as topless anymore. “It’s rare to see women showing their breasts,” she said, “The culture is much more limited now.”

Are the boob homewares a backlash, I wondered. Like, if you can’t show your breasts in public, can you at least have them on your bathmat?

She said that sounded right.

What Pasti loves about boob art is that it touches on everything from illness to femininity, to motherhood, to sex. “It is a 360 degree story,” she said. 

As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Pasti whether she thinks there might be a nefarious side to boob homewares. You know, like, they trivialize feminism or oversimplify womanhood. “Of course,” she said. “When they are ugly; that’s the very bad side.”  

That made us laugh.

The Heart of the Craft

In the weeks following that conversation, I spoke with six different thingamaboob crafters to see what drew them to bosom craft. 

Big issues cropped up over and over—desensitization, empowerment, body acceptance and women’s rights. Our conversations may have been about matters of breast-print phone cases, puzzles and shower curtains, but they became earnest, really fast. 

Mallie Testerman is part of a two-person ceramics outfit based in San Francisco named Sven Ceramics. She made some boob mugs to be silly for a one-off event, but the response she got from women who saw them online made her keep making them. “I got messages that made me cry,” she said, explaining that women said they wanted to buy one for a new mom, birth worker, friend or daughter. One woman wanted one for herself—a marker for beating cancer. “It’s become a symbol of womanhood, and I’ve just been blown away,” said Testerman.

Testerman’s observations were very much in line with the other boob makers. Chiefly, that a big part of boob things is that they can be given by women to women. Pasti, the curator, may have said it best, “It’s like, ‘I see you, you see me, here’s some boobs.’” 

The founder of New Zealand-based Artemis pottery, Georgia Casey, said she got into boob pots to combat the male gaze. It’s a way to break the long historic tradition of male artists depicting female bodies in objectified ways. 

“Putting boobs on a mug felt like a statement that our bodies were not something to be either sexualized or shamed,” explained Casey, “but something to be normalized and celebrated.”

Casey said that putting nudity on a mug, as opposed to, say, hanging it on your wall like a fancy piece of art, makes it part of your normal everyday ritual. That not only reduces bare-breast shock value, but also “every time you make a coffee, you're reminded how wonderful your body is.”

Meanwhile, Nicole Zappala, my artist friend (we have matching boob mugs!), plans to paint a lot of boobs, more boobs than usual, over the next presidency. “The time is now, when so much of our power is being taken away, to dive into it.”

But Zappala may be an outlier. Because—here comes the bad news—according to some, the boobs-on-products trend might be past peak. 

This is obviously upsetting for me since I have only just begun my boob vase journey, but Sonia Rose, who’s been making bare-chested ceramic “goddess ware” for eight years said business has slowed and she’s looking to do other ceramic work. “I don’t know what, yet” she said, “but I’m excited to explore.”

“Why has it slowed?” I asked, a little more desperate than I wanted to sound.

She offered two opposing hypotheses: Either the market was too saturated or people weren’t as interested anymore.

Meanwhile, Cassie McGettigan, the creator of Gravel & Gold’s famous boob print (you might know it: It’s been on T-shirts, totes, pillows, toiletry cases and more), said she’s happy her print still speaks to people, but she’s concerned the print isn’t living up to the current climate.

“I’m thinking more about who gets called a woman and what does it mean and how it’s linked to physical bodies,” she said, “I’m more interested now in ambiguities than declarative flags.” 

Julia Heffernan, the creator of the popular light-hearted boob doodle (I own it in puzzle form), is still fond of her 2014 creation, but 10 years on looks back on it a little differently. “I was never comfortable with my body,” she said, explaining that she now identifies as non-binary, “and I think I was processing.” Now an art therapist, she said she’s more interested at this point in exploring gender non-conforming bodies.

Heffernan suggested I, too, go deeper. She told me to think about what I think about while I’m creating my breast objets d’art. And so I did. The next time I found myself in the clay studio, I tried to pay more attention. As I shaped the breasts, I thought, Wow, I’m pretty fast at this. I’m fast at a lot of things. Not writing, though. Why did I choose the one thing I’m not fast at to be my career? And it spiraled from there.

Was I making these vases because I wasn’t breastfed? Or was I just a sheeple, jumping onto the breast vessel bandwagon? The more I queried, the more I doubted. And the more I doubted, the more issue I took with my own issue: I began to fear my clay breasts were too perky, failing to mirror true authentic breasts that interact with gravity. Naysayers might call them cartoonish. Sure, they could be called a woman’s breasts. But were they a woman’s woman’s breasts?

I needed to move on, and fast, before I canceled my clay studio membership.

That’s when I reached out to Sarah Thornton, a cultural sociologist, and the author of “Tits Up” and, in my view, the world’s foremost breast hype woman.

We were talking boob jugs, neon breast purses and bra earrings—she’s been gifted it all—when the conversation turned to breastfeeding. Thornton was angry. “Breastfeeding is increasingly being pushed back into the closet,” she said, “There are these port-a-potty style rooms in airports and it’s a deep offense to me.” Meanwhile, men can go topless without issue. 

“And if the top half of [a woman’s] body is obscene and the top half of men's bodies is not,” Thornton said, “we still face huge hurdles towards equality and huge hurdles towards self-definition and self-ownership and self-control of our bodies.”

Thornton went on to explain that there is this dominant idea of breasts in America—that women have them to attract men. “They are sex objects and erotic playthings and that is why we have to cover up and hide them,” she said. 

But because this body part has become oversexualized, Thornton explained, it is common for women to disassociate, essentially becoming alienated from their own chest. Viewed in this context, suddenly the breasty household trinket holds immense power. “It can be about reclamation,” she said. In other words, that little boob mug, as weird and disparate as it may sound, might really be about owning and defining our own bodies.

For some reason, this brought me full circle back to the question I’d raised with my waxer: What if all this boob stuff is just straight up consumerism? Does that make it bad?

I put the question to Thornton.

“I’m all for consumerism because it means it’s gone mainstream,” she said. “The problem is when it goes out of fashion. What then?”