Photo by Flickr user Wombatunderground1. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Feminist* author Courtney Martin, widely respected-by-feminists* blogger at premier feminist* website Feministing* quotes Australian feminist* porn-for-women blogger Ms. Naughty by way of decrying…

...censorship prompted by decidedly non-feminist Australian Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett. The censorship in question? Small breasts, which at least in Joyce and Barnett’s understanding of anatomy, are found only on underage girls.

Quoth Martin…

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests somehow stir up the pedophiles. And you only need to mention that “p” word to start a full-scale moral panic in Parliament.

Shall we put such hysteria aside and look at what this ruling is saying to Australian women? Basically, it’s classing a certain normal female body type as obscene. It’s declaring all flat chests to be automatically juvenile, something that should not be viewed by anyone because of a fear that it will stir up “base instincts” in certain people.

“Can the Classification Board be any more insulting or sexist?”

Read the quote in context here.

For what it’s worth Barnett and Guy have also pressed the board to outright ban all depictions of female ejaculations and, even weirder, they’re evidently working to restrict photos where inner (but not outer!) labia are visible.

So far anyway the comments at Feministing have been pretty positive in the sense that even those who aren’t totally thrilled by porn still think impositions like this are going too far.

In fact, pretty much around the world people of all stripes are taking a… pretty dim view of the board’s actions.

So I’m going to be contrary and try to give the stupid morons the benefit of the doubt.

Opposition to the small-breasts ruling have been pretty hyperbolic and the analysis has sounded a bit slippery-slope-y so I thought I’d look around and see if I could find the real scoop.

Turns out there’s not a lot. In fact the only credible source of a pro-small-breasts-ban line of reasoning comes from the the Australian anti-censorship site that seems to have broken the original story, SomebodyThingOfTheChildren.com.

According to them the Australian Classification Board says their intention is to ban only images of underage models. Well, and images of small-breasted of-age adults if they might be mistaken for underage models.

In other words even though there’s surprising unanimity in choosing to illustrate articles with photos of actress Keira Knightley, it’s at least somewhat likely magazines and videos depicting her wouldn’t be covered by the ban because she’s known to be an adult.

On the other hand, publications the board evidently has completely banned include 18 U.S. C. 2257-compliant U.S. magazines with titles like Barely Legal, Finally Legal and Purely 18. In other words publications that expressly intend their models to be perceived as of-age adults… and who, since the publications are under perpetual threat of F.B.I. investigation, are verified to be actually of-age adults.

Which means that, yup, even if accusatory articles are hyperbolic the underlying story appears to be accurate: in Australia pornographers are now officially required to discriminate against women with small breasts.

Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett, and no-doubt Russ Meyer approve.

\* I’ve been debating a bunch of anti-feminists who claim all feminists are man-hating, hairy-legged, lesbian-separatist, female-supremacist sex haters lately and, at least according to them this post, nor Courtney’s, nor Ms. Naughties can exist, let alone say anything that isn’t straight-up conservative about erotic images of adult men and women. So I thought I’d emphasis the point. Not that it would matter — they’re inclined to see feminism as an evil monolith than Mary Daly was inclined to see men, period, at all. So I thought I’d rub it in.

I mentioned earlier that I’ve noticed more posts about breasts than usual this week. Here’s another good one. F.F. of Feminist Finance, in a continuing series called “How to Care For Your Clothes” says

I will break the ice by telling you a somewhat embarrassing story about myself. Hi, my name is feminist finance, and I wore the wrong size bra for about 15 years. I bought bras based on the size I thought I probably ought to be. My breasts weren’t small, but I didn’t think they were especially big, either. I am not quite sure who or what I was comparing myself to, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was, oh, boob-fetishizing culture at large. So, not so big and not so small: a B-cup sounded about right based on that description. So that’s what I wore from the start of high school until the very recent past.

Ding, ding, ding, guesswork and habit is the wrong way to buy a bra. My idea of what I looked like, and consequently what size bra I should be wearing, didn’t match reality. ... But dysmorphic thinking can take a lot of different, less extreme forms, and the form it took for me was thinking that because I didn’t look like a Hooter’s poster girl that I could not possibly be larger than a B-cup. That is also the form it apparently takes for a lot of the women who appear on Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style (I’m such a sucker for Tim Gunn ), who says that in all the episodes of filming that show, he has never worked with a woman who was wearing a correctly sized bra. It’s not necessarily about body hate or even mild body dislike, but it is always about unreality.

... It wasn’t enough of a prompt that I always had to wear a sweater over my button-down shirts because they would gap and pucker across my chest. I thought that was just an occupational hazard of buying cheaply made stuff. It wasn’t enough that I could sometimes see the outline of my bra through my sweaters where my breasts were spilling out over the top of the cup. I thought maybe my sweaters had shrunk. ...I decided that just for shits and giggles I would swing by my friendly neighborhood department store lingerie department. It was there that I learned that I have probably not been a B-cup since early in puberty. Me and my properly supported 34-D’s can now quite happily wear the exact same button-down shirts that used to make me swear and foam at the mouth.

She said it here.

I strongly endorse f.f.‘s recommendation that women get fitted by someone who’s trained to do it, even though I don’t have breasts, because just before I moved to the northwest young I worked briefly with a young woman from a fairly rural area who’s starchily conservative, religious mom happened to sell foundation garments out of her home. And while she very strictly managed her daughter’s relationships (“so… exactly what are your intentions with my daughter?” “Um, I’m mostly giving her rides to work since she doesn’t drive”) she was absolutely relaxed and almost, well, evangelical about breast care. And so on the few times I had to wait for my coworker to get ready I got a living earful of not-immediately-applicable information about the importance of breast examinations, the merits and demerits of underwires, the proper adjustments of straps, changes in breast size over the course of menstrual cycles, and quite a bit about the arcane system whereby bra size is determined. And, as f.f. discovered, just how much a correctly or incorrectly sized bra affects the fit of one’s clothes.

The main upshot though being, yeah, especially considering how expensive they are and how much they affect comfort, fit, and even health, it’s really a good idea to get properly fitted before you buy bras.

Update: Doh! I should have added “...if you intend to buy or wear them.” Which not everybody does or should or needs to or wants to, and which some people say one ought not to.