The sins of my breasts!

I buttoned up my shirt, hoping against hope that my breasts don’t come bursting through. That atrocity can’t happen. Unfortunately the way the female body works, even though I am a petite woman of small proportions, my breasts have outgrown my body and need many containment strategies before I can present myself to other people. If I don’t do that then I can singlehandedly be responsible for any sexual assault that happens to me, cat calls that come after me, people’s faith being jeopardized and cars stopping in their tracks for an accident to happen. My breasts run so many pivotal operations around me that I can’t be lax about how I cover them. I mean even covering them with all means available can cause any of the above. Imagine if I let them loosely covered. That would cause moral mayhem.

A woman’s breasts are considered a thing of beauty that can cause people to commit sin . In popular culture they’ve been addressed with grossly shameful and aesthetically shameful references. The words used to describe them range from covert expressions to some more outrageous ones. They all smell of something perverse mostly.

And even in the not-so-popular culture. Urdu poets of yore have used sinisterly woven language to praise and glorify the female body. When I hear us having equal claim to religion and culturally deviant practices of men writing about women’s breasts while making it sound like a sexual assault that they have committed with their eyes, it confuses me. Do Muslims hate breasts or do they love them? A lot of this poetry makes up school curriculum so we are probably making an exception to religion while we educate our youth in the name of fine albeit deprave literature.

It’s odd that breasts have had so much visibility because honestly, their owners haven’t. People whose bodies these breasts are attached to have never been acknowledged with the type of admiration that has traditionally been reserved for breasts. Wonder why!

However, even though they should be celebrated, my breasts should be covered. They can only be talked about in lewd expressions and staged themes by men . They can’t be considered just another body part. And how can they be just another body part? With the havoc that they can wreak in the psychosocial system of the society, it doesn’t allow for them to enjoy the status of being just another body part. I can’t be cavalier about hiding them. That can lead to sacrilege by men. People can be really fixated about my breasts and somehow it’s my job to cure that fixation by not parading my breasts. I’m sure there will be a court order soon whereby women could only bring out their breasts when men allow for them to. When men can focus on them without running the risk of distraction from work or driving. When men want to enjoy them with a single-minded debauchery.

Even though my breasts have won me some favors over the years without me asking for said favors having any connection with them, the amount of upkeep they’ve asked for is insane. The constantly changing size due to puberty, pregnancies and breastfeeding ; the constant hunt for the right bra without exactly knowing my size because I’m not so shameless as to measure them ; the amount of concern at which way they point when I’m sleeping are all areas of concern about my breasts that can really occupy my life’s sanity if I didn’t have a certain careless attitude towards them .

Yup you heard it right! I don’t care anymore. They’ve caused so much grief over the years and have been the source of so much catcalls and filthy looks that my breasts have now seen it all. They’ve been appraised and weighed by men as I’m getting groceries from them. They’ve been eyed mischievously by some young boys whom I taught once in the safety of my home, making me feel vulnerable and unsafe. They’ve been mentally undressed by fellow coworkers as I speak with them about work. They’ve been the first thing that they’ve looked at when I’ve addressed them. They’ve stared at them and fondled them without my consent. So now I don’t care anymore.

I go out in public, brazen as they call me, without any extra protective measures on my breasts to constrain them, an ill-fitting bra my only armor against the breast offenders . I haven’t yet burned my bra as women some fifty years ago did. I might burn it someday when my breasts grow out of them one more time. It doesn’t serve any real protection, to be honest. In fact some people tell me that they can be turned on more by my bra than my breasts. Since I’ve been told this I have had to be careful that my bra is a utilitarian operation of a large piece of cloth with no embellishments or lace, nothing that could even come within an inch of being called lingerie and is draped across most of my breasts and my back, providing an extra layer of protection from the heresy that men can commit should they even so much as suspect I have breasts.