One of the highlights of this bleak period in US history, known so far as 2025, is the generous cleavage of Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s partner. During the presidential inauguration at the start of the year – and the subsequent media scandal surrounding her “obscenity” for daring to show – I was struck by a voluptuous pair of thoughts.

First, I was intrigued by Sánchez’s retro appearance. Her conspicuously augmented chest was so 1995, so defiant of the high-end designer fashion norms of billionaire-babe chic. While others sneered, I admired her resistance to convention and her courage to go with a vintage look. Here was a media-savvy 55-year-old with a pro-social offering of bosom. I think that she understood on some deeply embodied level how to upstage the 47th president of the US. 

Second, I was vexed by the irony that my new book, Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation, has been censored from ads and recommendations on Amazon, Bezos’s main business. It’s an unfortunate fact that the algorithms used to “protect the communities” of social media and online booksellers do not differentiate between pornography and women’s studies. As a result, women’s perspectives on their own bodies are being systematically suppressed. The media sanctions inflicted on Sánchez and me lead to a few historical questions: when did breasts become obscene or, for that matter, erotic? 

Breasts became eroticised in 15th-century France when aristocrats delegated breastfeeding to wet nurses, freeing the maternal body to be visually and sexually claimed. Starting in the 1400s, French kings commissioned paintings to celebrate the pristine, weightless breasts of the mistresses who had borne their children, standing next to the heavy jugs of the wet nurses who fed them. It is no coincidence that, to this day, Paris has the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world and is also the global hub of the lingerie industry.

Breasts are not universally erotic. Anthropological evidence clearly shows that sexual attraction to them is most common in Europe and the Americas. In Indigenous communities where women wear no clothing above the waist and breastfeed openly, the sexual fetishisation of breasts is viewed as a juvenile perversion or bizarre foreign taste. Beauty paradigms in East Asia have long favoured flat chests and upheld traditions of breast binding among Chinese noblewomen and Japanese geishas. In most of Africa, the ideal breast has not been served up for the male gaze. In Dogon wood carvings from Mali, for example, the finest pairs have a long, conical shape that often points to a baby’s mouth.

Evidence of the intensifying vulgarity of breasts can be seen in the changing connotations of the word “tits”. Initially an innocent variant of “teats”, tits is at least a thousand years old and likely derives from the ancient Proto-Indo-European word tata. Tits were not profane until the early 20th century, when “tits and ass” entertainment proliferated in the form of burlesque shows. At that time, “tits” mutated into a salacious term for a monetised body part, one presented for the delectation of men, far removed from its biological purpose. Today “tits” is the number one word for breasts on the internet due to its function in navigating porn sites and sex-worker services.

There are hundreds of slang terms for breasts in the English language, most of which are used by men. White women in the Anglo world tend to talk about “breasts” or “boobs” – the latter being synonymous with idiots, hence booby prizes and booby traps. This gender discrepancy suggests that women have surrendered the definition of their top halves to men – and they aren’t even trying to contest it. 

When I began researching the topic, I found it awkward to utter the word “tits” out loud. Then I spent many nights in “titty bars” talking to strippers. Sex workers deploy the word “tits” to claim ownership of their bodies in the jargon of their trade. Nowadays, it rolls off my tongue. “Tits” thwarts puritanical taboos and embraces sexual freedoms. When women who are happy with their own anatomy say it aloud, it is not demeaning. It’s a symbolic strategy that insists on reclaiming a body part.

This linguistic revelation led me to a love of the American showbiz expression “tits up”, which one woman might holler to another as she goes on stage. An alternative for good luck, “tits up” encourages a sister to stand tall, pull her shoulders back and succeed. In the UK, “tits up” means something has gone “belly up”, like a lifeless fish floating in water. It’s possible that the positive American meaning arose independently – a physical migration from “chin up” – or it could be that theatre people flipped the dead metaphor, making ironic use of the British idiom in the manner of “break a leg.” 

In the first half of the 20th century, legs were the most fetishised part of women’s bodies. After being hidden for centuries beneath floor-length skirts, the sight of legs had the power to arouse. Between 1942 to 1951, for example, Betty Grable was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress and America’s most popular sex symbol. She was so celebrated for her legs that 20th Century Studios insured them for a million dollars. In 1953, a benchmark year in the sexualisation of breasts, Marilyn Monroe emerged as the world’s premier bombshell, starring in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and appearing topless in the inaugural issue of Playboy. 

Until the Second World War, the ideal breast in Europe and the Americas was modestly sized – often described in poetry as an apple. By the mid-century, mass-produced pasteurised formula was widely available. With the rise of bottle-feeding, breasts became “free” to fulfil their new role as titillators. This fundamental shift in the use of women’s top halves, combined with the hyper-visualisation of films and picture magazines, led to the mega-bust.

The arc of the media’s big-boob obsession starts with the instant success of Playboy and runs through to the final episode in 2001 of Baywatch, the television show that featured Pamela Anderson as a buxom blonde lifeguard. This period idealised supersized breasts in the same way that the porn industry valorises large penises. Since 2007, surgical breast augmentations have declined and sales of push-up bras have plummeted. While breasts continue to bounce across our screens, they do so without the same volume in all senses of the word. 

It is with all this in mind that I appreciate the invincible orbs of Lauren Sánchez. I respect her choices. I admire her honest-to-goodness boob job. I’m delighted that she is out and proud. On that cold day in January, I also appreciated her suffragette-white pantsuit, which I assume was a nod to women’s rights and the fight for our bodily autonomy. So, thank you, Lauren. Tits up to you, sister. Wishing you all the best on the big day. A world desperate for distraction can’t wait to see what you’ll be wearing.

Thornton is a sociologist and the author of four books, including the international bestseller ‘Seven Days in the Art World’. A resident of San Francisco, her latest book ‘Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation’ is out now in paperback.