Sexual Performance
An ironic history of the British boob.
“I felt humiliated and embarrassed,” explained Whitney to her one-and-a-half million–strong Instagram nation. Recalling her doomed trip to a Florida theme park, young Whitney fell foul of the modern-day morality police. Garbed in a sports bra and spray-on yoga pants, Whitney shimmied up to the entry barriers.
“I was told I had to change my top to be able to enter,” she recalled. “I think it’s because I have naturally large breasts and it makes people uncomfortable. But as far as I know, my clothing wasn’t against the rules.”
In a New York restaurant, another expressive young lady covered up after restaurant staff ‘shamed’ her ‘big boobs.’ Akin to a morning in Riyadh, horrified patrons sat helpless as waiting staff wrapped the offending breasts in a scarf plucked from the lost and found.
These tales are just two examples of the war on tits, a campaign of boob-shaming which primarily afflicts women aged between 18 and 30, of generous mammarian inheritance, usually employed in modelling or social-media influencing.
How times change. Not so long ago, this fateful century in fact, one had to master the socially acceptable way to read The Sun.
That newspaper, once a colossal organ of truth and highbrow sensibilities, featured on Page Three a topless woman. Every day, five million readers practised this intricate ritual. First, one perused the front page festooned with hypodermic stories headlined with ‘steamy’ ‘romp’ and ‘shocker.’ With harpist dexterity, savvy readers pinched together the first three pages, opening up on the safety of page four. Those who failed this delicate ballet incited silent cries of ‘pervert’ and ‘misogynist.’
In 2015, a long and arduous campaign won the war on bare breasts. The ire of feminist theorists and campaigners ended that grubby British institution overnight. Page Three, synonymous with young women invariably named Keely, their names suffixed with age and cup size, was no more.
Before that symbolic Dien Bien Phu—the total defeat of Britain’s pro-boob colonial forces—Page Three symbolised a murky strain of British irreverence. The more that campaigners complained, the more The Sun revelled in their po-faced complaint.
Critics argued that Page Three objectified women; dissenters pointed to freedom of expression. The critics won. But former models such as Rhian Sugden, weren’t too impressed: “It’s only a matter of time before everything we do will be dictated by comfy shoe-wearing, no bra-wearing, man-haters.”
Page Three once featured a box next to the model called ‘News in Briefs’ in which Keely, 23, 32DD, opined on current affairs. When ‘Fred the Shred’ a rapacious banker (but I repeat myself…) lost his knighthood in 2012, Keely quoted Voltaire: “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
The Keelys and Beckys dispensed wisdom on all manner of topics, from the Iraq war to the bond market in Azerbaijan. Campaigners for No More Page Three loathed News in Briefs. A topless model, they insinuated, could not possibly possess such erudite opinions. News in Briefs got the chop.
The Ironic Triumph of OnlyFans
Ironically, Page Three first splashed bare breasts on paper in 1970, in a move the then-editor Larry Lamb claimed to celebrate the burgeoning sexual revolution.
Throughout its 44-year history, Page Three stars launched lucrative careers in glamour modelling and pop music, many cemented as household names. One model famously earned more than Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The internet age, with its kaleidoscopic array of pornography on tap, tolled the bell on what many deemed a sexist relic of a grubby, male-dominated past.
Liberated from the male gaze, and the legions interested in the fluctuations of Azerbaijani bond markets, Keely and her admirers flocked elsewhere. Today, that’s OnlyFans, a platform with more subscribers than the population of Brazil.
Whereas the aspiring Keely was once limited to a topless photo for which she was often paid a small fortune, OnlyFans models must hustle daily. ‘Fans’ demand intimate access to every inch of ‘their’ models’ bodily capital. Thanks to the digital revolution, such men need not limit their desires to a topless photo of a woman they’d never lay eyes upon. Now, for just £14.99 a month, they can message the modern Keely twenty-four hours daily.
Yes, I’m sure their messages burst with brotherly concern—and, of course, queries regarding Azerbaijani monetary policy.
The Neoliberalisation of Sex
Competition is fierce. Attention is the new petroleum. If OnlyFans were a country, it would be Saudi Arabia. Attention and wealth funnel toward the mega-stars atop the totem pole. In Onlyfansistan, the top one percent laps in luxury off the proceeds of its digital oil—attention. Elite creators suck up the pennies and pounds flowing ceaselessly from 220 million small-time pimps, as the aspirant lower orders labour in darkness.
Two creators extend OnlyFans neoliberal logic to its extreme. Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips are the platform superpowers, locked in an arms race of smutty stunts and sexual serfdom.
Last year, Phillips featured in a documentary during which she slept with 100 men in 24 hours. Phillips, fighting back tears, admits to remembering only the first ten. Deadened and derealised, but always on-brand, Phillips doles out the obligatory lines of female empowerment.
Her rival, Bonnie Blue, avoids such high-minded rhetoric. Bonnie craves fame and stacks of cash. In January this year, 1,057 mostly masked men serpentined around a Marylebone mansion for their 24 seconds of the old in-out with Bonnie. For this stunt, she claims the world record.
Outrage bubbled on paper and pixel. Familiar voices questioned the feminist credentials of Phillip’s and Blue’s raunchy stunts. In retrospect, Page Three was a model of restraint—a starchy Swedish social democracy compared to the OnlyFans narco-state.
Man and Breast
For decades, Page Three’s opponents argued in Pavlovian affect. To some feminist theorists and academics, men ogled Page Three because they were conditioned to do so. Nothing about the female breast, they insisted, was inherently sexual. Rupert Murdoch had trained millions of men to drool at a D-cup. Abolishing Page Three, they claimed, would liberate women, slash male-on-female violence, and soothe female mental health.
That lofty ideal recently underwent a major reappraisal. Researchers travelled to the highlands of Western New Guinea where they met the once-topless Dani tribe. Until 20 years ago, Dani women routinely milled around topless, much like French women do today.
Western influences changed Dani social norms. Dani women covered up their once ubiquitous breasts. Researchers studied the generations of Dani men who grew up on either side of this shift.
One might expect the older gentlemen, raised in a tit-swinging Dionysian festival, to have grown indifferent like a wearied Victorian botanist yawning at yet another orchid.
Researchers were dumbfounded. Both groups, they found, expressed an equal enthusiasm in breasts. No habituation. No Page Three. No Rupert Murdoch.
As Dr Michal Stefanczyk put it: “Breasts are sexy—naturally so. Men like breasts.”
Keely’s Revenge
Keely knew all along this ruthless truth. So, too, did Keely’s publishers in that relatively Mormon world of 2014.
The modern Keely has revived the philanthropic mission of News in Briefs. Everywhere one looks, aspiring Instagram models quote the very best of what has been thought and said.
Just this week, I glanced at an aspiring model on my Instagram feed. Beneath the obligatory, barely-there bikini photo rested the wise words of Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Next to that, subscribe to my OnlyFans.
Intrigued, and eager to be the change I wished to see, I clicked the button. As I suspected, plenty of revealing thoughts on the bond market in Azerbaijan.
Well, you know men used to buy "Playboy" for the articles...😉
“Breasts are sexy—naturally so. Men like breasts.”
Only on this benighted rock would it require a no-doubt gubmint-funded, academically-credentialed study to figure this out. Any normie human male anywhere any time could have told you that for free.