In and around the locker room there’s little talk of breasts, but lots of conversation about tits. Tits is a charming word that suggests many things. George Carlin once proposed a new crackerlike snack treat from Nabisco: “You can’t eat just one!” We prefer tits as the family dog, small, warm, cuddly, and benign—not unlike the little pooch sitting dutifully with his ear to the RCA phonograph. “Here tits! Nice tits! G-o-o-o-o-od tits!”
Historically, breasts began as teats (c.950), not becoming tits till around the seventeenth century, later spinning off the likes of titties (c. 1740) and diddies or diddeys (c.1780). Once they referred solely to the nipples (c. 1530); today they describe both soft protuberances situated on the thorax of the female.
Tits have been considered vulgar since the nineteenth century; it is now considered gauche to tell a lady what lovely tits she has. But it’s especially difficult to remember that in England, where when your mind is wandering, your tit is in a trance.
Lenny Bruce once found himself in such a state, fantasizing how he entered Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom and found her changing her clothes. “Haven’t I got beautiful tits?” she asks him. “You sure have,” he replies. “Do you work out or anything?”
Woman cannot make living with left leg.
Woman cannot make living with right leg.
But between them she do all right.
—Pseudo-Oriental wisdom, c. 1950s
Virginity once meant more than the condition of one’s cherry. According to Gordon Rattray Taylor’s Sex in History, the Romans distinguished between virgo, “an unmarried woman,” and virgo intacta, “a woman who had never known a man.”Ditto for the Greeks, to whom a virgin was a woman who had opted for personal autonomy instead of submitting herself to the narrow caged life of marriage. Virginity was considered less a physical state than a way of being. A woman getting married was seen as selling her independence, causing others to say she had “lost her virginity.” The only way to restore it was to sleep with a god, leaving most men out. Men for the most part continue to be infatuated with the notion. As Tamara Broder (Anjelica Huston) noted in the film Enemies, A Love Story, “Men love virgins. If every man had his way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and get up a virgin.”
You Name IT
The Female Privates, That Is
The portions of a woman that appeal to man’s depravity
Are constructed with considerable care,
And what at first appears to be a simple little cavity
Is in fact a most elaborate affair.
Physicians of distinction have examined these phenomena
In numerous experimental dames;
They have tabulated carefully the feminine abdomina,
And given them some fascinating names.
There’s the vulva, the vagina, and the jolly perineum,
And the hymen, in the case of many brides,
And lots of other little things you’d like, if you could see ’em,
The clitoris, and other things besides.
So isn’t it a pity, when we common people chatter
Of these mysteries to which I have referred,
That we use for such a delicate and complicated matter
Such a very short and ordinary word.
—Anon., cited by Peter Freyer,
“It” in Mrs. Grundy, 1963
A few years ago a story made the rounds of a young woman in a bikini who was bathing in the surf when a particularly violent wave hit her and swept off the top of her bathing suit.
To avoid embarrassment, she embraced her nakedness with both arms.
As she was making her way to shore, a young boy stopped her and innocently inquired, “Lady, those sure are cute little puppies. You suppose I could have the one with the pink nose?”
