This summer a publisher sent me a free copy of a book which someone evidently thought would be right up my street. Written by the sociologist Sarah Thornton (who according to her bio “was once hailed as Britain’s hippest academic”), its title is Tits Up, and the blurb summarizing its content starts like this:

BOOBS

KNOCKERS

JUGS

BOSOMS

MELONS

FUNBAGS

HOOTERS

In the English language there are over 700 expressions for female mammary glands—the vast majority of which are used by men.

Books, like lunches, are never really free: even if you’re not being asked for an endorsement there’s usually an expectation that you’ll do something to promote them—write a review, put them on a reading list, ask your library to order a copy. Fair enough, IMO, but I do quite often wonder how I, of all people, have ended up on someone’s list. Who would look at my profile and think, “ah yes, she’s the perfect person to promote this book by a Jehovah’s witness on how linguistic research proves the literal truth of the Bible”?

But in this case there was no great mystery. Tits Up is billed as a feminist book, and the jacket copy I’ve just quoted references an idea with a long history in feminist writing about language: that lexical elaboration, having lots of different words for the same thing, is a sign of that thing’s cultural importance, and that analysing the words can offer valuable insights into the worldview members of the culture inherit. The classic example, which has nothing to do with feminism (and has also been subject to some vigorous debunking), is “Eskimos [sic] have a lot of words for snow”. But since the 1970s feminists have applied the same idea to areas of vocabulary which tell us something about relations between men and women.

In 1977, for instance, the radical feminist linguist who would later be known as Julia Penelope (though in those days she still used her original surname, Stanley) analysed a large number of English words denoting prostitutes, and argued that prostitutes under patriarchy were treated as “paradigmatic women”. Other feminists examined the copious terminology available for talking about female genitals, pointing out that these terms tend to fall into one of three categories: clinical/Latinate (vagina, vulva, pudenda) obscene/pornographic (cunt, pussy, snatch) or vague and euphemistic (foofoo, ladyparts, undercarriage). They are numerous yet monotonous, sending largely the same message—that women’s genitals are shameful in a way that men’s are not.

I’ve contributed to this literature myself. More than thirty years ago I became briefly (in)famous as the author of an academic article about the terms used by some US college students to name the penis—though what interested me was not so much how many terms there were (I collected scores of them) as how heavily they relied on a smaller set of metaphorical comparisons (e.g., with authority figures, tools, weapons and food items). Despite the obscurity of the publication where it appeared (an American dialectology journal), this article attracted some media attention. A columnist on my then-local paper (the Glasgow Herald) denounced me for wasting taxpayers’ money on junk research; other journalists (to the justified amusement of people who knew me) took to citing me as a “penis expert” and asking me to comment on penis-related news stories. My reputation in this field still follows me around: only a couple of years ago I was contacted by someone who said he was editing an Encyclopedia of the Penis and invited me to contribute a couple of entries (in case you’re wondering, I said no).

This history may explain why I was on Sarah Thornton’s publisher’s radar—though Tits Up isn’t really a book about language. Rather it investigates the way breasts are thought about and treated in five different social settings where they’re a major preoccupation: a strip club, a human milk bank, a clinic offering reconstructive surgery, a fashion company that designs bras and a community of goddess worshippers. There’s some discussion of some of the terms people in those settings use to talk about breasts, but no attempt to systematically analyse the “more than 700 expressions” referenced on the cover.

Thornton does, however, make a more general argument about language: she suggests that the project of “liberating breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice” would be advanced by women “reclaiming” terms like boobs, knockers, jugs and *tits. *She asserts that those terms are used “mainly by men”, and acknowledges that their use is often objectifying and derogatory, but she still argues that women should take them back: “without reclaiming this sexualized slang”, she says, “we have little hope of repossessing the body part” (p.20).

Proposals to reclaim sexist and misogynist terms have been made with some regularity since the 1970s, but in general they’ve had limited success. For instance, it’s been suggested repeatedly that cunt could be rehabilitated as just a neutral term for the female genitals, to send the message that there’s nothing shameful or obscene about them; but that proposal has been impossible for most people to square with cunt’s long and continuing history as an expression of extreme contempt for women (a meaning it also carries when used, as it often is in real-world use, to insult a man). It’s a slur rather than just a body-part label, and slurs have a kind of performative power, producing effects such as shame and humiliation, which cannot just be removed by fiat.

Other misogynist slurs have fared little better. Attempts to reclaim slut have gained some traction in “sex-positive” feminist circles, but they’ve always been controversial, and plenty of feminists have opposed the whole idea. In a world without sexism, they ask, and more specifically without the sexual double standard which feminists have criticized for as long as feminism has existed, why would we need a word, even a positive word, for a promiscuous woman?

Bitch, on the other hand (which is now the subject of a full-length book by a linguist), has been partially reclaimed, in that it does now have positive as well as negative uses which are not confined to a small political subculture. It’s possible to address or refer to your girlfriends as bitches, or to joke about your “resting bitch face”, and be heard as celebrating the lack of agreeableness and subservience implied by the b-word. However, that move arguably only works because bitch continues to be used prolifically in the traditional, unironic (and unambiguously misogynistic) way.

How do breast terms fit into this picture? They haven’t, AFAIK, featured prominently in past discussions. I can’t remember ever reading an analysis that did for breast terms what various people have done for genital terms; nor, before Tits Up, do I recall encountering proposals to reclaim words like jugs and knockers. That can’t be because breasts and breast-talk are not real-world issues. As any woman or girl can tell you, having your breasts stared at, commented on and/or touched without your consent are all extremely common experiences: basic, everyday sexual harassment (verbal, physical or both) very often focuses on breasts (“get your tits out” is the trademark cry of the “lad”), and they are also a favoured subject for sexist jokes, memes, cartoons and innuendo-laden sitcom or film dialogue.

But maybe that’s what’s behind their relative neglect—the perception that, compared to cunt and its ilk, terms like tits are pretty low-level insults: they’re vulgar, to be sure, but more comical than hateful. Though *tit, *like cunt, can be used metonymically, as an appellation for a person (either male or female), its meaning, which is akin to “idiot”, doesn’t really rise to the level of a slur. And you can’t insult anyone by calling them a knocker or a jug.

When I look at the list of breast terms on the cover of Thornton’s book, the adjective that comes most insistently to mind is puerile, meaning simultaneously childish and male. They remind me of my brother, aged about six, running round the back garden yelling “belly bum pee shit”. And the impression of puerility is only reinforced if you consider the metaphors behind the words. Tits (aka “teats”) and jugs figure women’s breasts as containers of liquid nourishment (which of course they are, for human infants)*; melons *are also a food, something to put in your mouth; funbags, knockers and hooters conjure up a picture of protuberances to be squeezed, pulled or pushed on. To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.

It’s true, of course, that at least some of the words I’ve mentioned are used by women as well as men. While I was writing this post I set myself the task of recording every instance I encountered, either in the real world or online, of a woman making reference to her own breasts, and noting down the word(s) she chose to use. This obviously isn’t a sampling method that can support general claims. But I did find it somewhat interesting that in this collection of female breast-references, by far the most commonly-used terms were breasts, boobs (which appears to be the default choice if you’re looking for something informal but inoffensive), and girls (either “the girls” or “my girls”). Tits was pretty rare, and there were no occurrences at all of jugs, hooters, knockers, funbags, *mammaries *or melons.

The popularity of girls (a locution which is not discussed in Tits Up) was something I found interesting because it reminded me of a pattern I’d noticed in my earlier investigation of penis-terms. Many of the terms used by the young men in my study figured the penis as a person in its own right, attached to its “owner” but with a will of its own (I probably don’t need to spell out what aspect of male physiological experience this metaphor is likely to relate to). The largest group of penis-as-person terms referred to authority figures and fighters (e.g., “his honor”, “the king”, “purple-headed warrior of love”). There was clearly a strong element of humour in these expressions, but it still seemed noteworthy that men did not (even in jest) personify the penis as, say, a best buddy or a beloved child who might be vulnerable and in need of protection (ideas that might also capture something about male embodied experience, or so I’ve been told). Young women, by contrast, sometimes did produce penis-terms (e.g. “winkie”) that implied smallness and vulnerability. Women’s use of girls struck me as comparable: it personifies the breasts in an affectionate, quasi-maternal way.

But for Thornton this gesture might be a bit too tame and twee. Like many advocates of linguistic reclamation, she seems most interested in reclaiming overtly sexualized terms which would normally be avoided in “respectable” discourse. At the strip club, for instance, she notes approvingly that tits is used by workers as “a technical term for an eroticized and monetized body part” (my emphasis). This, she suggests, is “empowering”: the male punters may think they’re in charge, but in reality it’s the strippers who call the shots, using language to assert their agency and to “thwart puritanical taboos”.

This argument marks a longstanding division of opinion within feminism, and I have to say I’m on the other side of it from Thornton. To me the fact that (some) women make good money by selling sex to men is not evidence of women’s collective power, but on the contrary, of their subordinate status in a market where they may sometimes be the sellers but are always the goods for sale. I would also be inclined to argue that the association of tits with commercial sex is probably a major reason why it’s avoided in most woman-to-woman breast talk, where there seems to be a clear preference for boobs. Considered out of context, tits and boobs are pretty similar in their level of offensiveness (both quite mild), but in context they are not treated as interchangeable.

When women are urged to reclaim words, or coin new ones, the implication is that our existing vocabulary is inadequate—that we have too few terms, or the wrong terms, to express the meanings we think are important. That’s an argument I find quite compelling in the case of female genital terms, but I’m not so sure it applies in this case. What the word breast refers to is not obscure or vague (whereas research has revealed a startling lack of clarity and consensus on what fanny, pussy and even vagina name), and since it is neither a taboo word nor a technical (clinical) term*, *it is less contextually restricted in its uses. You wouldn’t (or most of us wouldn’t) talk about your cunt in a doctor’s surgery, and conversely you might find it weird to refer to your vulva during a sexual encounter or in a casual conversation with friends, but breast is acceptable in all these situations. And it doesn’t seem, in any of them, to require the euphemistic substitutions which are often heard even in clinical settings when women’s genitals are at issue. It’s hard to think of breast-terms equivalent to “down there”, “undercarriage” or “front bottom”.

As Thornton points out, though, there’s one part of a woman’s breast which does apparently require concealment, both physical and verbal. From her chapter about the process of designing and fitting bras I learnt that professionals in this industry do not call a woman’s nipple a nipple, they refer to it as an apex. And yes, that does strike me as a “puritanical taboo”, not to mention a ridiculous choice of euphemism. It’s hard to disagree with Thornton’s argument that the avoidance of the word nipple is connected to the norm that defines nipple-visibility—though only for women, not men—as immodest and shameful, and on that basis I’d agree there’s a case for reclaiming nipple as just a neutral label for the body part in question.

But context, as always, is crucial. One idea I find particularly tiresome, and which is rife among professional “creatives” as well as academics, is that sexualized language, whether slang or innuendo, turns more or less any message about women’s bodies into a subversive, quasi-feminist statement. In the past couple of years I’ve written about more than one case where this idea has been deployed in campaigns promoting cervical cancer screening and has badly misfired. The ad designers described what they were doing as “edgy”, “attention-grabbing”, or “playful and a bit cheeky”, but many of the women they were addressing found it off-putting or downright offensive. In most cases that wasn’t because they subscribed to “puritanical taboos” forbidding any reference to sex in any context; they just didn’t think “playful and cheeky” was the appropriate tone for messages about cancer.

Health messages that focus on breasts have had this problem too—and not just in recent years. After reading one of my posts criticizing sexed-up cervical screening ads, one woman recalled on X that when she gave birth in a UK hospital in 1979 there had been a poster on the wall of the maternity ward which said “Breast is best and Dad can suck on the empties”. Empties is a variation on the same metaphor that gives us jugs, and in this case it reminds women explicitly that their breasts exist to satisfy not only the nutritional needs of their newborn infants but also the sexual desires of their male partners. It’s hard to see how this kind of discourse helps women to “repossess” their bodies: it couldn’t be much clearer whose ownership rights come first.

Women don’t even seem to care for innuendo-laden breast-references when they are used to sell products that are meant to be sexy. The “bra wars” ad campaigns of the 1990s (of which the most famous was Wonderbra’s “Hello, boys”—another slogan that tells us something about who/what breasts are considered to be for) won a slew of industry awards, but they were cancelled when it was noticed that they’d done little to boost sales of the actual product. As one company’s newly-appointed female marketing director observed when she sacked the agency responsible, you’re more likely to sell bras if you “advertise to women, not men”. Meanwhile, attempts to apply the “playful and cheeky” approach to selling men’s underpants (using slogans like “Loin King” and “Full metal packet”) were found to be in breach of the UK Advertising Standards Authority’s rules on “taste and decency”. If sexual objectification were really so empowering, would sauce for the goose not be sauce for the gander too?

Though the relative neutrality of breast is a point in its favour, I don’t dispute that there’s a place for less formal words*; *it seems clear that one key function of slang terms like boobs and girls is to construct a nonsexual but intimate/solidary relationship between participants in all-female breast-talk. I wouldn’t choose those words myself, but I can see why many women do.

I can also see, however, why they don’t generally choose, at least for this purpose, terms like hooters, knockers or melons. Whereas some “reclaimed” uses of insulting terms (like the approving use of bitch to mean “a deliberately un-subservient and disagreeable woman”) can convey, in context, a subversive message–they repeat the misogyny of the original in order to disown and mock it–others, including these breast-terms, seem more akin to ventriloquism, adopting a male-centred view of women’s breasts as commodities to be viewed, used and judged by others. Does that really help women to “repossess” their breasts, or is it just acquiescing in the kind of objectification that does so much to alienate us from our bodies?

Sarah Thornton talks about “liberating breasts from…patriarchal prejudice”, and titles her concluding chapter “The Emancipated Rack”–turns of phrase which, on reflection, I find jarring, since they imply that what needs to be freed is the body-part rather than the woman whose body it is part of. In reality the attitudes examined in this book are reflections and expressions of men’s dominance over women. Adopting the kind of language that conventionally encodes those attitudes is not going to liberate women from them.