The two body parts I loathe the most are the two that Dolly Parton loves best. I’m talking about breasts: She’s obsessed with hers, mine have been invading my personal space for nearly two decades.
My chest has always felt like a hindrance, two items on a long list of inconveniences that come with being a woman. My breasts get in my face, literally, at the gym, stuffed into a sports bra. I’ve always hated having cleavage, especially once I began to understand that some men consider it an invitation to discuss a person’s body, her face, where she’s going, and what she’s doing later. My mom’s breasts are small and manageable; cruelly, my identical twin sister’s are a pleasant B-cup. As I surpassed them both alphabetically and landed on the letter D, I despaired. I took it personally that Shakira sang “lucky that my breasts are small and humble” in 2001, just as my own began to expand.
So I’m the opposite of Dolly, who, reunited with her 9 to 5 costars Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda at the Emmy awards this year, reminded the audience that her breasts are her greatest pride and joy. Dolly, who has made them bigger at certain points, with purpose, and insured them at $300,000 per breast. Dolly, who calls them “her girls,” not unlike how she might refer to her children. When I encounter Dolly and her breasts, suddenly I wonder what mine would be worth, if I didn’t hate them.
Big boobs have never been considered high fashion. Though inclusive sizing on the runway is a nascent trend, calls for American women to embrace our shapes are ever more frequent, and longstanding celebrations of a generous booty have reached a critical mass thanks to celebrity poster women like Kim Kardashian West and Nicki Minaj, among others, such a movement has yet to coalesce around breasts. We have “Free the nipple,” but the nipples in need of emancipation always seem to be attached to smaller chests. Emily Ratajkowski has said that she's lost modeling work because her breasts are too big, implying that the chest might be the next frontier of body positivity we’ve yet to explore.
But I’m not looking to Dolly Parton to help boobs become the next big thing in women’s bodies, because she’s always been this way. That’s what makes her ample chest so disarming, and her unabashed love for her own breasts so appealing. It’s not just about their planetary size: Her pride is so extreme and unwavering as to dare the public to ask her to do something different, or something less. Immune from trends, or opinion, or demand, she gets total control of what she thinks feels good and looks good.
And yet, Dolly’s commitment to her larger-than-life breasts also allows her to separate her sense of personhood from her physical appearance. “They're part of the persona,” she says, admitting that her assets have always been somewhat of a shtick. “It takes a bit of pressure off me.” It must feel good to take a break from the idea that, as women, our bodies have to define us at every given moment, which is so rarely required of men. How we look is inevitably part performance art, and it’s a relief to take the whole enterprise a little less seriously when we can. Part of Dolly's magic is that she still remains, in so many ways, a mystery, despite putting it, or them, all out there.
For those of us who feel perennially left out of the body-part celebration cycle, Dolly is a reminder that loving yourself doesn’t always fit in with the latest self-love trend. When the New York Post claimed recently that celebrity boobs were back in style, the Internet was quick to fire back that they were wrong; attached to our bodies, breasts have never actually been out. And maybe that's a good thing. Rather than waiting for outsiders to co-sign something you've always had, reckoning with your own feelings about your body might be harder, but with less fleeting results of happiness and satisfaction. Which would explain why the girls have been working for Dolly for almost all of her 71 years. That seems like body goals to me.