Orig­i­nally posted at Hyphen on Feb­ru­ary 1, 2010

As if we small-breasted ladies didn’t have it hard enough. We per­se­vered through ado­les­cences marred by a dev­as­tat­ing lack of top-growth, endured comings-of-age min­i­mized by the diminu­tive jabs of our bustier peers, and, as adults, find our­selves woe­fully rel­e­gated to Victoria’s Secret’s young teen “Pink” sec­tion, from where we cov­etously eye the per­fectly imprac­ti­cal lacy/strappy/barely-there/disgustingly-provocative under­things so accessibly-sized for plumper patrons. Since child­hood, men, mag­a­zines, and our moth­ers have ridiculed our rel­a­tive lack of endow­ment, so maybe it was only a mat­ter of time before whole gov­ern­ments made our bitty busts their business.

The first to do so: Aus­tralia, whose gov­ern­ment cen­sors are ban­ning adult pub­li­ca­tions and films that fea­ture women with small breasts, in an effort to — get this — curb pedophilia. Now, I’m no porn apol­o­gist, but I rather dis­like hav­ing my body cat­e­gor­i­cally likened to a child’s, even more than I vehe­mently dis­like cen­sor­ship. [As I always say: It ain’t much, but it sure ain’t nothin’!] And it seems obvi­ous to me that an indus­try founded on fake tits, fake orgasms, and the gen­eral fic­tion­al­iz­ing of women’s sex­u­al­ity is only made worse by cen­sors that fur­ther restrict it from real­is­ti­cally depict­ing women’s bod­ies — how­ever flat-chested those bod­ies may be.

Mau­reen O’Connor of Gawker sums up the ban’s implicit sex­ism pretty succinctly:

Obvi­ously, the pro­posed ban would not reduce smut so much as cod­ify an arbi­trary set of female sex­ual ideals, which is a ter­ri­ble idea for many reasons…

More­over (and at the risk of re-hashing that age-old Asian fetish debate), I have to won­der how a coun­try sur­rounded by Asia and with an Asian pop­u­la­tion larger than that of the US gets off dis­crim­i­nat­ing against the oh-so-petite. Per­haps a bet­ter way to dis­cour­age pedophilia would be to check IDs — or, I don’t know, find some way to pre­vent dirty old Aussie men from trav­el­ing to the Phils and Thai­land to be pedophiles over there. (For the record: I used to live in Ange­les City, the sex tour cap­i­tal of the Philip­pines, so I know who you are!)

Any­ways, in clos­ing: Thank you, Aus­tralia, for let­ting me know that I’m not woman enough for you. Lest I become con­fused at a later date, per­haps you should also con­sider ban­ning women under 5’3″ or with a size 6 1/2 shoe.

In the mean­time, I’ll be doing my part to curb Amer­i­can pedophilia by lob­by­ing to have men with small penises banned from bars.

Images cour­tesy of Flickr user Noemi Man­alang under Cre­ative Com­mons License.

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