The Mythic Reclamation of My Breasts
Once, women’s bodies reminded us of the beginning.
We can trace this reminder and this beginning in the lineages of our words and myths. Picking up The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects by Barbara G. Walker, I follow the ancestral paths: the Greek gala, “mother’s milk,” eventually became galaxy. Creation stories based on breast milk can be found everywhere. According to these myths, milk was the substance that became matter itself. As though everything—from the keys under my fingers to the beeswax candles and peppermint oil and handwritten letters in front of me—all of it can be traced back to milk. The Egyptian hieroglyph for breast, mena, is the same for the moon. In The Dictionary, I follow the glyph with my fingers. It looks like a vessel, a bowl, a dark nipple on the bottom, as though it’s holding up the whole universe. Tracing it, I feel like I’m touching the very beginning.
In front of the mirror, I imagine what it was like to look at a woman and know that she embodied all that was, all that is and all that will ever be. That each woman contained a kernel of the beyond, the formless, the dark before and after life, earth, lemon balm, dirt and quartz and snow. Instead, I focus on too-jiggly thighs, the silver streaks already in my 32-year-old hair, the rise and fall of my breasts, softer now that I’ve given birth.
Everything changed when I grew breasts. Or, at least, according to the law of my mother, everything needed to change immediately. I wore only high necklines, I wasn’t allowed to play ‘tag’ with boys anymore, and I was even scolded for smiling at a pastor (He might get the wrong idea, she’d said.). Suddenly, the tiny mounds on my chest were cause for concern and, as such, they needed to be strapped down immediately. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was, only that breasts oughtn’t jiggle or bounce or give any hint of their fatty, fleshy matter—an extraordinarily difficult feat once my A-cups became Cs.
I was twelve when I first caught a man staring at my chest, thirteen when I first had a man point them out to me (as though I didn’t know they were there). I never got used to it, even though it happened, some seasons, multiple times daily. Men walked too close and ‘accidentally’ grazed my chest. Men towered over me as I worked my first job at the Gap, leaning toward my covered cleavage, practically salivating. Men snapped their eyes to mine after gazing at my breasts, unaware of what I’d been saying. Unaware that I’d been speaking at all.
It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine, but somehow, once, the bodies of women reminded us of the beginning. There are ancient texts that tell us this mindset—woman as the origin—was once ubiquitous. Not just texts, but carvings and paintings and names and arrangements, hints of an older order in which women were not persecuted and subjugated, but revered and respected. In which our bodies were not seen as sexual objects to serve the male gaze, but as the bringers of beginnings, and, in some traditions, bringers of ends.
Again, we can trace this in words. Back to the work of Barbara G. Walker, only this time, the Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets: there are mountains named for the breasts and hips of women’s bodies all over the world. The Latin word for mother, mater, became the English matter. As though, once, we knew everything derived from a mother. Walker writes that mama means mother’s breast in nearly all languages, echoing feminist author and historian Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Breast: “In the beginning was the breast.” In the beginning, all we knew were the hill of breast and snow of milk. And we were pleased. We should still be pleased—we owe our existence to thousands of years of this mountain-river milk.
We can follow the patrilines of misogyny through the lineages of words, too. Traced in the Encyclopedia: bitch was once another name for the goddess Artemis. Cunt was used interchangeably with woman; it was not considered obscene until much later. Not until women’s bodies were considered obscene.
And breasts were not considered taboo in the Western world until the patriarchy took over. Brian Palmer, in Slate’s “When Did Bare Breasts Become Taboo?” writes that in ancient Greece, “women retreated into the home, rarely emerging in public, and lived under the dominion of their fathers or husbands.” Breasts were covered, and when they were covered, they became sexual. They became the property of men.
The first time I took my bra off for a boyfriend, he said, “Don’t you wish they were like white girls’?” At first, I had no idea what he meant, because I’d been friends with white girls, enough to change in the same room as them, enough to know all their breasts looked different. It took a long while to realize he was talking about the women he liked to watch in pornography.
Out of curiosity, I searched to see what he was talking about. And I was astounded. The porn stars’ breasts were flawless: round, firm, pink-nippled and smooth. Mine, meanwhile, were and are squishy, the areolas big and brown and Mexican, the pale lightning of stretch marks on nearly all sides.
From then on, I tried to keep my chest hidden with new partners. I remember apologizing to my next kind boyfriend when he finally saw all of me. “They’re beautiful,” he’d said. “You’re beautiful.” It wasn’t enough. I continued to spend too much time in front of the mirror, holding my breasts in such a way that they looked a bit firmer, perkier. Pinker.
The stories we have grown up with in the West—stories of a single male savior, of an unconditionally loving male God who creates a heaven and then a hell, stories in which the world is run and saved and created and destroyed by men—they infiltrate our culture, our internal hierarchies, our workspaces, our cells and bones and hair and lips. I have to believe that the older myths are somewhere in there, too. In my carne and sangre and caderas. I have to believe that not all of me thinks that my value depends on the beliefs and actions and attention of a man.
Walker assures us, once it was understood that the body of the Earth was a mother, the mother. The mother has her bones of stones and blood of oceans. She is filled with good things to eat and good things to see and feel. Everything, the wind rustling the crackly autumn leaves, the turmeric sunset clouds, the miracle of seed to plant to acorn squash—everything was mother, milk, matter. In the Encyclopedia, we can follow the lines: once it was understood that death would be a return to mother. Milk. Matter. To the embryonic night in which all alive things come from. “Women are the first environment,” writes Mohawk Native American activist, environmentalist, and midwife Katsi Cook in Indian Country Today. “In this way, is the earth our mother, the old people said. In this way, we women are earth.”
In front of the mirror, I try to imagine what it’s like to not be raised with such a burden of male-centered myths. And, instead, have something freer in its place: earth-mother. Mountain-breast. Star-milk.
The first time I ran into breasts in high school mythology, something shifted inside of me, like an almost dried-out seed drinking rain. The story was Greek, of how the milk that squirted from Hera’s breasts became the Milky Way. All my life I’d thought it common knowledge that breasts existed for the satisfaction of men. But now, I could look up at the night sky and begin to think differently. Against that smooth and black ink, swirls of stars, so thick and magical that ancient peoples thought, that’s just like breastmilk. Perhaps it is.
I knew, of course, that breasts, in theory, were for feeding babies, but it wasn’t something that hit home, quite literally, until I had my own baby. Ansel arrived too early and wouldn’t take my colostrum, so he was admitted to the NICU. I pumped every two to three hours, watching as the tiniest of drops beaded at my nipples, thick and the color of yellow diamonds. On the third day, my milk arrived. It seemed like a miracle—suddenly my breasts were geysers, filling bottles in fifteen minutes. I’d spent the last few days alternately weeping and having panic attacks over my child, feeling like a failure of a mother before I’d barely got started. Here was evidence that some part of me was doing something right.
I wasn’t prepared for the relationship between child and breast. For too long, after all, I’d thought my breasts were primarily sex objects for men. Now they were my baby’s lifeline, filling him with protein and fat and antibodies. They were the recipients of his biggest smiles and loudest coos. He kneaded them and left bruises. He scratched at them with his impossibly fast-growing baby nails. The first and only sign language word he learned was milk—a cow-milking motion, drawing out his first love, that mountain-river-mama milk.
The first time I witnessed my baby make a metaphor in his mind was breast-centered. He stared at the package of his strawberry yogurt drops for a long while, thinking hard. He smiled and pointed at the pink-tipped mounds. Then he pointed at my chest. Mama.
According to Walker in The Dictionary, the English word breast traces its roots to the Proto-Indo-European base bhreus, which means to swell, to sprout. I think of my associations with the word sprout today, with my garden. Pressing seeds into the black earth, and days or weeks or sometimes months later, the appearance of green life. Breasts do sprout and swell—initially, and when filling with milk, and sometimes with monthly hormone changes—but I wonder if swelling and sprouting in its etymological origins hints to earth as mother. The swell of hills, mountains topped with snow-milk. The sprouts of tiny seeds, the promise of this year’s harvest so small you could fit the whole of it in your hand.
Once, I caught a man watching me as I nursed my baby. I was in the backseat of the car, giving Ansel lunch before we drove home from yoga. I happened to glance over at the truck next to us. The driver, a young man in a brown baseball cap, widened his eyes and whipped his head forward and immediately drove away.
I knew it wasn’t the miracle of life and milk that had prompted his gaze. It was that bare breasts, in his mind, were for his viewing pleasure. It was that breasts were objects, sexual, and separated from the body they were attached to.
About two months after having my son, I developed a lung infection that lasted for weeks. I had fevers daily and hacked up my insides about every three minutes, even while sleeping. Because I was breastfeeding, I couldn’t take medications, so my doctor told me to rest while I could and ride it out. My mother came to help me accomplish this, and she brought a vapor rub to smooth on the soles of my feet. “Your welita told me to do this,” she’d said, and she put my socks on for me, softly. Like a mother to her baby.
The next morning, my legs were covered in pink welts. I thought a mosquito—or perhaps a thousand of them—had gotten in sometime in the night. By afternoon, it was clear that I was having a severe allergic reaction. Though I washed the ointment off my feet, hives the size of my head appeared all over my body. They were hot and itchy. At night, I had to throw my blanket off because hives appeared wherever it touched my skin. It was winter, so I shivered until I pulled the throw back on, and the process repeated itself. When I pulled my son away from my chest after nursing, I was horrified to discover a baby-shaped hive on my chest. At the time, my son was cluster-nursing at least once an hour, sometimes up to three hours straight.
Compounded with my lung infection that wouldn’t go away and mothering a two-month old who wouldn’t sleep for more than ten minutes by himself, I thought I would die. And my saving grace were my breasts.
When my son latched, I could finally breathe. The oxytocin flowed between both of our bodies, easing us into one another. Even with the hive forming on my skin beneath him, even with the oncoming shivers of another fever, even with the feeling that nothing could or would go right, my breasts made their milk. Thick milk, thin milk, white milk, blue milk.
For the first time, it was impossible to think of my breasts as sexual. Instead, they were the world and its stars.
I’ve unwisely perused the comment sections of breastfeeding photos on social media more times than I care to admit, and somehow am always surprised at how many people find the act repulsive. I can’t help but think that the patriarchy is its own entity, something we all internalize to some degree. And when breasts, desired strictly for sexual arousal, become something else, something miraculous and wild, this patriarchal entity can’t recognize it. It cannot understand something that doesn’t serve its own selfish desires. And so it grumbles and bans, or, worse, pretends as though breastfeeding is still in service of its desires, just like that man in his truck.
I don’t mean to say that breasts shouldn’t be eroticized. I just wish these parts of my body weren’t considered the property of a man’s gaze. I wish that I could be seen first, before my breasts. Seen as human and not as a body.
“To see through the nipples is certainly a sensory attribute,” writes folklorist and Jungian psychologist Clarissa Pinkola-Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “The nipples are psychic organs, responsive to temperature, fear, anger, noise. They are a sensing organ as much as eyes in the head.” After my son, my breasts indeed became eyes. When my son whimpered, I felt it in my milk. When he cried, my breasts cried, too, white tears leaving reddened nipples. And even now, when I take in art that moves me—stories or movies or poems or paintings or novels—my nipples tighten. It’s not arousal, or at least, not sexual. It’s seeing.
In Women, Pinkola-Estés writes that Baubo is the belly goddess, with breasts for eyes, and she speaks with her vagina. It was Baubo who pulled Demeter out of her depression after Persephone’s abduction. Baubo didn’t use wise words or a serious parable. Instead, she told wise, earthy jokes and made Demeter laugh. She made Demeter feel something other than the devastating sorrow deep in her bones.
During the worst of my postpartum struggles, my breasts—these eyes, these tools of creation—did the same for me.
“In the beginning was the breast,” writes Marilyn Yalom. And in that beginning, “breasts were sacred.” And this is how my breasts became sacred to me:
I sit in the light with my baby. He’s having a tantrum about God knows what and won’t latch. I need to be inventive, so I hold my breast and make it ‘talk.’ Hi Ansel, it’s me, your milk! My son smiles wide and gummy, wrapping his arms around it in a hug, then pulling back to give the nipple a gentle kiss.
In the beginning of my son’s life, my body isn’t an object, but a friend. A nourisher, the maker of babies and milk. The creator of the stars and dust that comprise our whole galaxy.
And, though I still struggle, I can’t look at myself the same ever again.
We can trace this reminder and this beginning in the lineages of our words and myths. Picking up The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects by Barbara G. Walker, I follow the ancestral paths: the Greek gala, “mother’s milk,” eventually became galaxy. Creation stories based on breast milk can be found everywhere. According to these myths, milk was the substance that became matter itself. As though everything—from the keys under my fingers to the beeswax candles and peppermint oil and handwritten letters in front of me—all of it can be traced back to milk. The Egyptian hieroglyph for breast, mena, is the same for the moon. In The Dictionary, I follow the glyph with my fingers. It looks like a vessel, a bowl, a dark nipple on the bottom, as though it’s holding up the whole universe. Tracing it, I feel like I’m touching the very beginning.
In front of the mirror, I imagine what it was like to look at a woman and know that she embodied all that was, all that is and all that will ever be. That each woman contained a kernel of the beyond, the formless, the dark before and after life, earth, lemon balm, dirt and quartz and snow. Instead, I focus on too-jiggly thighs, the silver streaks already in my 32-year-old hair, the rise and fall of my breasts, softer now that I’ve given birth.
Everything changed when I grew breasts. Or, at least, according to the law of my mother, everything needed to change immediately. I wore only high necklines, I wasn’t allowed to play ‘tag’ with boys anymore, and I was even scolded for smiling at a pastor (He might get the wrong idea, she’d said.). Suddenly, the tiny mounds on my chest were cause for concern and, as such, they needed to be strapped down immediately. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was, only that breasts oughtn’t jiggle or bounce or give any hint of their fatty, fleshy matter—an extraordinarily difficult feat once my A-cups became Cs.
I was twelve when I first caught a man staring at my chest, thirteen when I first had a man point them out to me (as though I didn’t know they were there). I never got used to it, even though it happened, some seasons, multiple times daily. Men walked too close and ‘accidentally’ grazed my chest. Men towered over me as I worked my first job at the Gap, leaning toward my covered cleavage, practically salivating. Men snapped their eyes to mine after gazing at my breasts, unaware of what I’d been saying. Unaware that I’d been speaking at all.
It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine, but somehow, once, the bodies of women reminded us of the beginning. There are ancient texts that tell us this mindset—woman as the origin—was once ubiquitous. Not just texts, but carvings and paintings and names and arrangements, hints of an older order in which women were not persecuted and subjugated, but revered and respected. In which our bodies were not seen as sexual objects to serve the male gaze, but as the bringers of beginnings, and, in some traditions, bringers of ends.
Again, we can trace this in words. Back to the work of Barbara G. Walker, only this time, the Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets: there are mountains named for the breasts and hips of women’s bodies all over the world. The Latin word for mother, mater, became the English matter. As though, once, we knew everything derived from a mother. Walker writes that mama means mother’s breast in nearly all languages, echoing feminist author and historian Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Breast: “In the beginning was the breast.” In the beginning, all we knew were the hill of breast and snow of milk. And we were pleased. We should still be pleased—we owe our existence to thousands of years of this mountain-river milk.
We can follow the patrilines of misogyny through the lineages of words, too. Traced in the Encyclopedia: bitch was once another name for the goddess Artemis. Cunt was used interchangeably with woman; it was not considered obscene until much later. Not until women’s bodies were considered obscene.
And breasts were not considered taboo in the Western world until the patriarchy took over. Brian Palmer, in Slate’s “When Did Bare Breasts Become Taboo?” writes that in ancient Greece, “women retreated into the home, rarely emerging in public, and lived under the dominion of their fathers or husbands.” Breasts were covered, and when they were covered, they became sexual. They became the property of men.
The first time I took my bra off for a boyfriend, he said, “Don’t you wish they were like white girls’?” At first, I had no idea what he meant, because I’d been friends with white girls, enough to change in the same room as them, enough to know all their breasts looked different. It took a long while to realize he was talking about the women he liked to watch in pornography.
Out of curiosity, I searched to see what he was talking about. And I was astounded. The porn stars’ breasts were flawless: round, firm, pink-nippled and smooth. Mine, meanwhile, were and are squishy, the areolas big and brown and Mexican, the pale lightning of stretch marks on nearly all sides.
From then on, I tried to keep my chest hidden with new partners. I remember apologizing to my next kind boyfriend when he finally saw all of me. “They’re beautiful,” he’d said. “You’re beautiful.” It wasn’t enough. I continued to spend too much time in front of the mirror, holding my breasts in such a way that they looked a bit firmer, perkier. Pinker.
The stories we have grown up with in the West—stories of a single male savior, of an unconditionally loving male God who creates a heaven and then a hell, stories in which the world is run and saved and created and destroyed by men—they infiltrate our culture, our internal hierarchies, our workspaces, our cells and bones and hair and lips. I have to believe that the older myths are somewhere in there, too. In my carne and sangre and caderas. I have to believe that not all of me thinks that my value depends on the beliefs and actions and attention of a man.
Walker assures us, once it was understood that the body of the Earth was a mother, the mother. The mother has her bones of stones and blood of oceans. She is filled with good things to eat and good things to see and feel. Everything, the wind rustling the crackly autumn leaves, the turmeric sunset clouds, the miracle of seed to plant to acorn squash—everything was mother, milk, matter. In the Encyclopedia, we can follow the lines: once it was understood that death would be a return to mother. Milk. Matter. To the embryonic night in which all alive things come from. “Women are the first environment,” writes Mohawk Native American activist, environmentalist, and midwife Katsi Cook in Indian Country Today. “In this way, is the earth our mother, the old people said. In this way, we women are earth.”
In front of the mirror, I try to imagine what it’s like to not be raised with such a burden of male-centered myths. And, instead, have something freer in its place: earth-mother. Mountain-breast. Star-milk.
The first time I ran into breasts in high school mythology, something shifted inside of me, like an almost dried-out seed drinking rain. The story was Greek, of how the milk that squirted from Hera’s breasts became the Milky Way. All my life I’d thought it common knowledge that breasts existed for the satisfaction of men. But now, I could look up at the night sky and begin to think differently. Against that smooth and black ink, swirls of stars, so thick and magical that ancient peoples thought, that’s just like breastmilk. Perhaps it is.
I knew, of course, that breasts, in theory, were for feeding babies, but it wasn’t something that hit home, quite literally, until I had my own baby. Ansel arrived too early and wouldn’t take my colostrum, so he was admitted to the NICU. I pumped every two to three hours, watching as the tiniest of drops beaded at my nipples, thick and the color of yellow diamonds. On the third day, my milk arrived. It seemed like a miracle—suddenly my breasts were geysers, filling bottles in fifteen minutes. I’d spent the last few days alternately weeping and having panic attacks over my child, feeling like a failure of a mother before I’d barely got started. Here was evidence that some part of me was doing something right.
I wasn’t prepared for the relationship between child and breast. For too long, after all, I’d thought my breasts were primarily sex objects for men. Now they were my baby’s lifeline, filling him with protein and fat and antibodies. They were the recipients of his biggest smiles and loudest coos. He kneaded them and left bruises. He scratched at them with his impossibly fast-growing baby nails. The first and only sign language word he learned was milk—a cow-milking motion, drawing out his first love, that mountain-river-mama milk.
The first time I witnessed my baby make a metaphor in his mind was breast-centered. He stared at the package of his strawberry yogurt drops for a long while, thinking hard. He smiled and pointed at the pink-tipped mounds. Then he pointed at my chest. Mama.
According to Walker in The Dictionary, the English word breast traces its roots to the Proto-Indo-European base bhreus, which means to swell, to sprout. I think of my associations with the word sprout today, with my garden. Pressing seeds into the black earth, and days or weeks or sometimes months later, the appearance of green life. Breasts do sprout and swell—initially, and when filling with milk, and sometimes with monthly hormone changes—but I wonder if swelling and sprouting in its etymological origins hints to earth as mother. The swell of hills, mountains topped with snow-milk. The sprouts of tiny seeds, the promise of this year’s harvest so small you could fit the whole of it in your hand.
Once, I caught a man watching me as I nursed my baby. I was in the backseat of the car, giving Ansel lunch before we drove home from yoga. I happened to glance over at the truck next to us. The driver, a young man in a brown baseball cap, widened his eyes and whipped his head forward and immediately drove away.
I knew it wasn’t the miracle of life and milk that had prompted his gaze. It was that bare breasts, in his mind, were for his viewing pleasure. It was that breasts were objects, sexual, and separated from the body they were attached to.
About two months after having my son, I developed a lung infection that lasted for weeks. I had fevers daily and hacked up my insides about every three minutes, even while sleeping. Because I was breastfeeding, I couldn’t take medications, so my doctor told me to rest while I could and ride it out. My mother came to help me accomplish this, and she brought a vapor rub to smooth on the soles of my feet. “Your welita told me to do this,” she’d said, and she put my socks on for me, softly. Like a mother to her baby.
The next morning, my legs were covered in pink welts. I thought a mosquito—or perhaps a thousand of them—had gotten in sometime in the night. By afternoon, it was clear that I was having a severe allergic reaction. Though I washed the ointment off my feet, hives the size of my head appeared all over my body. They were hot and itchy. At night, I had to throw my blanket off because hives appeared wherever it touched my skin. It was winter, so I shivered until I pulled the throw back on, and the process repeated itself. When I pulled my son away from my chest after nursing, I was horrified to discover a baby-shaped hive on my chest. At the time, my son was cluster-nursing at least once an hour, sometimes up to three hours straight.
Compounded with my lung infection that wouldn’t go away and mothering a two-month old who wouldn’t sleep for more than ten minutes by himself, I thought I would die. And my saving grace were my breasts.
When my son latched, I could finally breathe. The oxytocin flowed between both of our bodies, easing us into one another. Even with the hive forming on my skin beneath him, even with the oncoming shivers of another fever, even with the feeling that nothing could or would go right, my breasts made their milk. Thick milk, thin milk, white milk, blue milk.
For the first time, it was impossible to think of my breasts as sexual. Instead, they were the world and its stars.
I’ve unwisely perused the comment sections of breastfeeding photos on social media more times than I care to admit, and somehow am always surprised at how many people find the act repulsive. I can’t help but think that the patriarchy is its own entity, something we all internalize to some degree. And when breasts, desired strictly for sexual arousal, become something else, something miraculous and wild, this patriarchal entity can’t recognize it. It cannot understand something that doesn’t serve its own selfish desires. And so it grumbles and bans, or, worse, pretends as though breastfeeding is still in service of its desires, just like that man in his truck.
I don’t mean to say that breasts shouldn’t be eroticized. I just wish these parts of my body weren’t considered the property of a man’s gaze. I wish that I could be seen first, before my breasts. Seen as human and not as a body.
“To see through the nipples is certainly a sensory attribute,” writes folklorist and Jungian psychologist Clarissa Pinkola-Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “The nipples are psychic organs, responsive to temperature, fear, anger, noise. They are a sensing organ as much as eyes in the head.” After my son, my breasts indeed became eyes. When my son whimpered, I felt it in my milk. When he cried, my breasts cried, too, white tears leaving reddened nipples. And even now, when I take in art that moves me—stories or movies or poems or paintings or novels—my nipples tighten. It’s not arousal, or at least, not sexual. It’s seeing.
In Women, Pinkola-Estés writes that Baubo is the belly goddess, with breasts for eyes, and she speaks with her vagina. It was Baubo who pulled Demeter out of her depression after Persephone’s abduction. Baubo didn’t use wise words or a serious parable. Instead, she told wise, earthy jokes and made Demeter laugh. She made Demeter feel something other than the devastating sorrow deep in her bones.
During the worst of my postpartum struggles, my breasts—these eyes, these tools of creation—did the same for me.
“In the beginning was the breast,” writes Marilyn Yalom. And in that beginning, “breasts were sacred.” And this is how my breasts became sacred to me:
I sit in the light with my baby. He’s having a tantrum about God knows what and won’t latch. I need to be inventive, so I hold my breast and make it ‘talk.’ Hi Ansel, it’s me, your milk! My son smiles wide and gummy, wrapping his arms around it in a hug, then pulling back to give the nipple a gentle kiss.
In the beginning of my son’s life, my body isn’t an object, but a friend. A nourisher, the maker of babies and milk. The creator of the stars and dust that comprise our whole galaxy.
And, though I still struggle, I can’t look at myself the same ever again.
Sources:
Natalie Angier. “Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male Fantasies.” New York Times Book Review. 1997. Web.
Katsi Cook. “Women are the First Environment.” Indian Country Today. 2003. Web.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Women Who Run With the Wolves. Ballantine Books. 1992.
Brian Palmer. “When Did Bare Breasts Become Taboo?”. Slate. 2012. Web.
Barbara G. Walker. Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. HarperOne. 1983.
Barbara G. Walker. The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. Harper & Row. 1988.
Marilyn Yamon. A History of the Breast. Ballantine Books. 1998.
Natalie Angier. “Goddesses, Harlots and Other Male Fantasies.” New York Times Book Review. 1997. Web.
Katsi Cook. “Women are the First Environment.” Indian Country Today. 2003. Web.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Women Who Run With the Wolves. Ballantine Books. 1992.
Brian Palmer. “When Did Bare Breasts Become Taboo?”. Slate. 2012. Web.
Barbara G. Walker. Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. HarperOne. 1983.
Barbara G. Walker. The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. Harper & Row. 1988.
Marilyn Yamon. A History of the Breast. Ballantine Books. 1998.
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Raquel Vasquez Gilliland is a Mexican American poet, painter and aspiring micro-farmer. Her work has been published in Dark Mountain and Fairy Tale Review, among others. She's most inspired by plants and stones and her family. Her first collection, Dirt and Honey, is available from Green Writers Press.
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