Sarah Thornton, the San Francisco author of a new book about breasts, Tits Up, lives in a perfect home in the perfect neighborhood: Twin Peaks. On a sunny Monday afternoon, she sat in her Mediterranean-style, art-adorned aerie atop one of those bosom-shaped hills, a rainbow flag flapping in the wind by her front terrace.
Everything in the home—which she shares with her wife, the prominent art gallerist Jessica Silverman—was selected with care. The custom sofa gestured toward the arch of a window, the maroon felt coaster gently fondled the etched water glass, the objets d’art chairs bowed to the original Judy Chicago hanging from the walls.
Thornton has good taste. So it’s only fitting she would apply the same discriminating eye to her chest reconstruction in 2018 after having a double mastectomy. Rumors that her plastic surgeon was an amateur artist with an aesthetic sense gave Thornton comfort that she was in the right hands. But then came the experience of removing her breasts—or “tits,” as she now prefers—and welcoming new ones in their place.
“I felt a strong sense of loss, even though I didn’t value them much to begin with,” she said.
She named her initial pair of implants—a discomforting, disorienting size D—Bert and Ernie. “They were male muppets,” she said.
Unable to acclimate to what she called her “silicon impostors,” she switched to a new, female surgeon who gave her the A+ cup “lesbian yoga” breasts she was looking for. She renamed these new appendages Glenda and Brenda, after her mother and her mother’s childhood friend.
“Now they’re named after living women,” Thornton said approvingly.
Losing her “treasure chest” set Thornton, an academic, art critic and author of three prior books, on a journey of self-discovery that ultimately inspired Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts, out on May 7.
She has since come to love her new, smaller implants, which she said have helped her to develop a whole new relationship with her body—and with the word at the heart of her book’s title. The former journalist prefers “tits” to “boobs” because the latter has connotations with stupidity: boob tube for dumb TV, a boob as an idiot and booby traps, to name a few.
Yet, as the trained sociologist proves in her colorful new volume, jugs (another term she loves) are anything but idiotic. “Without breasts, there’d be no human species,” she said. “And as long as breasts are diminished as dumb boobs, we’ll be the second sex.”
Exploring the social history of ‘tits’
The phrase at the heart of Thornton’s book is an old showbusiness term: When performers get ready to go on stage, they throw back their shoulders and proudly display their bosom buddies. The feminist Borscht Belt comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel brought one of these old adages back into parlance: “Tits up!”
“I love that sisterly encouragement and that kind of confidence,” Thornton said.
Thornton’s previous books focus on the fine art world (“Seven Days in the Art World,” “33 Artists in 3 Acts”) and underground music scene (“Club Cultures”). All are concerned with the issue of cultural value—what is esteemed and what is considered lowly. She was a full-time media studies professor at Sussex University in the U.K. before she moved to the Bay Area in 2013, yet her four books don’t fit squarely into the academic mold.
“I think reading should be a pleasurable experience,” she said. “And I’ve never much enjoyed jargon.”
The book’s trajectory is an uplifting one, with its five chapters exploring different hard-to-access Bay Area arenas rife with breast-related decisions and transactions: the topless bars of North Beach; the country’s oldest continuously operating milk bank in San Jose; the plastic surgeons’ offices in San Francisco where cosmetic breast surgeries are planned; the Gap headquarters where Old Navy bras are designed; the neo-pagan gathering in the redwoods near Mendocino where women worship the divine feminine.
“It’s not a book about the Bay Area,” she said. “But I mine the diversity of the Bay Area for a book that would be broadly relevant.”
All of these immersive experiences left Thornton in a newfound state of wonder about the magic of mammaries. Her book also benefited from the collected wisdom of a fleet of students who served as research assistants during her three-year tenure as a scholar-in-residence at the University of California Berkeley. She recalls biology students exploring the biome of breast milk and Indian-American students digging deep into the iconography of Hindu goddesses.
Yet embracing “tits” in a title so unabashedly has also produced challenges. According to Thornton, the book has been censored all over the place: on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and in Amazon ads. Thornton’s representative at W. W. Norton confirmed the book has run into obstacles with national TV and radio coverage, because the word “tits” is still considered profane.
“I have to be very careful about what I say on Instagram and Facebook,” Thornton said. “If I put ‘tits up’ together as one word, I can get away with it, but just ‘tits’ and things get hidden.”
The predicament, Thornton believes, is telling. “We live in a tech world,” she said. “How is it that these algorithms can’t tell the difference between pornography and women’s studies?”
It’s also unclear whether Thornton will be able to say the word “tits” on the radio or in mixed company. (She did manage to score a major speaking engagement this week, being interviewed at the Commonwealth Club by bestselling nonfiction author Michael Lewis.) While she can sell the book on Amazon, she can’t advertise it—a fact she thinks the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, would be keen to address.
“If Jeff loves Lauren,” she said, referring to Bezos’s generously endowed fiancee Lauren Sánchez, “he’s going to love Tits Up.”
But Thornton means to throw no shade—she has grown to love tits in all of their rhetorical and physical glory. It is a word she says gives her an “odd sense of empowerment,” especially when uttered in front of the opposite sex.
“Breasts are not primarily for men’s sexual gratification,” she said. “So it’s time to reappropriate the word tits.”