"Not only do more women want to be small; they want to be smaller. Jerry Chidester, a plastic surgeon in Salt Lake City, said his patients used to ask for C cups."

"Now, they want Bs. He often does five breast reductions a week, mostly on young, postpartum mothers.... Small breasts may not draw as much attention on the subway or the street as bigger breasts do, but they are also a fashion. Whereas big breasts signal motherhood and sexual availability, smaller breasts can convey youth, girlishness, puberty, thinness, androgyny.... They can also indicate class. In March, a meme circulated on X... 'MEN,' it said. 'Which do you prefer? The aristocratic elegance of the small breasted woman OR the Nietzschean pro-sex, pro-beauty large breasted woman?' Thornton agrees that smaller breasts signal the self-assurance of affluence whereas breast augmentation can signify social ambition — a desire to attain wealth and status via the attention of men.... For a woman to withdraw from the male gaze, to assert herself in her refusal to be ogled, to relieve her own pain, to be able to comfortably train for a marathon or dance at her own birthday party — that is liberation. But it’s a personal, individual one, said Thornton. 'If women are going to have an emancipated rack,' she said, 'then men need to change.'"

I'm reading "The Power of a Smaller Breast/Breast reduction is all the rage in cosmetic surgery. Are women asserting their independence or capitulating to a yet another impossible standard of beauty?" (NYT).

Thornton is "Sarah Thornton, 59, a sociologist who lives in San Francisco, was a B cup before her double mastectomy. After breast reconstruction she had Ds, which felt huge to her — 'bulky and cartoony,' she wrote in 'Tits Up,' her recent social history of the breast."