My Breasts, Their Connotations

I have large breasts, big hips and a small waist.  I tend to dress elegantly, even for casual situations.  I wear a lot of black, a lot of dresses, and I like to play up my curves and look nice.  I wear scoop neck and V neck tops pretty often, and of course there’s the cleavage that comes with it.  Even when I wear crew neck tops, bam, my breasts are right there.  I don’t like to wear baggy things, and why should I?  Street harassment’s been a problem for me since I was 14 or so and I grew my breasts in the first place, and while the catcalls have always bothered me greatly I never really thought about them in terms of my body, personally.  Those guys are assholes, they do that to everybody, just because I’m wearing a dress and walking alone they think they have the right to blah blah blah.  But I never really thought of what my body, specifically, meant to them and means to the culture at large.

An extremely insensitive, tactless, and misinformed comment my dad made to me in the car a few days ago finally brought it home.  We were having one of those big heart-to-hearts, the same one we have every time I come home from school, in which he dissects what he thinks is my mental and emotional state based on I don’t know what.  This time he said that, when my breasts are "on display" like they are "all the time," it’s an "invitation for rape."  He doesn’t know that I’ve been raped, and that comment of his was extremely hard for me to hear.  Does he want me to wear burlap sacks?  Walk with a hunch?  I don’t know how what I’m supposed to do with that comment.  Who decided that breast size is in direct proportion to sheer amount of sexuality?  My breasts are just a body part like any other.  It’s not my thick thighs or big nose or size 8 feet that have those sexual connotations, though I have just as much control of those things as I do my breast size; that is to say, none.  They’re just traits, and don’t mean anything.  Large breasts, however, mean something.  The patriarchy has decided that a person with large breasts is a sexual person for as long as their breasts are "nice" and in the "too big" range.  If I’m rushing to class ten minutes late, the harasser sees my big boobs coming down the street and thinks I’m on my way to see him for a beer.  If I’m showing my parents a piece of artwork I’m proud of they tell me to put on a jacket because I look like a whore.  This happens in crew neck tops.  Even in a high necked, black dress, on a dark night, my chest is the first thing many men comment on.

I didn’t put that symbol on my body.  I’m in a sexual mood just as often as everybody else is, not 24 hours a day as the patriarchy would have us believe.  Is there a way to dress and look nice and still be considered a full person when I step outside my door, and not just a breast transporter?  I just want to own my own body and be in control of what it says.  I don’t know why that has to be so hard.