By Adrienne Anifant

Across Cameroon, Guinea-Bissau, and West and Central Africa breast ironing is a widespread practice undergone by at least 26% of girls during puberty, that’s one in every four girls.¹ Breast ironing is the attempt to make young girls developing breasts disappear or suppress their development through the pounding, flattening, and messaging of their adolescent breasts with hot objects such as wooden pestles, hammers, spatulas, bananas and coconut shells that are heated over coals.²

Mothers believe that ironing their daughter’s breasts will protect them from unwanted male attention, rape, and pre-marital pregnancy. Boys and men assume that girl-children are ready for sexual access just because their breasts begin to grow. Mothers also iron their daughter breasts in the attempt to ensure their daughters will complete school without interruption such as pregnancy and/or marriage. One mother recounts, “Breast ironing is not a new thing. I am happy I protected my daughter. I could not stand the thought of boys spoiling her with sex before she completed school.”³

Yet, some girls iron their own breasts with the same hopes for their future. One woman from south-west Cameroon said she ironed her breasts so she could escape being forced into early marriage. She said, “I wanted to go to school like other girls who had no breasts.” ⁴

The Network of Aunties Association, an activist group comprised of women who’ve undergone the practice, are committed to discouraging breast ironing. Doctors and anthropologists are joining them in this new campaign as they begin to educate people about the ways this practice is harmful to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of young women.⁵

They’re also informing people that the practice, in fact, does not prevent teenage pregnancy, early sex, or minimize the chances of a child being infected with AIDS. Flavien Ndonko, an anthropologist quoted in an article by the BBC, advised parents to “talk about the issue of sexual reproductive health with the child…so she that is aware about what it means growing up and having breasts or having periods.”⁶

Although the campaigns success on behalf of the Aunties Association, doctors and scientist to expose the egregious harms of breast ironing warrant praise, it seems the campaign is not targeting or even including in its scope of education those who cause women and young girls to fear the growth of their own breasts: men and boys. Experts are asking parents to talk with girls to help them to understand what their breasts “mean.” Isn’t that asking girls to be aware that becoming a woman means in and of itself to embody provocative, inherent sexiness and titillation. That message implicitly tells girls they must assume responsibility for the consequences of their perceived sexual attractiveness, of their “meaning” as sexual objects. A familiar scenario: in other words, be aware you could, at anytime, be asking for it. No wonder they want their breasts to disappear.

In fact, based on testimonies from women like Emilla, becoming a sexual object signified by the growth of her breasts and enduring the consequences of such seemed like a kind of death; she could lose her chance of an education and her own future through rape, pregnancy and arranged marriage. Why then is the campaign’s focus not on the culturally predominant patriarchal ideas of sex, women’s bodies and, above all, the exploitative sexual behavior of men and boys?

Breast ironing may seem extreme and restricted to those specific countries, however, the practice of women negotiating their bodies, particularly their breasts, with a consuming public gaze is not. In a study conducted by the Schools of Psychology at the University of the West of England, researchers interviewed a group of European women to gain a subjective understanding of their “breasted experience.” ⁷ Under an omnipresent male gaze, a woman’s breasts, their size and shape, are seen as a measurement of her worth and value.⁸ The woman expressed self-consciousiousness, humiliation and anger at the way in which men “called their breasts into being” through intrusive comments and invasive looks. Other research supports this finding that “girls experience the development of their breasts as embarrassing because they feel humiliated by the tendency of boys and men to stare at their breasts and comment on them.”⁹ Women do not experience their breasts as belonging to them but rather cultural symbols of sexiness, sexual openness, and promiscuity. And although it is not to the same degree these women are like the Cameroon young women in that they feel they must hide their breasts or make them disappear when they enter intellectual or social milieus striving to receive if not respect, then at a minimum, some degree of privacy and autonomy.

Across cultures being a sexually mature woman is in conflict with possessing individual autonomy, personal authority, bodily integrity, wholeness; the kind of wholeness that encompass your mind and passions, interests, opinions, and fears. A grown woman’s body becomes public through her breasts. As women, we devolve into out body parts and see and measure ourselves through the ways our body parts are perceived and consumed by others. Breasts signify women’s sub humanity and through them she grows into object-hood. Her breasts are symbols, ‘things’ through which she is interpreted. They hold meaning telling something about her although it’s unrelated to what she is actually saying, thinking, feeling. And they tell something about those who see her through them.

Perhaps it is the mature, sexual woman who is so feared—not the voracious, hypersexual, sex-crazed pre-packaged caricature portrayed in pornography and stereotypical fantasies of prostituted women and girls, but the real woman who isn’t just sexual or a symbol; a human being whose sexual life is an extension of her larger, complex intricate web-life. Pleasure and desire are interlaced and interfused within the many aspects of her work, her art and her vision. The woman who has an interior life with interests and angers who is in control over her own life, who works and rests and knows her sexual tastes, likes and dislikes, who can expand into sexual dimensions and space without conceiving, who doesn’t always orgasm, who can slip into months, years of abstinence and feel happy, whose sexual pleasure can feel metamorphic, almost bigger than herself, like creation itself. Maybe it is her and the potential of her in every woman and girl from Europe to Cameroon whom we fear. And it is that fear and its consequences which we all must bear, until the day we fear her no more.

¹ Kinot, Kathambi. 8.11.2006. www.awid.org/go.php

² (ibid.)

³ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/Africa/5107360.stm Sa’ah, Randy Joe,” Cameroon girls battle ‘breast ironing.’ BBC NEWS. 23 June 2006.

⁴ (ibid.)

⁵ (ibid.)

⁶ (ibid.)

⁷ Millsted, Rachel and Frith, Hannah. Being large-breasted: women negotiating embodiment. Centre for Appearance Research. Schools of Psychology, University of the West of England. October 2003.

⁸ (ibid.)

⁹ (ibid.)