Tits By Any Other Name Something Something

For someone who works as a writer, I really hate a lot of words!! I mean, I guess you could argue that it is precisely my intense love for words that is the root of my hatred; I care about words so much that I can’t be ambivalent towards them, maybe? No. I just hate a lot of words. I particularly hate words relating to sex — today alone I’ve told TWO different people in TWO different conversations not to use the word “titillated” because, like, gross. Last week I almost screamed when someone used the word “satiated” in a serious context. “Lover” is another one that makes my skin crawl. “Rad” is a nonsexual word that recently rankles me in the worst way. I think it’s something to do with the long “a” sound in the middle. Phrases can set me off too: “making love” is by far the worst offender and I KNOW I am not alone in that feeling.

So I cringed my way though Miranda Popkey’s recent entry in The Mating Book Club, where she deconstructs a phrase I’ve never heard before from a book I’ve never read: “I had been working my tits down to nubs.”

Tits down to nubs. Jfc.

If there is anything I do not want to do to my tits — and that is a short list — “working them down to nubs” is by far the number one practice I would like to avoid. To nubs? What’s a nub? But now, I mean, I’m torn: do I need to read this book? Or should I just keep my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed like la la la I never saw this everything is totally cool and fine?

I did like Popkey’s defense of the phrase, though the whole concept is still on notice. In response to the criticism that “no woman” would ever say such a thing, Popkey counters:

Even if it’s supposedly “a poor metaphor for the effect of hard labor,” I have had this precise tits-to-nubs thought several times since I first read Mating, and I’m prepared to defend it as plausibly feminine. During months when I worked sixty or seventy hours a week — months when I often made dinner out of Luna bars grabbed at delis on the way to readings; months when I couldn’t manage more than five hours of sleep a night — my breasts, small enough already, shriveled and drooped. I can remember looking at them in the mirror and thinking, Well, not quite nubs, but close enough. I make no claim to universality. My sympathetic reading reveals as much about my own fraught relationship with my body qua body — my insistent desire to take up less space, to degenderize the space I do take up — as it does about the novel. But Rush’s narrator is hardly an everywoman, and in her voice, the sentiment reads not as jarring but as apt.

Tits, nubs, let’s call the whole thing off, I guess.