Stephen Bayley

Thank you, Germaine, I’m enjoying all the breasts

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one.

issue 19 September 2009

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one.

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one.

Greer wrote a page of splenetic ‘comment’ on my new book, Woman as Design, in Monday’s Guardian. Her charge is that, like all knuckle-dragging males still emotionally located in the mastodon era, I fetishise and eroticise the female breast. This is said to be wicked. By offering ‘support’, the bra deforms reality, says Greer, and she wants me disabused of my idealism by a frank photographic confrontation with what gravitational forces do to the average boob.

What makes elderly feminists so humourless and unlovable? So leached of style? Is it racist even to discuss race? It certainly seems to be sexist to discuss sex and its aesthetics.

Written by
Stephen Bayley
Stephen Bayley is an honorary fellow of the RIBA, a trustee of the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust and the co-founder of London’s design museum.

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