I had a lot of trouble connecting to Nora Ephron’s piece “Shaping Up Absurd” because of the specific cultural environment that she was brought up in (starkly different from mine) that taught her that large breasts = pure womanhood and femininity. Throughout the piece, she discusses how growing up in the 1950’s caused her to develop a very specific sense of what it means to be a woman and thus feel insecure of her small breast size. In contrast, I was brought up in an era that prizes androgyny and small, boyish figures for women. Therefore, I couldn’t really connect to her piece because my small figure has always been culturally valued and thus I have never really struggled with body image issues.
There were certain moments of Ephron’s essay, particularly in the beginning, that struck me as extremely familiar; I think that she did a great job capturing a juvenile voice in her piece. For example, I really liked the moment in paragraphs 6 through 8 that followed a conversation Ephron had with her friend Libby. Libby tells her that her breasts will grow after her husband touches, rubs and kisses them. I could just imagine that kind of conversation bouncing back and forth between myself and my friends at a young age. We all made up absurd myths and rumors about sex and love and casually asserted them as fact, and the we would secretly obsess over the lies that we told each other. I thought that she did a great job of capturing the hodgepodge of emotions—naïveté, cool confidence, and a heightened sense of drama all rolled into one—in this section of the text.
I felt like there was no real resolution in the end; I wanted her to elaborate more on the fear of “gumming up” her femaleness that she discloses in the beginning of her piece. I understand that she, as an adult, is still hung up on her breasts but I wished she could
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