by Mara Altman
There were more stops, but what really stood out—more than being half nude in traffic or the rare sensation of exhaust hitting my bare chest—were the reactions of the people we passed. The ride seemed less an expression of our rights than a roaming focus group meant to collect bystanders’ thoughts about bare-breasted women.
People shouted, “What is this about?” and some said, “This is terrific,” while others yelled out, “Hey! That’s illegal.”
Going topless as a female is not illegal. I didn’t know it before finding the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, the organizers of this ride. Turns out I could have been sipping lemonade in Central Park with my nips out since 1992, the year female toplessness became officially condoned in New York.
I saw interest, shock, disdain, adoration, and curiosity on the faces that flashed past. Many, hoards in fact, turned their phones toward us and began recording. I got it; usually, viewing this kind of stuff costs money and endless viruses on one’s computer. I tried to be chill. I pretended, like most celebrities do in our nation, that since I had my hat and sunglasses on, my face wouldn’t be recognizable. But every time a camera pointed in our direction, one of the girls, the one who had grandiose breasts, large and pillowlike, the type I’d decided would be perfect to rest my face in for a quick respite from the world, would yell, “Fuck you, you have to ask!” while flipping the person (or depending on the case, the crowd) in question the bird.
I didn’t share her sentiment. Going outside topless would be like going out with a pair of parrots chanting “I like big butts and I cannot lie” while fornicating on your shoulder, and expecting witnesses not to snap a picture. It wasn’t realistic.
When we rode along the southern part of the island, a mother shrieked with horror and then spun her young daughter around to save her from seeing our bare and horrifying flesh. Two years earlier, that same young girl was probably suckling on a breast. In a few more years, she will have her own pair.
While there were many who opposed exposed boobs, there were also people who just as adamantly supported our venture. While we were stopped, looking at the site where the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire occurred, two older women with white curly hair and oversize visors peered at us from afar. The way they had their heads tilted and eyes squinted, I thought they were disapproving, but they soon came up to us and said, “You all are just so beautiful.”
It was very sweet. They genuinely seemed to be referring to the asymmetricals as much as the symmetricals.
Also, tattooed people with dyed hair and piercings in painful places hooted and hollered their approval. Couples, both sporting thick-framed hipster glasses, did as well. Some raised their fists in solidarity. I felt so cool to have clearly very hip people support my decision to show them my breasts. I know the ride wasn’t about being cool and getting approbation, but at that moment, I have to admit it: I was kind of cooler and edgier than all of them and it felt awesome.
But throughout it all, there was confusion as to how we should react to the crowds. As we rode through Little Italy, a guy with a beard and a tight white T-shirt turned and held up his hand for a high five. When I put up my left hand, my bike wobbled, but as I passed, we made contact and a wonderful clapping sound. It was so amazing—people train for decades to become lauded as professional athletes or skilled performers, but as it turns out, you can get all sorts of adulation by just taking off your shirt. I was fully soaking up the praise. In fact, I was wondering if by doing this ride I’d tapped into some previously unrealized potential to be a top-notch exhibitionist. Maybe I was going to turn into a boob-showing junkie. Only, I couldn’t tell if it was the freedom of my nipples I loved or the adrenaline rush created by doing something so divisive.
In the middle of my reverie, one girl, who had an obnoxiously fantastic mammary situation, said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”
I thought maybe she’d finally discovered that I’d been looking at her breasts all this time. “Done what?”
“High-fived,” she said.
“Why?” I asked. I had considered the move warm and wonderfully encouraging.
“Because we don’t want this to be considered good or bad. We just want it to be normal.”
She explained that we have won our cause once there are no reactions at all, once we can just ride down the street in our bare-bosom glory without shouts of approval or boos of disgust, the same way a man can jog in a park without a shirt on.
For being such an open-minded revolutionary, she was being so judgmental. Before she shut me down, I would have been happy to Freaky Friday with her boobs, but now the thought of having her rack became a lot less enticing, especially if it came with that attitude.
Just kidding. I’d totally swap! I’d get so many high fives.
Next, we parked our bikes under a tree near Washington Square Park. We dismounted and took off our helmets—our faces flushed from the heat and our hair wet and clumped from sweat. Summary: We were disgusting and hungry.
We walked into Murray’s Cheese, a deli and sandwich place. Everyone dispersed to different parts of the shop. I was off on my own, looking at a laminated menu, when a tall middle-aged man wearing an apron stained with a variety of condiments came near. “We can’t have you in here,” he boomed. His voice really did boom. It sounded like a thunderous warning before lightning was about to strike me down. “This is a health code violation.”
My face flushed another layer of hot and my palms got the same sticky as day-old spilled beer. It was one thing to have people condemn you from afar in the street, but another to be sedentary inside a sandwich shop and have every person’s head turn toward you. I could tell that these people were looking at my boobs, which made me worry that the others could tell when I’d stared at theirs, but never mind that right now; this was an emergency. I lowered my eyes and saw what some of the customers were holding—a baguette, an Orangina, a block of cheese. It was suddenly quiet; I heard a squeeze-bottle of mustard fart out a yellow line.
I tried to nonchalantly cross my arms over my chest as I began scanning the store to see what the other girls were doing, but not one of my bike-riding friends was around anymore. Without anyone there, my reality shifted. What does a uniform mean when you’re the only one left wearing it?
I dropped my backpack to the ground, unzipped it, and plunged my hands inside. I stirred the contents around, hoping to find the soft cottony texture of a T-shirt. I pulled it over my head desperately, like I was trying to pull myself out of a riptide. With the shirt on, I could finally breathe again. I went straight to a basket of ready-made sandwiches, turning them over to see the ingredients, but was actually blind to the labels as I attempted to make myself look busy and unashamed.
I learned later that upon getting kicked out, the other girls had left immediately, in a huff, and gone a door down to a topless-friendly deli. That all happened somehow while I’d stood frozen—while I went directly from confident exhibitionist to cowering shame-bot. Did it really take the condemnation of only one dude in a mayo-splotched smock to spur such a drastic transformation?
I met the others out in the park on a slightly damp section under a large tree. They were all still lighthearted and laughing; one was even playing kickball with some young kids. A couple of girls were lying in the grass while others were taking big bites of their subs. Two scooted backward in order to widen the circle, giving me space to sit down. I unwrapped my sandwich and then took off my shirt again, this time with much more ease and determination than I had a few hours before.
After lunch, we rode for two more hours, much of the time through the West and East Villages, before hanging up our helmets. The same hooting and hollering occurred—grimaces and glares mixed with thumbs-ups and attempted high fives. We made a few more stops before a late-afternoon rain broke the thick heat, and as little droplets pinged pleasingly all over my body, I finally realized an interesting change—my breasts, in that moment, weren’t for anyone but me.
The next day, I woke up and immediately flipped open my computer. My heart beat hard as I looked through all the newspapers. A week before, I would have expected my accelerated pulse to have come from the fear of being exposed, but today it stemmed from excitement and pride. In the New York Post, I found the photo. It was on the first page of the local section under the headline “Breezy Riders.” I would have gone with something more sophisticated like “Boobies Everywhere!!!” but hey, it wasn’t my operation. I was near the front of a group of four of us with my blue helmet and knee-high socks. My breasts were censored with black bars.
They can show the war dead, but not the female nipple.
My black bars were the same size as the other girls’ black bars, though, which I found gratifying. Equality, at last.
7
Actual Navel Gazing
I was recently at a coffee shop with my mom. While we waited for our coffees to cool down, I finally asked her something I had never dared to bring up before. “How did you feel when you first saw my belly button?” I was talking about the moment my umbilical scab came off and she could see what lay beneath.
“I just kept repeating to myself, ‘It’s okay, she’s going to grow into it. It’s okay, she’s going to grow into it.’” Then my mom got a weird smirk on her face and burst out laughing. “It was just so big,” she said, demonstrating by holding up both her hands. She was being dramatic—a kitten could have fit in the empty space between her palms. “You had an adult-man belly button on your baby body.” By this time, she was laughing so hard that she was wiping her eyes with the hem of her long-sleeved shirt. She could hardly speak. I wasn’t sure why she was so hysterical. Maybe this was what catharsis looked like after decades of keeping a straight face. “Your brothers got these great dainty little divots,” she said. “I was like, ‘Why did my daughter have to get the giant protruding one?’”
“But when I was little, you always told me that it was okay,” I said.
Her eyes grew big. “Well,” she said, “what was I supposed to say?”
She’s one of those people you may know: as she’s gotten older, she’s completely lost her ability to politely lie, even for the well-being of her loved ones. After taking a sip of coffee, she suddenly tried to get all mom-like and supportive again. She rubbed me on the shoulder. “It turned out okay, didn’t it?” she said.
* * *
When I was a kid, my shirt stuck out from my stomach like a tent—my navel was the pole. It was a permanently erect abdominal nipple. It was irritating; it rubbed on everything. I couldn’t even do Slip’n Slide properly; the button hurt and caused drag. Friends, during swim parties, would point at it and say, “What’s that?” as if I may have been harboring a miniature Kuato inside my bathing suit.
Every other week, I’d ask my mom if she could chop it off. It was usually at convenient moments, like when she was already dicing onions on a cutting board.
“No, not until you’re eighteen,” she’d say.
As I got older, what my mom suspected—that I would grow into it—was true, though instead of growing into it, I actually grew around it, my belly ballooning on all sides of the nub like muffin batter rising around a chocolate chip. Now, when viewed straight on, my stomach appears to be birthing a tiny pink baby mouse.
My sister-in-law, during a moment of creative inspiration, said it looks like a chewed-up piece of bubble gum.
Besides having an outie, my knob is also inordinately sensitive. When I was growing up, my brothers knew that touching it was an easily accessible form of torture. Press it and it detonates a missile of nausea. I had to teach boyfriends that it was a no-go zone. I’d say something understated like “If you touch my belly button, I will rip off your eyelids and use them as toilet paper.” Anything subtler than that seemed to be taken as a coy invitation to attempt to make contact.
* * *
As an adult, I’m able to display my navel without embarrassment, and I’ve even had a friend touch it without my vomiting on her face. But because of the shape of my navel and the unsavory sensations it inspires, I’ve given the whole situation an unseemly amount of thought. I’ve concluded that the navel is obnoxious; it’s prominent, but it doesn’t even do anything. The navel is for . . . it is for nothing.
After working double duty for the first nine months of our development, as both our mouth and anal orifices—two highly respectable roles—at the moment of birth, it gets a gigantic demotion from CEO of survival to weird stomach indent. By the time we become conscious of it and start asking questions, the body part is already retired. Parents try to tell you it’s a button, but nothing happens when you press it. Then they tell you that you used to eat through it, but when you hold up food, it doesn’t take a bite. Our other useless parts sometimes surprise us with pain—I’m looking at you, wisdom teeth—but at least when they do, we dispose of them. The navel just stays there forever, right there in the middle of our stomachs. Not only don’t we remove it, but sometimes we even turn it into a fashion statement.
Maybe it’s the navel’s pointless yet permanent presence that leads scientists, laymen, and even entire cultures to desperately try to make sense—justify the existence—of this derelict hole.
Desmond Morris, famed zoologist and author of The Naked Ape, believes that we retained our prominent stomach crevasse while other mammals, such as dogs, leave virtually no umbilical evidence behind, because for us upright-walking humans, it’s a useful “genital echo,” a kind of symbolic “pseudo vagina.” Theoretically, the navel helps remind the opposite sex of our other more reproductive organ a tad bit south. I guess that might work, except if yours, like mine, looks like a little otter penis.
In Chinese acupuncture, the belly button is referred to as the Spirit Palace. Puncturing it with a needle is prohibited, but if you put salt and ginger inside, it is supposed to cure diarrhea. In some Eastern traditions, the navel is also considered the location of an important chakra. Guru Mantra Singh, a kundalini yoga master I contacted, told me that the chakra embodies vitality, energy, and power.
To explain how it works, he asked if I had a puppy. “If it pees on your rug,” he said, “you speak to it from your navel.” Then he demonstrated. “No, don’t pee on my rug!” he yelled. “Get it?” he asked.
Not really.
There are plenty more navel interpretations—a Time magazine article from 1959 tells me that in early Japan, if a baby was born with a navel pointing downward, “the parents would brace themselves for a weakling child who would bring them woe.” I even spoke with a man, Jonathan Royle, who uses the navel to tell one’s fortune. When I sent him a picture of mine, he wrote back to tell me that people who have buttons like mine “tend to have split personalities and are often very unpredictable and often emotionally unbalanced indeed.”
I wonder if that’s what my husband is referring to when he tells me it’s not normal to give motivational talks to my undersunned houseplants.
All these perspectives were fascinating—if not a little desperate to make meaning—but for me, the navel started to make sense only once I spoke to an anatomist. The tangible and concrete facts added up to a truth that I couldn’t have seen otherwise.
* * *
Derek Harmon spends most of his time wrist-deep in cadavers at the University of California at San Francisco, where he teaches human anatomy to medical school students. Before digging too deep, I wanted to find out the truth behind an outie. How an outie is formed—as benign an issue as it seems—is oddly a hotbed of conspiracy. Harmon, a professional, even had to powwow with his co-anatomists to discuss the reason behind our differing shapes.
Before I spoke with him, I had been exposed to a lot of hearsay. A friend thought that the ob-gyn takes a look at the mom’s navel and then snips the baby’s so that they’ll match. Though it’s a popular theory, I already knew that an ob-gyn cannot take credit for shaping the navel when she cuts the cord any more than a mohel can take credit for the size of a penis after clipping its foreskin. I knew that because someone once pointed at my abdomen and said, “Don’t you wish you could go back in time and tell your mom’s doctor to pay more attention?”
I’d approached my aunt Karen, an ob-gyn and a professional cord cutter, about it, and she had told me that navel shape wasn’t the fault of her kind. Besides, many mammal mothers chew off the umbilical cord of their young and don’t do such an immaculate precise job, yet you don’t see big honking stalactite button structures hanging off a cow. The umbilical cord is cut, and the remainder—whether it’s a centimeter or five inches—will shrivel up into a scab and fall off at the abdomen.
My mom, when I’d asked her on several million occasions why I got the one I did, always said, “Your dad has one, too.”
