'The sexualised view of the breast,' Marilyn Yalom asserts, is a Western phenomenon. Non-Western cultures, she assures us, 'have their own fetishes'. This seems dismissive, running the risk of a National Geographic style of condescension, other cultures representing the (scorned) site of an (inferior) idyll in which everything hangs out, and there are no hang-ups. Women who have been 'going abroad with their breasts uncovered since time immemorial' are not necessarily bare of any cultural suspicions about them. Yalom has some of the vices and virtues of the writers of the Enlightenment in whose line she follows. If we see how changeable and culturally determined our view of 'the breast' is, we have, she believes, some chance of conquering the irrationality and superstition surrounding the fetishised object. What might happen then is not so clear.

LRB 19 June 1997 | PDF Download