First, and least obtrusively, breasts are mounds. Most often they are fleshy:
“They continued like this for deliciously long moments, losing track of time as Kathryn earnestly kneaded and fondled and tweaked the dark-pink nubs and fleshy mounds of Borg bosom before her, Seven responding with mock protest, which became increasingly more difficult to sustain.”
“Twin mounds” aren't quite so popular, but the fact that the first few pages of Google matches are crammed with “XXXX Shemales” and “amatuers” indicates to me that we have already ascended to the dizzy apotheosis of cliché.
“Pillowy” is another good word for mounds; but under Google's objective eye “pillowy mounds” is lavished impartially on mammary and culinary confections.
Still, I won't cry “ouch” if I bump into a mound or two in the course of my reading. Fair's fair, and it's a decent simile.
The niggles start when we venture into the vegetable kingdom. Just about every fruit you can think of (except, possibly, the banana and the kumquat) has been used as a metaphor for the breast. If you're really anxious to avoid cliché, don't bother with plums, apples or grapefruit. Lots of things get likened to grapefruit. Not just breasts, but hailstones, knees, rats, glands, testicles, fibroids, ovarian cysts, tumours – you name it. Mind you, the lactating breast does have one thing in common with grapefruit, unless you are very careful with your spoon. Funny that grapefruit are so popular, though.
Anyhow, I'm prepared to accept most fruit without a wince – or even a quince. Melons are my problem. The melons I normally buy are extremely hard, heavy and difficult to get hold of if, like me, you have small hands. My mental picture of a melon is something that I slice with a knife and enjoy eating chilled (rather good with a dusting of ground ginger). The very idea of having two massive lumps like those anchored to my chest suggests nothing but all-encompassing fatigue. But so much of a cliché is the melon simile (“breasts like melons” and “breasts the size of melons”, as literal phrases, find nearly a hundred matches) that some writers take it for granted that “her melons” is semantically equivalent to “her breasts” – and the phrase finds an unbelievable 2,340 matches. I find myself wondering if these people have ever seen the inside of a greengrocer's.
As ever, the fun comes from those authors who try to avoid the cliché by tweaking it a bit. I get a kind of thrill watching people wrestling with their conscience, realizing that this melon-talk is a bit preposterous, but not really finding the wherewithal to avoid it:
“The chest had cut-outs too, around each breast, but the holes must have been slightly small, as each tit stood out strangely taught [sic] and firm, literally looking like small melons.”
Literally!
It goes without saying that these melon-people are size fetishists. You don't spend long in the world of erotica without realizing that surprisingly many people out there get their jollies by imagining various bits of anatomy blown up to nightmarish proportions. Why this is I cannot fathom, and for now I'm regarding it as one of life's little secrets. But in an idle moment I wondered whether “clitoris like a melon” might find a match. Yup. And actually it led me to a very funny joke: see e.g. http://www.freeholes.com/joke/doctor.html.
Quite a few authors, likewise suspecting that melons are far too suggestive of the freak-show, try to damp it down by talking about cantaloupes (often misspelled “canteloupes”). Indeed, it seems that “cantaloupe” has become a synonym for “breast”. It's especially charming when they resort to “half-cantaloupes”. Here's a sample, with its intriguing use of “rigid”:
“I finally coaxed her top open enough to reveal the most rigid pair of breasts I have ever seen. They were large, like half-cantaloupes.”
And this leads us naturally to the matter of geometry. When people talk about fruit and other vaguely spherical objects, I see in my mind's eye a vaguely spherical object. And breasts, to my benighted mind, aren't even vaguely spherical. Not even hemispherical. Isn't that exactly their charm?
So it really perplexes me that people talk about “globes” and “orbs” in connexion with the breast. Just search for “her globes” on Google and you will see that geography is the last thing on people's minds. As for “twin orbs”, apparently they have a long history. The phrase is also to be found in this erudite survey of breast-screed.
Globe people are not troubled by literal meanings or verbal associations. They effortlessly move beyond cliché, into the realm of thoughtless synonym. It appears that some actually feel happiest with cliché, and don't feel that “globes” is clichéd enough. Have you heard of the “golden globe” awards? Surprise surprise. How about using “golden globes” to describe breasts, then, since it's a handy phrase that trips off the tongue, or at least dribbles from the pen? Here's a fruity sample, ready garnished with muscles (that's a new one!) and long rigid nipples:
“Ashley's mother gasped from shock and pain, and you could see her luscious golden globes bulging as she immediately tightened the muscles of her tits in order to stop her nipples from sinking in any further. Although Ashley didn't really understand what was going on, she was filled with pride when she saw her mother's long, rigid pink nipples come back out to full length as she pushed them back against the dark brown ones which were pressing against them.”
I find myself scratching irritably at my thighs, as if trying to test whether I am dreaming; or do some men really prefer to focus, in their erotic imagination, upon the image of spherical metallic objects on women's chests, instead of what actually does appear there? To me it seems weird and mechanical, like JG Ballard's fascination with wrecked cars.
Why has such strange, unintuitive language found such favour? Perhaps, in our age, most people find it easier to interact with machines than with nature.
But I don't think this started with the Industrial Revolution. I call to mind Plato's doctrine of the Forms. For Plato, earthly shapes were mere imperfect approximations of the heavenly, eternal Forms, and these possessed beauty to an infinite degree. Perfect squares and circles were lovelier than anything Nature could invent. This has always been my most basic problem with male psychology. To me, perfect shapes are just boring abstractions, simplistic man-made stupidifications of Nature's rich and boundless inventiveness.
Well, you can tell that I was not exactly cut out for a career in physics.
Treasuring absurdity as I do, I was a little shocked to discover that this month the melon-fanciers have wrested the prize from the worshippers of Athena, and I will award this month's Golden Globe to:
“Then her countenance suddenly softened and a dreamy look came into her eyes. She cupped her ample breasts in her little hands, which were so unequal to the task that it was like trying to stand two large melons upright in a couple of tiny sherbet-dishes.”
Really, the biggest breast-cliché of all should be a climax, a greater absurdity than all the absurdities that have gone before. But it's not. It's actually the least problematic, the least remarkable, and easily the most endearing. Among all the curious and far-fetched metaphors that have gained ill-deserved popularity, there is one designation that no woman alive would criticize for its unoriginality. Overwhelmingly the most common epithet for breasts is “perfect”, with a Google match count of twenty six thousand four hundred. (Glad to see that it's an even number.)
Next month: breast-worship.
Till then, toot toot!
O.