Porn Review Special Report: Breast Expansion

One of the operating assumptions of this series and of erotic materials in general is that the female body is sex. The form of a woman is designed to entice, the function of a woman is to arouse and ultimately climax the other party, male or female. Breast expansion as a paraphilia is an expression of this idea in terms of breast paraphilia. Since boobs are one of the most popularly sexualized body parts in modern western society, it should come as little surprise that the modification (specifically here the growth of breasts. Breast shrinkage or deflation is a separate and much less common paraphilia) of those parts is one of the most popular paraphilia.

Breast expansion is exactly what it sounds like, the expansion of breasts on women. This is sometimes presented in a “before and after” fashion, sometimes depicted as it happens, and occasionally is applied as a label to characters depicted with larger breasts than is canonically known. For this special report I’ve selected two comics and a handful of related gifs to discuss the impact and creation of this paraphilia, as well as elements of the community formed around it.

Surprisingly, I am not an expert in sexuality, so take what I say with whatever grains of salt you wish. I’m more of an expert in the construction of online cultures than a person who has performed significant research into the areas of human sexuality. What I’m here to do, however, Is present and critique a handful of viewpoints and use my experiences to deconstruct the paraphilia as a whole.

Trigger Warning: Nonconsensual body modification, general reduction of women into objects

Part 1: Everyone enjoys it!

Satire and its toothless cousin parody are useful as both criticisms of a problem and as descriptions of that problem in direct ways. Humor on the whole is built around transgressing certain boundaries, whether of logic or of social norms or expectations, and through it we can precisely identify the bars of the cages we’re in. This is a parody of particular Japanese expectations of the body types of drawn women. The word Oppai means breasts in Japanese.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with manga, read the text bubbles and frames from right to left, top down unless otherwise depicted via little arrows.

A lot of this comic deals with silly Japanese jokes and stereotypes. The proliferation of Japanese erotic material (in the western world known as “hentai,” Japanese for “pervert” or “transformation” depending on context) along with the popularization of anime and manga have created an interesting situation where manga both expects and generates literacy in Japanese culture. Of course, we’re talking literacy in a very narrow portion of Japanese culture and a great many titles sell pretty well without any knowledge of the culture whatsoever, so ultimately the situation becomes one of how invested one is in anime and manga. It’s a situation that itself creates a subculture that prides knowledge of japan manga and anime trends as a formation of identity: Anime nerds. Those kids who were in the japan/anime/geishinkan club in high school and college. Anyone from the U.S. who describes her/himself as an otaku.

Anyway Japanese pornography is just as subject to being Japanese as Japanese comics, and Japanese parody porn even more so. This comic, though, happens to have breast aliens that are in an overly muscular shape of Cyclops from X-men. Seriously that’s his weird 90s belt thing. It’s fantastic.

So yeah they shoot beams that make breasts larger, and as far as I can tell, defy gravity. Maybe it fills them with helium. Already we have a hint of the understanding that larger breasts = greater sexual pleasure for men with the guy in the top left panel spontaneously developing a bloody nose (anime/manga shorthand for sudden arousal) and asking makoto there to marry him now that she’s of such significant sexual value. I’m not sure what the joke is in the bottom left two panels, but I assume it would make more sense if I were Japanese.

Here the central woman character in this comic presents a counter-argument to the breast alien’s fanaticism. Among other assumptions here is that women with small breasts (a class that probably wouldn’t include her, given that she looks like at least a c cup) is probably unsatisfied with them. Not so for her. Her male authority figure approves of them and enjoys the sexual pleasure he derives from them.  Cyclops perv-man over here doesn’t care about all that. Cyclops perv-man does what he wants. No one denies Cyclops perv-man.

Pew pew absurd breasts! Not only are they ridiculously perky and untenably large, they’re placed on her chest something like immediately below the collarbone. But who cares! Ovular shapes with nipples. And as a 180 reverse from the immediate previous page, she’s happy to have such huge breasts. Everyone is happy. Yay.

So of course large breasts achieved the alien is here to pleasure himself (and ultimately her) bouncing them around and shaking her and nibbling on them. She’s clearly enjoying it, so that’s good. It’s totally cool, since he knew she would enjoy it and she did so he didn’t really need to ask for permission or anything to shoot her boobs up 15 cup sizes.

Shit, she’s even cumming from a tit job. And lactating for no apparent reason. Yay happy ending!

Replete with a mangaish interior monologue finish before a scene transition. And voila, everyone on the planet has giant titties and 75% of the women are like 3 feet tall now.

Oh hold on, we have more content to go. Looks like we have Loli aliens shaped like wolverine. I love it. Lolicon, however, is an interesting subject. The term loli comes from the german novel Lolita about a 13 year old girl who seduces and, I dunno maybe kills an adult dude? I’m getting it crossed with the movie hard candy. Anyway Loli in japan has come to mean a certain erotic aesthetic that emphasize childlike bodies and frequently drawn children. It’s edging past the concept of ephebophilia, the erotic attraction to youth or teens (see: super-perky breasts, any porn marked Jailbait) and landing directly into a weird form of pedophilia. I can’t justify it (largely because I’m not even a little into it) and it’s something that stands on shaky legal ground. Like the “my hot ass neighbor” comic from a few weeks ago, most authors simply abide by a silly claim that all characters depicted are at least 18 years of age. I’m not sure this holds up in court, but it does manage to qualify requirements for at least the few countries that do have rules against drawn child pornography (which I will remind you is what “my hot ass neighbor” was).

Anyway lolicon in japan is extremely common, with pop stars and female celebrities commonly taking on more childish affectations and clothing styles like “Gothic Lolita” being thoroughly common. It’s fucked up on many levels that japan so aggressively infantilizes its women, but it’s a reflection of a larger western conceptualization of women that requires them to be essentially helpless and thus nonthreatening to men. Remember: Masculine = Powerful, Feminine = Weak.

This is essentially what loli looks like. She’s now prepubescent, as supported not only by shrunken size and lack of secondary sex characteristics, but also by the beads in the hair tie—a popular look for Japanese schoolgirls.

The complaint made in the last panel by the female protagonist is more or less echoes the ultimate point I’m trying to make here. Breast expansion in particular and body modification on the whole is a paraphilia about optimizing the sexual environment primarily for male enjoyment. It’s ultimately the purpose for most breast enhancement plastic surgeries, as well as labioplasty, anal bleaching, hip/butt enhancing surgeries and so on.

On a side note, Moe (pronounced “mo-ay”) is a Japanese word referring to a particular aesthetic that falls somewhere between cute and erotic.

Part 2: Eroticizing the TV

This next image set is a scanned collection of pictures from 1998 by a guy named John Barret. Fifteen years ago tablet technology isn’t what it is today and internet connections on the whole were a fair bit slower. Paraphiliac pornography was thus distributed more commonly in traditional manners, through subscriptions to particular pornography magazines, the existence of which (before the internet) were popularized through certain conventions and potentially local kink clubs. This image set might have been sold at a kink convention or it might have been distributed to fans of barret’s work who previously joined a mailing list of his. I’m more interested in the content than the background for this particular work, but I encourage you to use the ultimate research tool, Google, to see if you can find out something about it.

So here we have a character from a fairly popular harem comedy that was contemporarily dubbed and put on cartoon network’s “Toonami” anime block of programming in the afternoons. Harem comedies are a genre or style of Japanese television show and manga that feature a single male protagonist and a group of women who live with him. The comedies usually specifically avoid actual sexual contact on-screen or off between the male protagonist and any of the women, instead creating wacky/embarrassing erotic situations played out for laughs. The purpose of this is two-fold. First, it gets the shows past censorship laws and allows it to play on daytime television. Second, it allows fans of the show to maintain a belief in the “purity” of whichever female character they like best. This “purity” drives a ton of outside merchandising sales, from lunch boxes to body pillows to little figurines.

In recent years, the harem comedy has moved from featuring a male protagonist to featuring no central male characters, with shows like K-On! featuring nothing but a trio of girls acting in moe and childish ways. Harem comedies are fully designed to appeal to men and to the sort of men who are into fantasy babes. This concept was well-received here, where our comics industry has done years of work establishing women as largely pin-up models and sultry seductresses.

But beyond the politics let’s take a look at what Washu from Tenchi Muyo is saying. Washu is a space alien scientist, so this fits in with her general characterization, but look at her suggestions of what to do with her breast growing technology. Clearly bust enhancement is a thing women are willing to pay for, so financial gain could be made here. Power comes along with money, so that works as well. “Lame porno story” is a self-aware pseudo-criticism present in nearly every work of pornography by authors who tend to believe that they’re better than pornographers. Instead, Washu declares that she’ll have some “fun” as though wealth and power and porn stories were not that.  She lays out her plan. She’s going to give anime babes “more than they can handle” since larger breasts also means a greater sexual appeal and also greater globular weights attached to the chest. After, she finishes with an enticement, as though the reader wasn’t specifically there for the pornographic content, but a reluctant acquaintance to be convinced to have casual sex or cocaine or whatever.

The dialogue is honestly weirder than the paraphilia ultimately is, but hey man it’s hard to graft genuine, earnest story onto a narrative wholly designed as an erotic tool. “Anime babes” is so 90s also. Sheesh.

This page seems to be an advertisement for another of barret’s artwork, a comic series called “The Magnificent Milkmaid.” In it, the titular character is a superhero of sorts whose primary ability is the ability to expand her breasts to a significant size, filling them largely with milk. I don’t really understand the premise, especially since it’s basically an excuse for a longer running paraphilia series. The character depicted here transforms into a werewolf, where werewolf means a taller exaggerated female figure with funny ears and fur. And of course the innuendo name “sweater puppy.”

One of the broader things to take away from breast expansion paraphilia is that it intersects with numerous other paraphilia, being of generally inoffensive and overtly sexual nature. I’ll be writing about transformation paraphilia and anthropomorphism in future reviews.

The first victim of Washu’s “fun” is another character from tenchi muyo, Mihoshi. Mihoshi fits the harem stereotype of ditzy and easily embarrassed, and as such she is directly embarrassed by her situation and ultimately upset at the fact she’s just been immobilized by some poorly drawn breasts. Too bad for her, she is the first victim of Washu’s recreation of male desire. Given that both characters already existed in a fictional context to provide companionship to a single male protagonist and in a physical world context to sell merchandise by appealing to a publically acceptable erotic desire. Harem comedies themselves are porn, so porn of harem comedies is unsurprising.

Case in point, look at the dialogue here. Lum is considered by Washu, or John Barret specifically, to be the original anime babe, existing primarily to be sexy with her minimal clothing and cutesy anime behavior. But Washu is pointing out something more: that “anime babes” have become bustier as slow one-upmanship has created an essential arms race in the commercialized world of softcore drawn pornography in Japan. Washu’s breast growing is thus reframed as a matter of modernization, making Lum here competitive in a more modern marketplace.

This panel is about gender essentialism. King is mistaken for a man because she had flat breasts. Now she has enormous breasts and thus cannot be mistake for a man. The tiny man down there (Terry Bogard, I think) is aroused by this as his comically exaggerated erection and hat flying off indicates. This is again to the benefit of men, not necessarily to the benefit of King’s desire not to be mis-gendered.

Washu here is talking about another typical anime conceit: women with large breasts and overtly feminine features are depicted as fully capable warriors, their sexual bodies and apparent lack of exercise no hindrance to their abilities. Here that reality is again reflected in a terribly drawn picture. Look at her meat tube torso and his amazing twenty four inch penis! Don’t even get me started on that weird torso angle or her odd under-armpit boobery.

Anyway another important element of breast expansion is exaggerated depictions of lactation. Often the expansion is tied to the filling of breasts with breastmilk, a common theme is the need to deflate those breasts, often in a way that is visibly pleasurable for the woman involved. It’s a little odd, and often leads to a weird conceptualization of nipples as essentially little chest penises with centralized urethras and whatnot. This form of pornography gets stranger the longer you think about it.

The rest of this imageset follows essentially the same pattern as the previous, various anime women with much larger breasts than presented in their respective forms of media. Occasionally there are men involved and all of them are shocked and aroused by their partners laughably unrealistic breasts.

Part 3: Paraphilia off the Page

So far in this project I’ve only covered drawn porn, and further I’ve only covered drawn porn in comic form. This is largely a choice born out of convenience, since comics are a bounded set of images that tend to feature a narrative that can be discussed more coherently and being images I can easily upload and annotate them. The reality is that all of the paraphilia I’ve discussed come in multiple forms of media and occasionally take on very different presentations and contexts in those media. For every hardcore NEET hikikomori otaku living by the mantra “3DPD” (3d—as in physical—women are pig disgusting next to their moe waifus) there’s another dude of varying levels of social adjustment who just isn’t turned on by drawn pornography. Something about the lack of motion or the essentially unrealistic characters—it’s very subjective.

TaylorMadeClips is one of the many websites that specifically appeals to what are otherwise wholly unrealistic paraphilia with pornography videos that feature creative camera angles, simple special effects and a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief. Modern technology has yet to bring us a particularly realistic simulation of expanding breasts and the sheer cost of digital effects  prevents their wide use. Many, if not all of the BE videos sold on the website feature something like this gif. Women wearing large, chest covering clothing while some form of balloon is inflated underneath. They then marvel at the size and general infeasibility of their now-enormous breasts.

If this situation seems a bit disappointing, you are not alone. I’m uncertain of the sales margins of these videos, but certainly among online paraphilia enthusiasts, live action clips of this caliber are largely derided. A huge part of the problem is that the audience for these kinds of clips is undoubtedly small and it’s hugely unlikely that a project with the special effects to make something interesting will get funded. That said, the last year has seen the development of a crowdfunding website specifically for paraphilia enthusiasts called “offbeatr.” It’s too early to tell how successful it will be, but it’s definitely a sea change in the normal way this kind of niche material is created.

However breast expansion isn’t always limited to overtly pornographic materials. Creative types in movies and advertising have found all kinds of ways to incorporate the concept, from bruce almighty to dude where’s my car to this commercial for a slimming yogurt from korea. The concept is pretty simple: women are expected to want larger breasts than they have and men are expected to want women to have larger breasts. Exploiting this idea for a joke or for advertising or for a simple sexual flair is about as inoffensive as paraphilia gets, wholly adhering to an expected social narrative with regard to women’s breasts. Here is a list of live action media that features the paraphilia.

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One of the most prevalent places to find weird pornography ideas is in the world of horror. Given horror’s nature as an attempt to inspire fear, and given fear’s nature as a reaction to the unknown or unexpected, and also given the erotic’s reliance on the same, horror stories often present a mixed bag of eroticism mixed with the creepy or disturbing that strongly influence or are influenced by our sexualities. From H.R.Giger’s intentionally erotic designs to the insistence on the usage of sex as a plot device in the ubiquitous slasher films in the late 80s, sex has always existed in some form in horror.

A few notes:

I’m well aware that the motivations for breast expansion porn consumption are very broad and varied. One person might be a breast fanatic; another might be into the humiliation aspect of being exposed in public or becoming immobilized by giant lumps of erogenous flesh. I tried not to comment on that and instead discuss the construction of breast expansion as a paraphilia. This is more about how society approaches the female body and how society expects women to behave (and conversely how it expects men to behave) when it comes to their breasts. Discussing motivations behind arousal--answering a “why” question instead of a “how” question--leads to an incredibly subjective picture, of which few broad statements can be made. I’m sure there’s interesting things to say about it, but it’s beyond the scope of what I’m doing.

In this same vein, I don’t want anything I’m writing to be understood as dismissing any of the artists or consumers of this porn though I’m against the particular political assumptions built in to the production of the work. I've said it before and I'll say it again: pretty much everyone is into some kind of weird shit and the key element of fantasy is fantasy. Being aroused by tits getting larger or lolicon or whatever isn't really much of a commentary on the rest of the character of a person, or else the majority of Americans would be creepy muder paraphiliacs with all the cop shows and war and violence movies that get popular.