I was listening to a radio interview with Phyllis Dillerand she was telling about how she broke into the business.
She was describing how she used props and she indicated the hardest thing for her to do was to “subtract” size. She said her jokes revolved around her being flat chested and she said she was anything “but” flat chested. So she said she had to use binding and boas around her neck and oversized dresses to make her look like an “ironing board” as she said it.
She didn’t say what size she would, then again why would she? But I got to thinking, there has to be some limit to how much you can downsize if your “well endowed” in terms of breast size.
Being a man I don’t know. So that’s my questions. How hard do you think it’d be for a well endowed women (in terms of breasts) to downsize? I am a gay male and know nothing of women’s sizes so I can’t give examples.
But let’s say you were like someone on Baywatch. Could you look flatchested?
Or is the best you can do is look like you went down a cup size?
I’m currently a 38D. I can flatten out my breasts such that there isn’t a shelf effect. Add a t-shirt and I don’t look like I have much by way of breasts at all. But, my total chest will seem bigger in diameter. So, I’ll look fatter. Which is awesome.
I was looking at some really old pictures of Phyllis and she really looks flatchested, but she does where clothes that are so mishapen they are ridiculous. They look like no one would ever where them in real life. Of course it was the 60s and women wore paper dresses.
I guess going from big to small isn’t what most women strive for.
In Diller’s case from what I’ve seen it seems she achieves this effect from her odd clothes
I have an acquaintance who binds. I’ve never personally seen her without, but I’m told she is of average endowment (around a C cup, maybe). With the binding, she looks like she has the chest of a fairly muscular man. They’re quite… squishy… aren’t they? So I guess if you know what you’re doing you can pretty well get rid of them.
Without going into more specialist realms of film, did Julie Andrews bind for Victor Victoria? What about Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love? Is her name Hilary Swank or something - in Boys Don’t Cry - they must have flattened her out, she was playing Brandon Teena. You should be able to find this stuff out. Try a lesbian or trans message board.
I know some FTM people (female-to-male transexuals) who I’ve either met before they transitioned or seen photos of before they transitioned, as well as some women who bind their chests now and then for drag king nights. They can go down at least a couple of cup sizes - though it helps if they’re slightly overweight so that it, uh, looks like it’s part of general fatness.
Clothing helps a lot, too - it’d be harder to bind and look flat-chested if you were wearing a figure-hugging top, but not so difficult with a loose shirt and a jacket (but no tie - that accentuates the breasts).
It’s also relevant that there are two types of breast tissue - dense and loose (aka, “fatty”). Women with a high proportion of dense breast tissue aren’t as squishable, so two women with identical bra sizes may not be able to bind down to the same size.
Dense breast tissue also has a higher risk of breast cancer and is more problematic on a mammogram. On the bright side, we rarely get pancake boobs as we age.
Not necessarily “mannish”. She identifies as genderqueer, I believe, and hence wouldn’t necessarily think of herself as mannish or womanly. Thinking about it I’m not actually sure whether I’m using the right pronoun, though I do know that this person has no intention to transition and doesn’t identify as male. Unhelpfully they even go by a non gender-specific name, so I can’t try to work it out that way! :smack: As I said, they’re more of an aquaintance than a friend, so we’ve never really discussed it in any depth. Generally, I understand it may be uncomfortable to begin with, but one becomes used to it and even finds it more uncomfortable to go without. But we really need to find someone who knows more about this than I do!
Well I wasn’t looking for really serious answer, more like guesses. Obviously Phyllis Diller didn’t make too much of an attempt to look flatchested, just so if she told a joke it’d look more believeable.
I guess it would’ve been better to phrase the question, to an average women, do you think you could look flatchested? Or could you go down a cupsize?
I actually found another site with an excellent video interview with Phyllis Diller where she indicates she actually had breast reduction surgery.
I am a C-D cup and I have tried binding my chest when I was acting in some goofy skits with friends and needed to play ‘the man’. Admittedly, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just used whatever I could find. I never got to ‘flatchested’ - there was still something of a lumpy area. As you noticed, baggy clothes help quite a lot in hiding what remains.
I may have been doing it wrong, but I don’t see how you could end up just going down a cup size - once you’ve squished everything around it doesn’t look at all like your breasts normally look, so it’s not like you’re going to become an A-cup, you’re going to become sort of fatter in the chest area, as **Pullet **mentioned.
A minimizer bra can take a woman down a cupsize. Most of them do it by having a shallower, wider cup, so some of the breast tissue is smooshed over into the armpit. Minimizer bras are regularly available in C cups and up.
So, with a flat corset or ACE bandage, any woman could go down a cup size, and probably two or three cup sizes.
(Each inch of circumference, roughly, is “a cup size”.)
I can’t really disguise the fact that I have breasts the size of a one-year-old’s head without a sports bra and clever tailoring. It’s either busty or as big as a door, take your pick.
It really does tend to depend on how much the woman has in the way of pectoral muscles, too. When I was younger, I had quite impressive pecs, as well as large breasts. The pecs were the result of using a hand plane in wood shop, for a couple of months. The tits were very well supported by the muscles underneath. Of course, at the time, I didn’t particularly want to decrease my apparent breast size, but if I had, then I would have had to bind pretty firmly, and press the fatty tissue to underneath my armpits.
A woman who isn’t well endowed can more easily bind and have it look convincing. It helps to not just bind, but to bandage in bulk above and below the breasts, so that there is a smoother transition between breast and non-breast areas.