My boyfriend had his chest surgery before we got together. That’s the phrase for it in the community, anodyne and non-specific. A doctor would call it ‘double-incision subcutaneous mastectomy’, which is a little more direct but just as cool and distant, just as much at arms length. The blunt way of putting it – and I want to be blunt, because this must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate – is that he had his tits cut off.
This is how I have always known him. The scars are only a few years old, with the knobbly rough pink of incision and the holes beneath them that I can feel if I press a little. He is, as everyone is, a little lopsided and a little self-conscious about it. His doctor asked, at the outset, if he wanted a ‘standard male chest’ and that is what he got – the muscles, the thin layer of fat, the small nipples just above his half moon scars.
I’ve seen pictures from before – just after his first baby, before the surgery. “I had such nice tits,” he always sighs, with a complicated mix of emotions – wistfulness, humor, annoyance, relief. I know he started binding when he was very young. I know they were a huge focus of his dysphoria, leaving him uncomfortable in his own skin. When I ask, he’s very clear that the surgery is one of the best choices he’s ever made – but even so, it’s complicated. There are reasons I’ve never pursued surgery, even though my dysphoria also makes me uncomfortable with my chest. We talk about it sometimes – the benefits, the things he misses, the reasons I have considered it, the ways I deal with my body as it is. Surgery is always complicated.
But it’s usually considered pretty final.
Artemis of Ephesos. Type of sculpture called the Beautiful Artemis of Ephesians. White marble, 292 cm, 1st century AD. Roman Age work according to the archaic (or geometric?) tradition. Findings from the Prytaneion of Ephesos. Ephesus Archaeological Museum, no. 712. [public domain]
Historians don’t know much about the goddess that was worshipped in Ephesus before the Greeks came. They know that it was her image that was adorned and worshipped as a unique aspect of Artemis. They know that the temple where she resided, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times, that hers were popular and well-attended rites and festivals. They know what she looked like, and how she was dressed, but nobody really knows why, or what the aspects of her outfits were supposed to represent.
As usual, that hasn’t stopped anyone. While modern scholars, grounded in their research and their broader context, have pointed out that the globes on her chest could be any number of things – precious stones, eggs, even ox gonads – over a thousand years of hearsay and opinion have been pretty universal on their interpretation. They’re breasts. As usual for opinions on a pagan idol, these hot takes have their origins in Christian smear campaigns designed to denigrate and undercut other religions. As usual, by the time they got to modern practice, those origins don’t much matter. The story is too good – many-breasted Artemis, the virgin goddess of childbirth who answered any supplicant who asked her for help in finding a partner, is too rich a text to walk back into the cloudy unsurety of fact and academia. Whatever its origin, whatever the truth of the devotees who tended her in antiquity, the myth of Diana Efesia Multimammia is here to stay.
Personally, I think there’s something to all of the possibilities that the scholars have presented for what she’s got on her chest. If they’re amber ornaments it offers a syncretic line of connection to Freya and begs questions about the ancient concepts of fertility and childbirth. If they’re eggs, those questions are even more potent – what meanings might her followers have gotten from eggs taken from their nests, fertile and yet never hatching nor being eaten? We know that this temple was kept by eunuchs – stringing gonads around the chest of their idol seems like a pretty intense act of devotion, albeit one that I can match a little more easily with the virgin Artemis of Actaeon fame.
But those possibilities weren’t what came to mind, for me, when my boyfriend called with wry amusement in his voice. “I asked the OB/GYN,” he said down the line, affronted and almost laughing. “It shouldn’t be possible! My surgeon said it wouldn’t happen.”
I felt a surge of fear. I’ve always known pregnancy is dangerous, but I haven’t had someone I loved so much risking it before now. “What?” I asked, imagining any number of terrible medical complications.
“My tits are coming back.”
Fountain of Diana Efesina in Tivoli, Italy [Wikimedia Commons, Lalupa, CC 3.0]
The updates kept coming like that as the pregnancy progressed, my boyfriend and his husband sending texts and occasional, nearly scientific pictures. How am I lactating??? They took that out! came one message to the group chat, sparking a race for who could post the only appropriate response in the form of a Jurassic Park gif.
“My doctor also said ‘Life finds a way’,” my boyfriend muttered to me one evening. “I’m getting tired of hearing it.”
“It’s kind of a joke, and it’s kind of not,” I told him. “Bodies just do things during pregnancy. Weird things.”
He snorted. “I just wish someone would say something else.”
I gave him a wry look. “It’s a side effect,” I drawled. “Truly thou hast been blessed by Artemis of Ephesus, Artemis the many-breasted, Artemis the goddess of childbirth. Genuflect, O Man, and give thanks for her many blessings and for the health of your son.”
He threw a pillow at me, and I howled with laughter – for all that it was kind of a joke, and kind of not. That night I touched his scars and thought of doubting Thomas and of the much older goddess mentioned in Acts, and of the perfectly standard male chest my boyfriend paid a good deal of money for. There is nothing less male about it now, as he holds his second child. There is nothing less blessed about the way he moves through the world.
I know Apollo better than his twin. When I was sure my boyfriend was asleep, I put my hand on my chest. “Hail Apollo, giver of light, healer of diseases,” I whispered. “Thank you for keeping him safe. And tell your sister thank you, too.”
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