A Brief History of Tits Used As Weapons

I’m a 33-year-old straight American male in decent health. I enjoy a life expectancy of around 76 years. I can’t imagine that, in the 43 years between now and my likely demise, I will ever tire of tits. They are a marvel of human anatomy: pleasing to the eye, full of erotic possibility. There seems to be no context in which I would not welcome boobs. Which is why I am drawn to stories about women using them to assault men.

For your edification, please consider a recent local news item written with stunningly commitment to wordplay by reporter Natalie St. John of the Chinook Observer, a newspaper serving the coastal Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state, some few hours’ drive southwest of Seattle. In the small community of Ocean Park, St. John relates, 46-year-old Jennifer Rose Chipman was charged with fourth-degree assault over a domestic dispute in which she allegedly bared her breasts as she charged the man she’d been arguing with, causing his “head to bounce off the wall.”

She was also accused of rubbing said breasts on him as he lay on the ground, and on his nephew’s back when he turned around to avoid getting an eyeful. The main victim — who also claimed to have been celibate for 7 years and shocked by the nature of the attack — apparently had trouble convincing deputies of the injury. But as St. John explained on Twitter, “unwanted contact” alone may amount to criminal intent. (And no, the relative hardness of the exposed nipples does not figure in the jurisprudence.)

The police were probably right to be skeptical of the assault-by-mammary claim, since other stories of this kind have been tricky to reconstruct. It’s more than probable, I think, that Ms. Chipman simply pulled off her bra to gain a surprise advantage in an already heated confrontation, much as a woman in Kazakhstan removed her top in a betting shop to befuddle a security guard who had already physically ejected her once for refusing to put out a cigarette. The video of that incident doesn’t exactly bear out the Mirror’s “uses breasts as weapons” headline — it was more a defensive maneuver. You couldn’t say the same of a woman who was filmed pinning a man and battering him with her tits in Brazil last year for turning her into a “sex object” with his indecent stare, but that turned out to be a bizarre and maybe counterproductive theater stunt meant to call attention to the street harassment women face every day. Does this nevertheless prove the potential for a “bosomy battering” perpetrated against the target’s will? Inconclusive.

Elsewhere, accounts of getting knocked around by aggressive jugs are plainly absurd. Most infamously, a Hong Kong woman named Ng Lai-ying was sentenced to three months and 15 days in prison after accusing “Chief Inspector Chan Ka-po of touching her breast during a protest” in March 2015, per the BBC. A court ruled that she’d actually pushed her breast against him as an excuse to lodge a false assault claim. The outcome of this decision made it pretty clear that the Hong Kong public wasn’t buying such nonsense, as hundreds of men and women turned out in the streets wearing bras to declare that “breasts are not weapons.” Presumably, then, these activists would be unconvinced by the Ocean Park case of hooter violence. Ditto Conan O’Brien:

Yet clobbering isn’t all we have to fear from women’s chest accessories. Every once in a while, someone is booked for assault after squirting a cop in the face with breast milk. In the U.S., this can bump the charge up to the third degree, since the milk is technically a “biohazard” through which disease is transmissible. Still, that’s nothing compared to the greatest titty-threat: smothering. For every bogus tale of breastphyxiation (“Groom Killed By Stripper’s Boobs at His Bachelor Party!” is, indeed, too good to be true), there are a couple of tabloid tidbits with the ring of truth. There’s Claire Smedley, who confessed that her 40MMM-sized boobs nearly suffocated a boyfriend, thereby ending the relationship — “He became too scared to have sex with me. I don’t want that to happen again,” she said of the accident. In 2012, a German lawyer accused his girlfriend of deliberately trying to turn a sex game deadly by trapping his head in her cleavage till he “couldn’t breathe anymore,” alleging that she later told him, “I wanted your death to be as pleasurable as possible.” Finally, there was the poor boyfriend of Donna Lange, another Washington woman — he was found unresponsive in a mobile home with his face buried in her significant assets and soon after pronounced dead at a hospital. Although there was chatter at the time about a manslaughter charge, as witnesses said he and Lange were having a drunken argument, it appears she evaded prosecution.

Throughout the legal history of wielding breasts with intent to injure, one thing is clear: It’s a difficult crime to prove. The near-deadly and actually fatal instances all involve some measure of consent and/or mistaken application of force, while the bludgeonings incur negligible harm. No less esteemed a judge than former New York Mayor Ed Koch, serving on The People’s Court, set a working precedent for these encounters. Hearing a lawsuit against a Florida stripper who went by the name Tawny Peaks — a customer alleged that she hurt his neck by thrusting those peaks too enthusiastically at his face, an experience he likened to being hit by “two cement blocks” — Koch had a woman bailiff privately weigh each boob. Both were “about two pounds” and “of average firmness,” evidently insufficient to account for real physical damages. Tawny Peaks won. A handy rule of thumb: If you’re trying to go tat for tit, you’d better have bruises to back it up.

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Miles Klee

Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’