It’s no secret that 2020 has been the year of big naturals, and while this isn’t the first time in history that large breasts have been celebrated, what is new is that you can now have big naturals without having, well, any tits at all. “Big naturals are not about corporeal volume,” @killdads tweeted recently. “They’re about spiritual, metaphysical presence. A vibe, if you will. A-cups can be big naturals. Are you spreading joy? Are you feeling? Are you walking the earth with generosity? That’s big naturals, baby. Go out there and love.”
big naturals are not about corporeal volume. they’re about spiritual, metaphysical presence. a vibe if you will. A cups can be big naturals. are you spreading joy? are you feeling? are you walking the earth with generosity? that’s big naturals baby. go out there and love
— sung (@killdads) June 16, 2020
My colleague Magdalene Taylor confirms the same, writing that big naturals are “like the concept of ‘dad dick’ — you imagine it to be much bigger than it actually is.” Besides, “the actual size or realness of the boobs is beside the point,” she continues. “Really, it’s just about leaning in to the visual splendor and symbolic power of breasts.” Search “big tit energy” on Twitter, and you’ll find even more of this: users congratulating each other for having it regardless of their chest size, and declaring that everyone from Harry Styles to flat-chested video game characters exude it, too.
big tit energy from mr harry styles
— emily 😉 (@SANFRANCISCOEM) November 13, 2020
Yuria's relatively flat-chested but she has Big Tit energy so /shrug
— Hyena, An Animal in Your Care (House Montilyet) (@amongtheavvar) November 19, 2020
But if Big Tit Energy isn’t about actually having big tits, and if big naturals are more of a vibe, what on earth does it mean to have these things? “When I think of big naturals, I think of being cared for and safe,” Taylor clarifies. “It’s not about breastfeeding per se, though there is surely some psychoanalytic connection to be made. Instead, I think mostly of my friends’ mothers while growing up, the ones who made us dinosaur chicken nuggets well into our teen years, or let us drink from their boxed white zinfandel on our winter breaks home from college freshman year. These women all had massive jugs, and they made me feel loved.”
Again, @killdad’s definition is even more chaotic: If you’re spreading joy, walking the earth with generosity or feeling seemingly anything at all, that all comes under the rubric of big naturals. For them, big naturals isn’t just about the qualities we usually associate with big breasts, like maternal warmth and care — it’s an elusive, Chaotic Good quality, impossible to pin down but universally desirable.
So, how did we get here?
Big Tit Energy is an obvious riff on Big Dick Energy, the buzz phrase from 2018 coined by @imbobswaget on Twitter. The phrase was so astronomically popular that it ended up in an Ariana Grande video and on the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year shortlist, so it’s no wonder the phrase morphed to include other body parts. But Big Dick Energy works because a person’s dick size is generally up for speculation, given that people don’t usually carry their dicks out in the open. You have to make an assessment based on personality, and there’s endless room for debate, which is half the fun.
we’re talking about how anthony bourdain had big dick energy which is what he would have wanted
— vampire workday (@imbobswaget) June 9, 2018
Breasts, on the other hand, are right there — you can see whether they’re big or not. How can you really quibble, then, about whether a person has Big Tit Energy?
Well, this is a hopelessly literal way of looking at things, and one that doesn’t mesh with an online environment more concerned with energy, moods, vibes and auras. The vibe is “something too ephemeral to quantify,” my colleague Miles Klee wrote last year, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” The same applies to the “energy” of certain coveted body parts, even when they aren’t physically there. As you don’t need a dick at all to have Big Dick Energy, we’ve come to the same point with big naturals.
This focus on the ephemeral over the physical is surely due in part to how we spend our lives these days, at least if “we” is the terminally online among us who trade in terms like “Big Tit Energy.” We’re shitposting constantly and refreshing our feeds on a minute-to-minute basis, and in a pandemic world, we go outside as rarely as possible. Little wonder, then, that our physical bodies have come to matter less than the sense of them we project online. And when you’ve become untethered in this way from what you actually look like, the possibilities are endless.
But there’s another explanation, too, and it’s that a kind of collective tiredness has set in about obsessing over the perfect body. Perhaps more than any previous generation, young people today are exposed to an endless barrage of images of wildly unattainable, FaceTuned bodies, but unlike previous generations, they’re now hyper-literate in the language of body positivity. This creates a bind: They know the pressure to have a perfect body is capitalist bullshit and they’ve been tasked with loving themselves regardless of what they look like, but they still want to be hot anyway, and why wouldn’t they? The chips are stacked against the ugly online, after all.
One low-effort solution to this problem is to simply act as though you already have the body you want, and agree to indulge others similarly. You might not have the big, natural breasts you want, but you can still have Big Tit Energy — whatever that means to you.
Madeleine Holden
Madeleine Holden is a lawyer and freelance writer based between Berlin and New Zealand. She writes about relationships, sex, gender and whatever the hell else she feels like for MEL.
