The Envy Economy

The actual difference between small tits and a small dick is that there’s an entire subculture built around appreciating the former and basically nothing built around accepting the latter. Flat-chested women have devoted advocates. Men with small dicks get clinical euphemisms and Reddit threads full of people trying to convince themselves it doesn’t matter. It does matter to them. That asymmetry has always struck me as darkly funny.

My friend Lisa—genuinely one of my favorite people—has carried a years-long war with her own chest. Modest is the word she hates. One night at a bar, somewhere past the third drink, she worked herself up to tears in the bathroom and came back to the table calling them "cripple tits." I didn’t know what to say. I went with another round, which in retrospect was probably the right call.

Somewhere on the internet is a Reddit forum called BreastEnvy, where women who feel exactly how Lisa sometimes feels go to discuss it, and where—in a detail I find both predictable and somehow still surprising—men who are specifically into that anxiety also gather. A community built around shared insecurity, with an audience that finds the insecurity itself erotic. The internet is a place. You can grieve communally and be fetishized for it simultaneously. That’s the deal. At least nobody’s alone with it.