The Bloodletting

        Historically, marketing emphasized the material qualities of a product—its specifications, functions, and practical benefits. Over time, however, advertising evolved toward the production of symbolic value, positioning commodities not merely as useful objects but as vehicles through which consumers might perform identity, autonomy, status, and self-actualization. The emergence of targeted advertising represents a further epistemological shift in the relationship between commerce and subjectivity. Rather than simply responding to preexisting desires, algorithmic advertising increasingly identifies, cultivates, and monetizes latent insecurities, rendering the individual both consumer and product within an ever-expanding digital marketplace of self-optimization. This essay seeks to interrogate the implications of this paradigm while situating the contemporary body as a contested site of neoliberal commodification.

Just kidding. 

I have been getting a lot of ads targeting my breast shape lately, and I'm unsure how "they" even know this information about me.

"They."

Who are they?

Big shrug.

Big money.

The Man.

They know far more about me than I know about them.

I have big ol' floppy tits. As my mother had before me, and her mother before her. And probably all the way back to my ancestors in Germany, hauling kegs of beer around a tavern—or so I imagine them.

Yet the internet knows this about me.

I looked at my photos on Instagram. They couldn't possibly have figured this out from my pictures. I generally point the camera at my face. I have never Googled my breast shape.

Why there are loads of breasts in this world. There are flatty-flats and roundy-rounds and perky-perks and lopsy-sides. A million kinds of tits for a million kinds of women, and they are all pretty. 

Including mine. 

And apparently the internet knows exactly what they look like.

Well, thanks to targeted ads, I have been informed that I have "teardrop boobs."

Until last week, I had never heard of this. But now, thank you, marketing executives, I know that "teardrop boobs" are not only what these—imagine I'm motioning to my chest—are called, but that they are apparently a terrible condition which can and should be addressed.

What I find most troubling about this recent influx of "fix your shit tits" ads is that last month, I took a few minutes each day to rub lotion lovingly onto my chest and, in my head, tell my breasts that they are beautiful and wonderful and that I love them.

Do you think my phone was listening to all that?

Listening to my daily tit affirmations?

Did they think I was like a little kid whispering to myself, "It's okay," because she felt ashamed—and not because I actually like the big ol' floppy flops of my matriarchal lineage?

Because now it is shoveling five kinds of bras, a chest binder, breast reduction surgery, breast lift surgery, a supplement to "drain toxins from the lymph nodes in breast tissue" made from some sort of deep-sea algae, and a dress that lifts the tits.

Oh, free consultation!

Fifteen percent off when you sign up for the newsletter!

Decreased sagging in just two weeks!

Never feel ashamed of your sad, sad teardrop boobs again!

So sad they're even called teardrops.

Aren't you crying yet, girlie?

Not yet, bruh.

The other day, I was in the bath, my floppies just floating and flopping, as they do, in the water. Swaying sweetly with the motion of the warm water. And they weren't teardrops at all. They were round little buoys, bouncing and playing like dolphins in the ocean. It was delightful. Press them down and they'd bob back up to the surface.

Hello! 

Hello!

Ahoy, matey!

Then I dried myself off and saw droplets of blood all over the tile floor. Then streaks of blood on my feet and calves. I leaned down to clean it up, and there was blood smeared all over my left breast—the slightly smaller one. I tried to clean it up and find the source, but as I did, it only seemed to get worse.

Finally, I found the tiny, minuscule nick on my thigh, just above my knee, from shaving.

How so much poured out of my body through such a small hole, I don't know.

But I dabbed a little toilet paper on it.

Stopped it up.

And as I cleaned the mess, I thought about how much of my DNA—those same little nucleotides that made my tits, and my mother's, and her mother's before her—was now still on the floor. 

Just traces, of course. 

Like a crime scene after the cleanup.

Just enough left behind to tell someone exactly who had been there.

Enough to break the whole case wide open.

Funny, isn't it?

How a detective can reconstruct a life from a drop of blood, while an algorithm seems determined to reconstruct an insecurity from a body.

I'm sure this week I'll get a billion ads for safety razors and creams and lotions and products to prevent nicks and get a closer, smoother shave. Maybe wax. Maybe Nair. Maybe some other product to address the terrible condition of growing hair like the ape I am instead of the mannequin I could become with enough money and enough time.

And you know what?

It didn't need fixing.

It never needed fixing.