Why Did Large Breasted Protagonists Disappear from Media?

Malcolm argues the trend toward flat-chested female leads in movies and TV shows reveals an unhealthy demonization of female sexuality by progressives. He traces how vilifying anything that arouses men led to removing feminine traits, resulting in more masculine or underage-looking female characters. Malcolm and Simone debate if this stems from misogyny, class divides, fashion trends, or producers being out of touch. They agree it likely hurts young women who can't see role models that embrace both femininity and strength.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] they say anything that arouses males is bad.

Malcolm: Female dimorphism arouses males. Let's take that away from them. Right? Let's take away these big breasted characters. Let's take away these voluptuous characters. But we still want lots of strong female leads. . Now what happens if you take those things away?

Malcolm: What do those leads look like? They look like one of two things. They either look like men or they look like underage women because those are the two Groups in our society that have no breasts. Okay Those are the two groups that have this overall masculine archetype. So in moving away from this more gender dimorphic archetype They you know, I think in a way are are promoting Underage sexual attraction or the elevation of underage characters into sexual positions, which, you know, I, I regularly see, especially in Western animated shows [00:01:00] and , the removal and the erasure

Malcolm: of women, or at least women that most young girls can identify with body type wise from positions of power.

Would you like to know /more?

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. This is a request that came from one of our viewers, who is actually your dad. Um,

Simone: VIP. VIP, right?

Malcolm: And I'm glad that he actually takes ambiguity. That's very sweet of him. Like my mom used to.

Simone: Hi, dad. Love

Malcolm: you. He wrote, so here's an inquiry to explore with Basecamp. All the leading ladies in contemporary fiction video storytelling have small breasts.

Malcolm: What is this about? It seems like larger breasts to less intelligent, bimbo type female characters. This is very deliberate and has been an editorial casting choice for decades. You have to go back to Raquel Welch or Sophia Loren to bring back that statuesque big breasted woman of Classic cinema.

Malcolm: [00:02:00] Thank This is really, really fascinating for me because it's definitely something I've seen and, and know that I consume primarily animated content, right? Yeah, and I mean

Simone: animated, like anime, specifically Japanese anime, since I don't know, like 2015 has really seen a spike in what, what is called fan service, which

Malcolm: is really No, I'm not talking about that.

Malcolm: I'm talking about Western animated content as well. Oh, oh, oh! And in Western animated content, there's been a growth in women in leading roles. But also in small breasts kind of intelligence, hold on, actually, before we go larger further, I got to take a gripe that I have with Western animation.

Malcolm: Okay. So there is a lot of people out there who complain that Western animation is like getting too gay. Right. And it does have a lot of gay stuff going on in it. I'll agree with that. And yes, that could be seen as a form of indoctrination. That is not my complaint. My complaint is I want to take the lesbian community aside for a second and be like, okay, I see you guys [00:03:00] are getting a lot of representation now in, in Western animated things, but in most of these arcs, one character starts trying to kill the other character, and then they fall in love.

Malcolm: You know, you can see this in She Ra, the most recent She Ra was the Catra, She Ra love arc. They're definitely trying to kill each other at one point. You can see this in the Owl House, by the way, I, I really enjoyed that show you see this, oh, or metaphors for unconsensual sex are depicted as we're seeing in Steven Universe. What's going on here? Is this normal? Are you guys like trying to kill each other out there?

Malcolm: I this was not a trope in heterosexual animated media, but it appears to be just like a very big trope in lesbian animated media. But okay, back to the main question, which is what, why are they painting small breasts as a sign of competence and strength? What are your thoughts? I want to hear yours first.

Malcolm: I've got my own thoughts on this. Yeah,

Simone: so I, part of me thinks [00:04:00] it's like a sort of post gender world that we're living in, in mainstream media. So like the more androgynous characters look, the better. And maybe it's also that like people just find it easier. To relate, especially kids and child audiences find it easier to relate to when he just looks like a child and children just look more androgynous and therefore have like flat chests or at least smaller chests.

Simone: So I feel like that must be what's going on that androgyny is seen as, as more just of a cultural norm. And we're kind of just in a so confused about gender society that making someone look super gender dimorphic is too stressful to handle. To, to full of baggage. So let's just make people look neutral.

Simone: And I find myself often just really not being sure what gender people are anymore and especially animated media. So especially Western animated media, I don't think that's what's happening. Really? So what's your theory?

Malcolm: So I think it's a confluence of things, which has [00:05:00] led to something that's actually really sexist.

Malcolm: So I'm going to try my hardest not to be straw man. So if I was going to be straw man, what I would say is the left actually have a pathological hatred of women. And so they refuse to associate gender dimorphic traits. with any positive characteristic, whether it's intelligence or anything else. I mean, look at this.

Malcolm: If you look at you know, the, the recent explosion of transitions, it's been an explosion of transitions, which never happened before. We're talking about was in trans people of, of women to men. It used to be predominantly male to female. Now it's predominantly female to male and predominantly young.

Malcolm: Well, I guess you call them men, so it's a, you know, young men who are transitioning. So females transitioning to males. What could be seen as a cause of this? If we as a culture are acting as if femininity and, and, and being womanly is this wholly negative thing and this wholly disgusting thing.

Malcolm: Of course, these young girls hate themselves. You know, of course they feel this way, which is something that [00:06:00] we didn't have in the past. You know, you had women who were excelling at being women and men who were excelling at being men. And we were able to glorify both archetypes where now we need to you know, glorify men excelling at being men and women excelling at being men.

Malcolm: Which of course leads to these women feeling like it's not actually women being celebrated. But, I'm not actually going to take that route. I am going to say that that is a strongman in this case, and I think something else is happening. I think that the left began to associate anything that elevates male sexuality or male sexual expression with the enemy, with, with something that's wrong.

Malcolm: So coming out of the feminist movement to an extent, almost, they began to say. Okay. Like you, you've got to keep in mind, you, you may have sophisticated ideas, but the, the dumbest tropes end up trickling down and permeating the ideology and male sexuality, bad, anything that [00:07:00] arouses males, bad. And this is something we've seen online.

Malcolm: We've done other videos about this. You know, we were recently today I had a call with a conservative following. He's you know, why do you do so much? Like Sexual stuff these must be videos that are losing you followers and it gets you like the least likes and we're like actually there Are most watched videos often right?

Malcolm: And and the reason is is because the left is completely seeded male sexuality as a ground and Starting with the manosphere. The right has been gobbling that up because it's It's very easy ground to take because it's just a natural part of it and many men feel hated because of this. But anyway, so they say anything that arouses males is bad.

Malcolm: Female dimorphism arouses males. Let's take that away from them. Right? Let's take away these big breasted characters. Let's take away these voluptuous characters. And in doing that, they're like, oh, but we still want lots of strong female leads. So let's make these leads look. Now what happens if you take those things away?

Malcolm: What do those leads look like? They look like one of two things. [00:08:00] They either look like men or they look like underage women because those are the two Groups in our society that have no breasts Okay Those are the two groups that have this overall masculine archetype. So in moving away from this more gender dimorphic archetype They you know, I think in a way are are promoting Underage sexual attraction or the elevation of underage characters into sexual positions, which, you know, I, I regularly see, especially in Western animated shows and the, the, the removal and the erasure of woman.

Malcolm: of women, or at least women that most young girls can identify with body type wise from positions of power.

Simone: Yeah. That's, that's really interesting. Because when, when I'm thinking about this like shift in breast size and [00:09:00] media, like it makes me think of a book actually that I read well before I met you called a history of the breast by Marilyn Yalom and Alfred Knopf.

Simone: And it's, it's this really interesting discussion of how. Women's breasts were politicized and made into all sorts of different types of objects. Like they argue that around the Renaissance, the breast went from you know, kind of being a fairly neutral thing or, you know, kind of being seen as elevated, you know, like there were, there were paintings of the Madonna with a breast out.

Simone: to feed the baby Jesus, you know, it was like kind of a sacred object to something that was specific or specifically around to like excite and titillate, titillate, titillate men. And that's, that's when you start seeing more use of wet nurses, for example, because there's this big interest in preserving nice you know, Fulton on tits that, you know, don't get saggy after a lot of use or whatever.

Simone: And it's, it is interesting. So I'm thinking about it from that perspective. I'm like, okay, well, what does this mean about how the breast is being politicized [00:10:00] now and who's the last character I can remember who was like aspirational to both like men and women, I guess, Laura Croft who had actually.

Simone: A decent sized cup size. But, but keep in mind, she was

Malcolm: created a really long time ago and became famous before she was put in. I want to see the recent Lara Croft. Mmm.

Simone: Oh yeah, what does she look like?

Simone: No. What have you done? She's sweaty. We made

Malcolm: her to

Simone: look like a guy. Yeah. She, yeah, she's a guy with a nice long ponytail and the short shorts are gone. The short shorts are gone. Yeah. Is, so is this then about less fan service? Like less, yeah.

Simone: Like less section. Yeah. I guess it could be like, let's stop pandering to men. That's a bad thing. Yeah. So it's, it's misogyny that ends up being misandry. Right. Because now like women.

Malcolm: Yeah. They were trying to hurt men. Yeah. And they took it. It's like they took out their guns in a, in a metallic room and they started shooting at men and the bullets sort of [00:11:00] ricocheting and hitting them.

Malcolm: Well,

Simone: yeah, because now all the busty teenage girls who are deeply uncomfortable in their bodies who do want to see someone who looks like them, they're not going to find anyone. They're not

Malcolm: gonna, no, no, no one in a position. They have no one to turn to. They are told that they are. That they're, this very change that they're going through in one of the hardest parts of their life is a sign of their inadequacy on intelligence and undesirability.

Malcolm: Oh my God. Can you imagine anything worse than that? Can you imagine what these young girls are going through and these people do not care because they are so obsessed with social signaling They don't think about the actual damage they're doing and you bring them statistics like all of these, you know young girls or young men whichever way you want to put it transitioning that it's never happened before and they're like Well, this is good.

Malcolm: There are more people Why would so many more women want to transition than men? I mean, presumably either there was like a, a, a [00:12:00] set number of people who would have transitioned historically. Right. And that that was represented by the historic figures that more men transitioned. Right. Or Okay. So consider this from a progressive ideological perspective, right?

Malcolm: Okay. Most people were transitioning for like a bad reason. Like they didn't really want to transition, but they were doing it for some sort of social gain or something. So historically that would have happened with women transitioning to men because by progressive ideology, men have a better life than women.

Malcolm: Right. So, all things aside in a historical context, you should have seen. If it is true that historically men had it much better than women, and that has been declining over time, okay, historically there were men transitioning to women who weren't actually trans, right? Like, when transness became more accepted what you in fact should have seen is more men transitioning to women, and yet the exact opposite was true.

Malcolm: So [00:13:00] either transness is just a stable thing in both genders. It's just like there should be exactly equal numbers. And then you could say, okay, but then why did it explode here? Or trans to something which, which I believe, which is a biological thing, but that it appears much more commonly in people, more male than female.

Malcolm: And what we're seeing here, Is a society that has well, really dehumanized femininity in an attempt to remove the sort of arousing content from it.

Simone: Yeah. Wow. That's, that's really interesting. I mean, so you don't think, you don't think that it's, it's going after young kids and just trying to show younger, younger looking characters.

Simone: No, that can't be. Not for Laura Croft. Yeah, that's right. This is for adult, adult women as well.

Malcolm: So this was actually something when the She Ra character was done and they were like, Aha! Now we've created a character that men [00:14:00] can't masturbate to because they thought that they were all masturbating.

Malcolm: This was actually things that people were saying. That

Simone: people were saying online.

Malcolm: When they created these characters, and then of course they appear on you know, the, the, the hentai sites and stuff like that. And they're like, Oh no, this character looks underage. And it's you did this. You did.

Simone: Here is a an alternate theory. Okay. So when you look at dress silhouettes throughout history you will see transitions from busty to non busty where, you know, in the the late 1700s, you've got, you know, these very tight corsets and these giant, you know, flaring hips and these, you know, boobs sticking out of these you know, corsets and whatnot in many cases.

Simone: And then you're ending up with the, the like straight column of an empire dress, you know, just like very, you know, straight silhouette. They're like literally styled like a Roman column column. And I mean, certainly sometimes there were little bits of cleavage showing up, but definitely it was like a.

Simone: the flattened chest look. And then you [00:15:00] end up back into like the, the Victorian period where again, you've got these like larger, like waist to hip ratios and, and larger busts. And then you go back down again. So is this maybe not just a normal oscillation of body shape again? Because we're going away from, you know, women.

Simone: Are not getting BBLs, for example, these are Brazilian butt lifts. Like they're also getting smaller butts as well. You know, the Kardashians are reducing their, their butt size. So maybe that's what's going on. That we're if I think about what the fashion YouTubers that I like to watch are saying we're moving away from really curvy looks and moving toward what's called heroin chic, where you just look more like a stick heroin chic.

Simone: So yeah, as in like you're addicted to heroin and you don't eat food

Malcolm: anymore. it as being more like a heroine in modern co

Simone: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm talking drug addiction. I'm talking, you look unhealthily skin, skinny. That's not what we're moving towards.

Malcolm: If you look at the women who are being elevated, they do not look unnaturally skinny.

Malcolm: They look muscular. They look like someone who has a lot of [00:16:00] testosterone in their system.

Simone: And that's not, that's not current style. Yeah. So I guess I can't argue that we're, we're just tracking. female silhouettes, clothing and style trends, because they're not actually tracking female silhouettes and style trends.

Simone: In fact, what we have now in fashion is really a lot more plus sized fashion. And we have then a lot of you know, more, more heroin chic, like we're moving away from big butts. And

Malcolm: I'd say I haven't seen heroin chic in terms of media is representing,

Simone: what you're saying here is that we've got like muscular It's just normal sized women.

Simone: Yeah. And that's not, that's not a thing anywhere. I mean, there are some like fitness, fitness influencers. Well, there's

Malcolm: only two things. And I point that again and again, that lead to this body type. It is being underage. Or being a man. This, this, this almost no waist to hip ratio this very small breasts.

Malcolm: No, this muscular frame that is either you are an underage woman. Do you look like that? You know? So, okay. So outside of that, here's another hypothesis. [00:17:00] This is a sign of increasing class divide in our society.

Simone: I was wondering if you were going to go there. Yeah. Talk about what you found in your

Malcolm: research.

Malcolm: When we did our big sex survey, the thing that really shocked us was the thing that was most determinant of a male's sexuality. And also a female sexuality, but more important here is a male sexuality. Actually, female sexuality might be just as important here. But that the wealthier and more powerful and individual felt the more.

Malcolm: So I, I always say that was, was attraction to women. You're sort of pulled between two extremes. You are either optimizing for absolutely assuring that there are women. So you're optimizing for gender dimorphism, large butt, large breasts, everything like that. Or you're optimizing for fertility window, which means you're optimizing for a younger woman small breasts you know, small waist to hip ratio and stuff like that.

Malcolm: So, the wealthier a man was, the more he seemed to optimize for fertility window in our study to the extent that there wasn't a single guy in the wealthiest category of our study. [00:18:00] Who preferred anything other than the smallest category of breasts. And that's really interesting. .

Simone: And

Malcolm: it was the thing, like when you look at the porous men in our study, just to get an idea of how aberrant this was, it was something like. 65% to 70% of preferred above average breast size. So this, this did really track and this could be a persistent thing throughout history, something that potentially even evolutionary pressures were targeting in monogamous societies or mostly monogamous societies.

Malcolm: So, the, the perception of wealth led me to be like, okay, well, I need to choose the, the youngest acceptable potential wife which will increase the number of children I can have, and I don't really need to worry about, is she definitely a woman, because... You know, those older evolutionary pressures aren't at play.

Malcolm: So that, that could be, we can explain in another video how the evolutionary pressures worked around this, but, but, but seeing as this holds true, what it could be is that historically in like an animation company or in something like this and we actually saw the same trend was women, women, when they had more wealth and [00:19:00] power actually found other women more attractive and preferred those women to look less gender dimorphic.

Malcolm: It very odd. And women also felt more dominant, men also felt more dominant as they, they got more wealth in power. The trope of the wealthy man who wants to be dominated or goes to a dominatrix is not a born out by evidence. And, and also we know people in these roles and they're like, that's not the thing.

Malcolm: You, you might get a government bureaucrat who's in a high role, but no, you won't get like a c e O or something. I mean, not that these people never exist. It's just incredibly rude. Anyway, so, we, we end up in this situation where there's these animation companies and stuff like that, and it used to be somebody would be like, oh, I'm going to draw this character as a sexual interest or as a as a heroine, and people would be like, Oh, dude, that's really creepy.

Malcolm: Don't do that. That looks like a little kid or a man. And today there's nobody in these companies to do this because you know, the, the majority of the people and sort of positions of power was in these companies [00:20:00] have moved into this extreme high wealth position. And they're like, Oh yeah. I like that.

Simone: I thought you were going to say that maybe like our society has gone more toward post scarcity, which has led more people to just be attracted to more androgynous, young looking people. But you don't think

Malcolm: that's it? No, I don't think that's it. I think, I think it's that the, the, the class that's creating media is more out of touch with mainstream sensibilities than ever before in, in, in recent human

Simone: history.

Simone: Oh, so this is like a Balenciaga photoshoot ad situation. Yeah. Which, that, to, if you missed that whole thing, it was basically like a... A pedobear style BDSM styled photo shoot of Balenciaga products with kids and teddy bears dressing up. We have another video where we go into all this a lot more. Yeah.

Simone: Just, just sort of making sure that context is not missing, but yeah, okay. That's, that's a, let's see, [00:21:00] maybe, I mean, I honestly think a combination of your theories sounds the most compelling to me having now thought it through that this is a combination of misogyny, which is ultimately leading to misandry and producers and, and the high power people making these styling decisions being uniquely out of touch, but also uniquely like high socioeconomically.

Simone: Yeah. No,

Malcolm: no, no, no. Yeah. I think, I think all that is true. And it's, it's really sad because it's hurting a lot of young women. And it's creating a world where young women cannot imagine being both feminine, which, which their biology is driving them to want to be. And successful, you know, where historically you know, you'd look at the, the successful female characters in early media like the early feminist archetypes, they were often, you know, big breasted, voluptuous, like this, this was normal.

Malcolm: It's not that this is a truism that if you were creating a successful woman, she needs to look under age or like a [00:22:00] man, this is a modern thing that has only really begun in the last few years. 15 years or so. And it's, it's really sad. It's really sad. And I I, I really grieve and I hope that you know, there's enough of a conservative sort of counterculture media generation that by the time our daughters get older, you know, the daughter you're pregnant was now and the daughter that exists that they have archetypes that they can look up to that display both femininity and power and that they can understand how those things can work together.

Malcolm: And this is, this is one of those things where I think you know, another angle to take here, which is one of the things I often talk about, which is the progressives, while they stall you know, diversity, they, they say, Oh, diversity is the most. The best and greatest thing ever. They also say, oh well, there's no real differences between any groups.

Malcolm: No differences between groups, no differences between cultures, no differences between genders, right? And, and that's, I think, also a part of this, right? They are genuinely trying to [00:23:00] portray through media and animation That genders are not different because they need to believe it's the dumbest ideology in the world.

Malcolm: I, I, you know, we have another video on, on, on how much progressives hate diversity, but it's insane. It's insane that you would take this perspective that there are no differences because if diversity is. Strength, it is strength because we are different conservatives who like are not actual conservatives.

Malcolm: They just sort of buy into this I don't know, masculine or aesthetic ideal of what conservatism is rather than the tradition of conservatism. They don't understand what I mean or what the guy who you know, wrote Richmond North of Richmond, which we, we've done a video on, I don't know if he'll have gone live by this.

Malcolm: He was like, diversity is the greatest strength of this country. They don't, they don't get what, what the real conservative base, people like us mean when we say this, right? And I, and I, what I would say is if you want to get what that means, look at a husband and wife. Okay, who are [00:24:00] working together.

Malcolm: You've got the Andrew Tate model, where the wife is what, like a house slave and he's sleeping with like a hundred other people? That is, to me, a form of weakness. That is not a one two punch. That is not a, a shield hero and shovel knight situation. The, the strengths of Of the husband and wife is that we are different and that we can fulfill different roles and through fulfilling those different roles, we can create a strength that if I was married to another guy who took on a masculine role, or she was married to another woman who took on a feminine role, or I was married to a woman who took on a masculine role, or you were married to a man who took on a feminine role, we could not achieve.

Malcolm: We could not achieve. Specialization is useful. Okay. It allows you to outcompete the people who deny the possibility of specialization. [00:25:00] And so when you say diversity is not a strength. I ask you to look at your own families, look at the husband wife dynamic, you can see as clear as day, at least if you're not one of those people who, who denies that men and women are different that that is the strings, or who thinks that, that one gender is just like a parasite on the other gender, and, and if you're one of those people, well, nice knowing you, but you probably won't get married, you won't have kids, and people like you won't think in that way in the future, and I won't say that men and women haven't become more toxic, you know, we've done videos on this due to the, the ways that their parents teach them, but these toxic men and women, they're not having kids.

Malcolm: They're not. They may have a few kids, one kid, maybe, maybe two kids on occasion, but majority, they're not finding partners. They're not having kids. And, and, and at least their kids won't have kids and they'll disappear. Because you know, the, these parasitic mindsets don't replicate.

Simone: Yep, man. It's a lot going on with [00:26:00] boobies.

Malcolm: So yeah, a lot going on with the boobies. It's a

Simone: lot to buy. Why? Well,

Malcolm: I appreciate that you have the perfect body from my perspective. Well, thank you. I am so blessed every day to be able to see you. see this paragon of human perfection.

Simone: Well, I'm not the lucky one. You get more attractive with age. It's insane.

Simone: And you were like, they put me in my type when I first met you. So I'm the lucky one here. I'm

Malcolm: going to enjoy it. No, no. I think you're delusional because I am a very.

Simone: You know, you know that you're beautiful. Come on. Every time you walk by a mirror, you're like, wow. Okay.

Malcolm: I am not a Bane person, but I do get

Simone: very distracted by You know, you got to enjoy what you have though.

Simone: And I really like I, I cannot emphasize this enough. If you've got it, you've got to enjoy it. What a waste. You know, don't waste. What a waste. All

Malcolm: of these people who were just born lucky and don't spend time

Simone: or a waste of time feeling [00:27:00] self conscious and hating themselves and wanting to be better.

Simone: Can you not just enjoy? What you have.

Malcolm: What you have. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many people out there who are like, I don't know, they invest so much time in themselves and here's me like, Ooh, I'm here.

Simone: Yeah. It's great. No, that you, you are, you're both in looks and in behavior, the epitome of what I want in a human.

Simone: Thank you for existing. I love this conversation. I feel

Malcolm: the same way and I feel the same way about our kids. Isn't that amazing? Our

Simone: kids, they're such

Malcolm: treasures. Yeah. Which reminds me, it's about time for child pickup. So I love you to death, Simone, but we have to be ending this podcast so I can start dinner and you are amazing.

Malcolm: Love

Simone: you, Malcolm

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