From Breasts to Sex

Decades ago I co-authored a book to heal and empower women. Today I’m writing books to heal our sexuality.

10 min readSep 27, 2023

by I. J. Weinstock, author of the SECRET SEX LIFE books.

As I write books and publish articles to inspire what I believe to be an urgent conversation about the hidden connections between sex, society, and even survival, I’ve been thinking about the book I co-authored with my then-wife, Daphna, more than four decades ago. That book was also about our sexual culture, specifically about women’s experience. And particularly about their breasts!

In hindsight, I can see how that unique experience researching and writing that book sowed the seeds for my recent work about sex.

BREASTS: Women Speak About Their Breasts & Their Lives was published in 1979 by Summit Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. An 8.5 x 11 coffee table-size book, formatted like Our Bodies, Ourselves, it was a profusely illustrated documentary not only about women’s breasts but also their intimate experiences in our “mammary mad” culture.

Back in the mid-’70s I was in my late-20s making avant garde art. But my work became so self-referential, I grew tired of doing “art about art.” It felt increasingly irrelevant. Having hit a dead end, I wanted to do work that impacted people’s lives.

Sensitized by Daphna to the women’s movement and the media’s oppressive objectification of the female body, I planned a new art piece that I hoped would be an antidote to the idealized, air-brushed, unreal images of women’s breasts presented by the media. A graphic designer herself, Daphna was enthusiastic. We’d do it together.

In the book’s Introduction we wrote:

“Breasts was born one day in the spring of International Women’s Year. We wanted to produce a photographic catalog of breasts of women of all ages, without makeup or special lighting effects, un-retouched and without bias toward the preconceived cultural ideal of ‘beautiful breasts.’ Our intention was simply to compile a book with pictures of hundreds of women’s breasts in all their variety of shape and size, arranged in chronological order from puberty to old age. The photographs would thus create a life cycle through which one could witness, perhaps for the first time, the growth and change of breasts throughout women’s lives.”

But something unexpected happened. During our initial photo sessions, the women surprised us by talking about themselves and their breasts at length and in depth. As one woman said, “I can’t talk about my breasts without talking about being a woman.”

Realizing that their testimonies were as important as the images of their breasts, we decided we’d interviewed them, too. Ultimately, we interviewed and photographed more than 300 women from age 8 to 80.

“The Break of Day” Paul Delvaux, 1937, from BREASTS: Women Speak About Their Breasts and Their Lives

For me, as a man, these intimate interviews were revelatory, akin to doing a PhD in our culture’s breast fetish or “mammary madness” and how it impacted women’s lives.

Inspired, I educated myself about the women’s movement. I devoured important feminist critiques to understand where our book fit into the larger awakening and consciousness-raising that was going on. I steeped myself in anthropology, archeology, and alternative history or “herstory.” I learned about ancient goddess-worshipping religions. I became informed about breast cancer, mastectomy, and even breastfeeding.

I read that the ancient Minoan culture on the island of Crete had carved into one of its goddess temples the inscription, “I have breasts, therefore I am!” Since this declaration expressed what the women were saying in their interviews, we used it for the title of our introductory essay.

Artemis/Diana of Ephesus (Artemis Polimastos / Diana Multimmamia)

We had great hopes for the book, as did the hundreds of women who participated. As one of them said, “I hope this book gives us back our breasts in a way…kind of helps us reclaim them.”

Though our book was controversial, the media’s response was positive. The Washington Post hailed it as “an important contribution.” The Chicago Tribune devoted 2 full pages to our book in its Sunday edition.

The Chicago Tribune’s 2-page feature coverage in its Sunday edition (January 6, 1980)

Besides being featured in US magazine, the Village Voice, and other media, BREASTS was the subject of an entire Phil Donahue show (the Oprah of its time). With Donahue, we hit the PR jackpot. An appearance on the show was supposed to be worth tens of thousands of books sold. Our episode was so good — the studio audience had consisted entirely of women who’d responded to the Chicago Tribune feature — Donahue re-ran it a few months later.

Phil Donahue featuring BREASTS on his daily TV talk show

Meanwhile, we began receiving letters and postcards every day from frustrated viewers around the country who’d seen the show and couldn’t find our book in stores.

After frantic calls to our editor, we discovered that our book’s fate had been sealed months earlier during the publisher’s bi-annual sales conference when the editorial department pitches their sales reps on the upcoming list of books. At the time, the mostly male sales force didn’t understand how much women had to say about their breasts or who would be interested. They didn’t get it! So they didn’t waste their precious time (and potential commissions) trying to sell a book they thought no one would be interested in.

With so few advance orders, the publisher limited the print run. When the Donahue show aired, there weren’t nearly enough books to meet the demand, turning what had been a PR success into a commercial failture.

We were heartbroken. We’d worked so hard and been so inspired by women’s enthusiastic responses that we’d planned future books on puberty and mastectomy. Since I’d trained in theater, I‘d even toyed with the idea of a Vagina Monologues-like play (before that play existed) based on our breast interviews. But without the commercial success that comes from books sold, all our hopes and dreams were aborted.

Month after month, the thousands of cards and letters we received from frustrated and disappointed women asking for our book was like “death by a thousand cuts.” The book had been our “baby” and its “miscarriage” eventually tore our marriage apart. The experience was so traumatic for me that for several years afterwards I couldn’t speak about the “Breast Book” without feeling sick to my stomach.

Decades later, I take great pride in having co-authored a groundbreaking and consciousness-raising book that healed and empowered women. Despite the publishing debacle which resulted in the book’s commercial failure and the collateral damage of my subsequent divorce, my experience was a profound privilege, especially for me as a man. And I have no doubt that it sowed the seeds for what ultimately blossomed into my writing the SECRET SEX LIFE books.

One of those seeds was learning about the Goddess-worshipping civilizations of the ancient world and their ”sexual mysteries.” As a young man, living in a male-defined, penis-centric world, I had no idea that there had ever been a female-defined, vagina-and-clitoris-centric world until I worked on the Breast Book.

In the Beginning Goddess Created the Heavens and the Earth

Humanity’s first concept of the Divine was female. Countless female stone figures have been discovered across Europe, the Middle East, and India dating back to 25,000 BC. The archeological evidence confirms that our earliest belief systems worshipped a Goddess as the Supreme Creator.

Our patriarchal civilization has largely ignored the rich history of female-centered religion that humanity celebrated for thousands of years. Though called by different names — Inanna, Ishtar, Isis, to name a few — the Great Goddess was worshipped throughout the ancient world.

If we weren’t so immersed in Western Civilization’s “matrix,” we’d see how obvious and natural it would be to envision the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe as female. Woman bleeds with periodic regularity like the moon, ripens with pregnancy like a fruit, gives birth to new life and then nurtures that life with milk from her breasts. Magical. Miracle. Mother of Us All.

And the mystery at the heart of all these miracles of life is sex.

The Goddess is Worshipped Through Her “Sexual Mysteries”

The difference between ancient Goddess-worshipping civilizations and our own is not just their veneration of a female deity. That source belief generated a fundamentally different civilization as a result of their belief that sex was the Original Blessing.

In Sumer (the biblical Babylon), they celebrated the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on stone tablets pre-dating the Bible. It’s a record of the Goddess sending her High Priestess into the wilderness to sexually initiate a wild man named Enki and thus raise him from bestiality to humanity.

In her groundbreaking book, When God Was a Woman, historian Merlin Stone writes, “The legend of Inanna and Enki listed the sacred sexual customs as another of the great gifts that Inanna brought to civilize the people.” Stone points out that for thousands of years these sexual customs were widespread and accepted as natural among the people of the Near and Middle East. “Women who made love in the temples were known as ‘sacred women’.”

Temple priestesses were healers of the sick and also considered seers with prophetic powers, but their primary function was to teach the Sexual Mysteries of the Original Blessing and dispense the Goddess’s “grace” through sexual worship.

Holy sexual communion with a priestess, a representative of the Great Goddess, was an act of religious devotion. Such mystical sexual rites — based on the Sexual Mysteries which had raised humanity from bestiality — played a central role in the temple worship and sacred rituals of the Goddess.

Learning about the ancient “sexual mysteries” as a young man opened me to many new possibilities. Since the Breast Book, my life has unfolded in surprising ways that confirmed what I’d read about in my late 20s—that sex was more fundamental and consequential than our limited, male-defined, penis-centric world — the legacy of patriarchal distortion and religious oppression—would have us believe.

Over the past decade, I’ve written a fantasy series—THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS—that explores the outer limits of the mystery we call “sex” and attempts to reclaim some of the lost knowledge of the ancient “sexual mysteries.” My recent nonfiction book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny, reveals the secrets we carry between our legs and the hidden connections between sex, society, and survival.

I have no doubt that my experience researching and co-authoring the Breast Book prepared and inspired me to write the SECRET SEX LIFE books.