Why Breasts on Breastplates? Part the Second
Head, Shoulders, Chests and Those!
Breasts are a wonderful topic, and in my previous article on worldbuilding with female characters, I briefly touched on a subject that is sore among some writers. It also nicely highlights exactly what I was talking about in regard to world and character building. If you have a child-like character, why is he able to go out to the forest, rip up the biggest tree, and then start slaughtering armies? An engaging well-built world will at least make some effort to explain this aberration of physics and rational thought.
Thus, it is with breasts on breastplates. You know, those fantastical fantasy globes fashioned onto farcical armor so that we don’t forget the warrior is also a woman to be wooed, won, or at least lusted over.
Through the lens of our modern culture, it would seem that armorers, working on armor for a woman warrior, should make such an allowance for her breasts. First, because, well, they’re breasts and like all things feminine, they shouldn’t be treated like a man’s. Second, of course, they’re breasts and why not show them off! Express that femininity that is not weakness but strength, vibrant and beautiful!
This misses the mark for several reasons, exactly because we’re a modern culture so far removed from a time and place of armed men and women wore armor because it meant the difference between life and death. I’m not saying it can’t/shouldn’t be done in a fantasy world setting. I’m saying there is a hill to climb to make practical armor of boob-plate because physics, history, layers, and the potential for harm are still part of reality, so they should be part of worldbuilding too.
Ultimately, It’s All Physics
First, let’s look at the breastplate. I won’t take you through a whole history lesson of development and different versions (partly because I only know a fraction of the information and can’t be bothered to track down the rest). Suffice to say even ancient homo sapiens understood that getting sharp sticks or pieces of metal stuck in your vitals was bad. Downright detrimental. Unhealthy even.
To compensate for the lack of natural armor, humans started covering up their favorite soft, fleshy bits with cloth, leather, wood, and eventually metal. For warriors this culminated in all kinds of various and interesting armor pieces with various and interesting names, including our subject, the breastplate. We know that any forged metal is going to be — generally — better than going around naked. Physics tells us that the best designs of a breastplate are convex, meaning they bulge outward like Santa’s belly. In fact, Maximillian armor actually looks very much like it was meant for Santa to wear — a slim, deadly Santa. This convex shape provides the strongest armor, distributing the force of any blow away from the center, and the very important bits necessary for breathing, and resulting in more glancing blows.
So, the shape itself is important from the standpoint of physics, whether you’re being hit with a sword, a shield, a spear, a hammer, etc. The whole point is to let the armor take the damage, and keep the wearer relatively unharmed and able to keep on fighting. Thus, there are no examples of functional armor that rejected the shearing and distribution of force in favor of a form fitting female version of the breastplate. Women wore armor, and they wore essentially the same armor men did, without bespoke chest bulbs.
It’s Layers All the Way Down
But a woman’s chest is fundamentally different, in some cases vastly, from a man’s! Shouldn’t we make allowances?
I have one word for you: chaffing.
This is true for men and women, and so it should be understood that plate armor was never worn by itself — at least not if you wanted to keep the skin on your bones. Most armor wasn’t custom tailored, but instead made in a kind of one-size-fits-all version which was always larger than your average man-at-arms. Even armor that was custom would be bigger than the owner in order to accommodate the various layers that had to be worn and still allow for mobility. It was also made out of metal. Metal chaffs. Like a lot. And not in a good way. Plus, you can’t put solid metal everywhere. There have to be hinges and gaps to allow for movement.
To compensate for the chaffing and mobility, layers of clothing would be worn. Layers, being multiple. You started with undergarments, then some work clothing on top of that. But we’re just getting warmed up! Over your battle clothes, you usually add some more layers, including a leather jacket and/or padded gambeson (rich, custom, personalized armor would have already taken these layers into account). Once the padding is in place, we add a shirt of mail or hauberk to try to armor up those gaps. Only then do we strap on the very important breastplate over everything else. Unless the lady in question was extremely busty, all chests are essentially rendered fairly equal by this point. Everyone looks like they’re wearing a ski jacket. Even an extremely busty warrior-woman, wearing a proper gambeson, would only be slightly more “chesty” than her male counterparts (provided her male counterparts aren’t Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Pumping Iron years). Any compensation needed in armor, especially breast cups, are rendered completely useless.
The extra effort of forging out a breastplate with breasts was both cost-prohibitive and unnecessary. The one-size-fits-all standard complete with layers of padding and protection, would account for all this. While we only have a few examples of women in contemporary armor, their breastplates are not much different than a man’s, and completely lacking in ice cream scoops with a cherry on top.
Ouchy-Ouch
The other thought toward breast compensation (as you can read from Emmet Asher-Perrin’s article here or I_clauswitz’s article here) is that breasts on a breast plate could negate the entire point of the armor. We’re back to the physics of armor again, but this time going to the other extreme. Instead of shearing off the force of a weapon to either side, away from the vital central region, an extra busty set of lovely metal spheres creates a wedge pointed straight at the center of the wearer’s chest. There’s a lovely video from Shad of Shadversity where he points out this likely wasn’t the reason there are no historical examples of functional armor with breasts. As Shad says, we’re still talking about hardened steel over various layers, so any potential threat is likely mitigated. Still, a force that does hit the breastplate dead on can now smash that wedge into the chest, damaging the very area it’s supposed to protect. The wearing of armor is all about the reduction of harm to the wearer, so why take the chance?
So yeah, sure, you can argue until you’re blue in the fact (not a typo) that your world allows for breasts on breastplates to take hits and still be as effective, that it won’t chaff the wearer without the many layers traditionally worn, that history-be-damned in favor of emphasizing sexuality over safety. Realize that’s what you’re doing, and compensate for that in your worldbuilding. Otherwise, taken altogether — physics, history, layers, and the potential for harm — while women warriors should wear armor, it should also make sense. From a modern view, especially that of a heterosexual male perspective, breastplate breasts are quite lovely.
From reality, where the woman wants to survive past round one, there needs to be a better reason.
