In an article with the title ‘“Too good to be real”: The obviously augmented breast in women's narratives of cosmetic surgery’, published in 2013 in the journal Gender & Society, Debra Gimlin writes that ‘in Westernised societies, no other aspect of women's embodiment is as scrutinized or as emblematic of femininity as breasts’ (2013: 918). What this otherwise interesting article appears unaware of are the complex ways in which women's breasts are perceived among groups such as young Swati and Zulu women, in eSwatini and South Africa. This complexity is tied to the idea of Westernisation. It may well be true that women's breasts are the most scrutinised parts of their bodies in Westernised societies. At the same time, the notion of ‘Westernised societies’ referred to in this case is not unpacked. Is the reference to countries in the West? To predominantly white countries? If the intention was to speak about all Westernised societies, which includes not only countries of the West but all those societies which were colonised by Europe and therefore Westernised, then the author has excluded several societies, including those in Africa, in which the discourse on women's embodiment and femininity is denser precisely because of the existence of more than one competing discourse on femininity; where society does borrow the fetishising narrative of the breast from the West but there is also a destabilisation of such fetishisation because the society has other narratives. How is this critique, which simultaneously dismisses a whole part of the world, to be read then? Some of what the author notes may actually apply to how women's bodies are regarded in countries that are excluded from the ‘Westernised societies’ referred to. Some does not apply. And the apparent ignorance on the part of some feminist scholars about how women's bodies and femininity are perceived in Westernised African societies is yet another call to feminist and other critical African female and male scholars to ‘write African femininities and masculinities’ for the world. Even if it is just one among thousands of instances, does this example not indicate the persistent need to understand society, the body and the psyche from African-centred perspectives?