Ah, to be a DDD-cup. It’s prescient of the British Association of Aesthetic
Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS, you acronymised correctly) to e-mail me their
leaflet, “71-year-woman thrilled with new breasts”, on the very day that I
am scheduled to meet a woman who says that there are times when she feels
like a “walking pair of tits”.
The way Susan Seligson describes it in her new book, it’s clear that feeling
like a WPOT is not a good thing as far as her self-esteem or attempts to
take up jogging are concerned. But a glance at the BAAPS website tells us
that enormous, or at least conspicuous, boobs are what so many women want.
In America, from where Susan comes and lives and where British women in
search of their next beauty fix tend to take their cues, a boob surgeon to
the stars, Dr Robert Rey, noted on TV recently: “Inner beauty is
disappearing in this country.” Before Dr Rey sets to work on their breasts,
his clients, he says, “feel unfeminine and incomplete”.
The shirt-potatoes under discussion in this article, Susan’s, are triple Ds
and come attached to a curvy, sturdy 52-year-old body. Susan’s boobs are big
but so is her behind. Her waist is tiny. Naked she must look like Robert
Crumb’s ideal woman. For Susan the problem has always been twofold: her
confidence, which is small like her waist, and her brain, which is big like
the rest of her. She used the brain to study macrobiology at university, the
point at which her breasts “really started growing, they just really got
away from me. I would try to smash them into a too small bra and used to
pretend they didn’t exist, as if they were somebody else’s boobs. I didn’t
enjoy them.”
The problem was that the brain and the boobs weren’t meshing. “That’s the
confusing thing about being a woman,” she says. “You want to be attractive
but you don’t want to be physically attractive at the expense of your brain.”
Now that even pensioners are upgrading their cup sizes to Cs or Ds, one would
have thought that Seligson’s knockers are envied. But there’s an ambivalence
there. And that’s because unlike the 71-year-old’s new set — yearned for by
their owner ever since her old ones were described by her mother as “cow’s
udders” (how long ago? did she really save up for half a century?) — Susan’s
are natural.
And Susan’s look natural too. When at one point she pulls up her shirt to
flash her new bra — a red lace Rigby & Peller number, the British
brand worn as a courtesy to me who has flown to meet Susan in Cape Cod all
the way from The Times “of London”, it suddenly becomes clear that
Susan and, say, the late Anna Nicole Smith, who also packed a triple D
according to an internet link called the Official Celebrity Bra Size List,
have nothing in common. In the same way that, except for the fact there are
two of them, two cushions have nothing in common with a couple of cannon
balls.
When she pulls the fitted black top back down into a pair of jeans Seligson
tells me that her wardrobe is adventurous today compared to what she used to
wear well into her forties, which was more or less a tent. “When I was
younger I liked nothing about my body. I didn’t enjoy my breasts. I’d watch
the boyfriends marvel over them and it was as if they weren’t really
attached. I was non-participatory. Also I thought I was fat. My ideal body
was the skinny kind where you can wear jeans low on the hip with the bones
sticking out. When you get to my age and you see your friends start to fall
apart you think, ‘Oh my God, that I spent any time . . .’ ” she drifts off,
concluding a moment later: “Wanting to be beautiful, it takes such a toll .
. .”
Before meeting Susan I typed the word “breasts” into Google. What I got were
a lot of sites about breast cancer and a lot of porn and men’s magazine
suveys. In between were either pap shots of celebrities topless on holiday
or celebrities, tops on, campaigning against breast cancer. The point is,
most of the boobs were fake. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a
trend in breast augmentation surgery, but the fake boobs I was being
bombarded with on March 1, 2007, looked almost virile — not just the nipple
but the whole half-orb appears to be permanently erect. It began to make
even more sense that most plastic surgeons are men.
Without an occasional trip to the female changing rooms of your local pool,
you might forget what real boobs look like, even if you are a woman and own
a mirror. As a rule of thumb, I now know that the bigger the real boobs are,
the less they resemble the fake versions. Frankly, it was a shock when Susan
pulled up her shirt. Here were a pair of breasts which didn’t look as if
they were about to head-butt me. I mentally compared them with Anna Nicole
Smith’s rack, reminiscent somehow of an armoured truck, and tried to find
the appropriate slang terminology to contrast the two sets. Susan’s were
gazongas; loaves of love, amortisseurs , Good-years maybe, dairy
pillows had she been breast-feeding.
By contrast, Anna Nicole’s were unquestionably howitzers. No other word would
do. Compared to Susan’s, Anna Nicole’s jutting breasts were really quite
masculine. Susan’s boobs — how to describe them? Do you ever catch sight of
an old rotary phone — the alphanumeric chrome dial, the heavy receiver
designed to last a lifetime — and feel nostalgic for another, less
complicated age? Susan’s boobs make you feel like that. They’re very 1950s.
What is a bad day in the world of this particular WPOT? “Often, it is
breast-size-related,” Susan concedes. To give you three examples: the day a
rogue male tweaked Susan’s nipple in the Louvre (the unsolicited
nipple-pinch/breast-grope has happened to Susan ten times and counting); the
day a smart businessman approached her in New York and offered her $10 “to
get a look at them. and I promise I won’t lay a hand on you”; and the day an
avuncular boss took Susan aside to have a discreet word in her ear.
“You do a good job,” he said. “And you’re very fortunate to be a very
well-endowed young woman. But I’m going to have to ask you to wear loose
blouses when you come to work here. My salesmen are having trouble
concentrating.” Whose fault was it that they couldn’t concentrate? There are
still women out there campaigning for the right to go topless all day long
because, they argue, breasts are not sexual organs. If men saw more of them
all day long, breasts would be as sexually arousing as noses or elbows.
Susan disagrees. “I think a lot of it is really primal and unavoidable. It’s
hard-wired. You feel as if it’s your fault, that there is something obscene
about your body. I always felt like that in a bathing suit.” Married for
over 20 years to a cartoonist, illustrator and sculptor, Seligson says she
now feels less self-conscious about her body.
She has established herself as a journalist and has written a well-received
travelogue. She even wears a little eye make-up. But up until a couple of
years ago there were still unanswered questions in her life such as, “How
many situations might have been different had I chosen to wear a different
shirt that day?” So she decided to write a second book.
What starts as a memoir soon becomes an exploration of the world of
predominantly enormous breasts. Susan travels to Los Angeles to interview
the former editor of a magazine called Busty Beauties ; she talks to
women who have had their natural breasts reduced and some of the
surprisingly high number of women (4,000 in the US) who have had their
implants removed.
She attends a sex fair in Las Vegas where she attempts to track down Maxi
Mounds who is in Guinness World Records for her augmented breasts,
the world’s largest. “[She is] a six-foot, hazel-eyed blonde with a
twenty-inch waist and a bust size of 156MMM . . . just how big are Maxi’s
boobs? Each weighs 20 pounds.” Maxi’s breasts are growing, Seligson tells
us, because her surgeon used polypropylene string instead of saline implants
to make them feel more realistic.
Ditto the career-stripper Lisa Lipps, whose aesthetic goals are recorded for
posterity in Chapter 7 of Seligson’s book: “I was a good DD; I still had
room to go and the elasticity of my skin was just great. I saw all these
huge beautiful busts, and all I could think of was, ‘I don’t want these
boobs for the industry. I want them for me.’ I worked out, I was hard as a
rock, and I would be this live, walking cartoon character.” An agent tells
Susan about a girl who went to Mexico to try to get a breast implanted on
her back. Back breasts are the future for novelty strippers, he thinks. Most
strippers love their big boobs, but Susan also talks to other women who
complain that now they have had implants men assume that they’re dumb. Not
that she’s surprised; she’s been there, after all.
She’s halfway through the story in which an Ivy League professor interrupts
her during an interview for a science article to tell her that on account of
her breasts “I assumed that you were stupid”, when it starts occurring to me
how significantly different my life would have been had I had big ones. Men
grow up thinking about this all the time, the comparative size of their
penises, but do small-breasted women really know what they’re missing? The
male facial expression that Susan calls the “Big Tit Alert” — have you ever
witnessed it? T-shirts which read: “My face is up here, pal” — have you out
of frustration with men ever had occasion to wear one? You’ve done yoga,
right? But have you ever been partially suffocated by your own breasts
during a shoulder stand?
It occurs to me further that small-to-medium-breasted women also miss out on
so many surreal large-breast-related experiences. Here’s one of Susan’s: “I
encountered a lone fisherman. We exchanged greetings and small talk about
the weather. A while later, when I returned to my car, the fisherman was
gone but I saw, written in the veil of dirt on the rear windshield, the
words NICE TITS.”
Back at my hotel that evening I have another look at what the 71-year-old
pensioner has to say about breasts. A good cosmetic surgeon, she is quoted
as saying, can help “change something that has affected their [women’s]
confidence”, that “something” being the five signs of ageing, presumably,
otherwise known as the inexorable slide towards death. The pensioner says
that before she had the work done she never appeared naked in front of her
husband.
I read a line in Susan’s book. Dr Rey is saying: “I do a procedure and they
[the clients] just blossom.” Big fake breasts are supposed to give you
confidence. So how come growing your own big real ones takes it away?
“Having big breasts definitely made me less confident,” Susan tells me over
coffee the next day. “The confusing fact was that here was a body that was
really responded to, but I was convinced I was unattractive.”
She’s reconciled with her body now, although still bewildered when “I run out
for a quart of milk in what I slept in last night feeling at my absolute
least attractive and the guy behind me in the grocery store is like, ‘hey
baby’ — how men are oblivious to the fact that nothing about my body
language is receptive.”
I’ll finish on the most interesting chapter in Seligson’s book. It’s called
I’m Doing It For Me and Seligson is talking boobs with Robert Goldwyn, a
professor emeritus at Harvard and the long-standing editor of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgery , the journal of the American Society of Plastic
Surgeons. Earlier on in the chapter we’ve been told that studies have
indicated that bigger breasts make women appear younger. Why do women get
breast implants? She asks Dr Goldwyn. “To please men,” he says. “I thought
that after women moved up in the world the demand would go down, but it
hasn’t. Towards the end of my practice I felt sorry for these women. They do
it to please others, frankly.” He sounds rather gloomy. Vaguely, I wonder if
there are any statistics as to how many lesbians have had boob jobs.
I read on. A survey of 25,000 men reveals that only 56 per cent are
“satisfied” with their partner’s breasts. It’s not the size they mind. It’s
gravity. Twenty per cent of the men surveyed in the poll considered their
partner’s breasts, “too droopy”. I think of the 71-year-old and her shiny
new boobs. I imagine her husband and hope he is a handsome stud of a man,
half his wife’s age.
Stacked: A 32DDD Reports From the Front, by Susan Seligson, is
published by Bloomsbury USA
