Stacked

Armed with a backpack filled with clean socks and underwear and my Eurail Pass I boarded a cheap charter at SFO bound for Heathrow on my 18th birthday. The plan was to hitchhike around Europe for a month before ending up in Radolfzell, Germany (West Germany at the time) for an intensive German language program, which would have me chattering away in Deutche in no time.

I had no idea then that the giddy freedom I felt would be such a fleeting slice of my generation’s history ─ free to follow my endless curiosity about our world in comradely safety with armies of young explorers at the time, many American. Extensive travel in my youth shaped my world view in countless ways large (police didn’t carry guns) and small.

One example on the small side of that equation involved the female breast. I was ambling along a path in the Black Forest of southwestern Germany when I came upon a group of picnicking Germans. The women were sunning themselves or going about their picnicking duties, hardly an uncommon sight. What was uncommon to me was that they were topless. Coming from an American culture á la Carol Doda, where breasts were king, I was stunned. Nobody stared at those bare-breasted women, no teenaged boys lurked, leering, on the periphery, no husbands jumped up to hastily drape coverings over their wives’ breasts; no one even looked at them. It was just a picnic.

The National Institute of Health estimates that just under 5 percent of American women have surgically enlarged their breasts, mostly for appearance than, for example, after mastectomies. This is an important distinction when it comes to cost, since the 1998 Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act requires that group health insurance plans that pay for mastectomies to also cover breast reconstruction. If for cosmetic reasons, women pay the whole freight – an elastic cost that typically runs between $5,000 and $10,000. The ‘breast augmentation’ outfits around our East Bay community predictably don’t even hint at their price tags on their websites, opting instead for photos of young, breasty patients offering smiling testimonials about how bigger boobs have changed their lives and even delivered that most elusive of human states: happiness.

Though it’s rarely listed among his hundreds of better-known quotes, British author Somerset Maugham wrote that American men are so obsessed with female breasts that he was surprised they didn’t marry cows. This is borne out in the public arena, and in the female consorts chosen by some of America’s richest men.

In Trump’s first term Melania Trump (who always dresses modestly) was quoted as saying that [you had to get] breast enlargements to get top modeling jobs. Given the plethora of skinny models with big boobs, that is probably true. But this breast-forward view has also gone public with non-models like Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend strolling into Trump’s second inauguration in her underwear (so dubbed by a courageous reporter who has probably since been black-listed by Trump), an open-to-the-waist number that somehow withstood the enormous strain of holding up her outsized rack for all the world to see. (I wonder how she gets ‘the girls’ to line up so symmetrically, it must take a professional outfitter with an engineering degree.)

I get that we’re free (at least in this respect) and can do what we like with our bodies. You have the dosh to go under the knife to pump up your breasts? Go for it. But understand that you’re buying into an American narrative of female attractiveness and sexuality, where appearance is all and character is an outdated concept.

I don’t know if I’ll live to see the day when our culture shifts to a more euro-centric cultural model where breasts are not the be-all and end-all of female attractiveness. But what I do know is that I can’t imagine a more bankrupt emotional state than pegging a sense of your own worth to the size and gravitational perkiness of your breasts.