Read Online Breasts by Florence Williams - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Florence Williams
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together with his hands, then squeezed each one like a club sandwich. I felt like I was awaiting the word of St. Peter. I was secretly hoping one of the world’s foremost experts on flawed breasts would be so vexed by my nice, very normal breasts that he’d tell me he had nothing to offer.
“Well, first off,” he began, “let me say you’d be a great candidate for breast augmentation.” He assessed me some more. “Where you’re lacking a little is some upper fullness here,” he said, referring to the slope above my nipples. “You actually have a decent amount of breast tissue to begin with. We just need to give it a little boost. Silicone would really serve you best. What I would say if we were truly just trying to gain a little upper fullness and enhance its look, we would want to work with implants in a 250 to 275 cc range. This would move you into an average C size.” (Silicone implants from Mentor, for which Ciaravino is a paid consultant, come in a range of about 100 to 800 ccs, or cubic centimeters. Most women in Texas go much bigger than what he was recommending for me. “Big breasts are part of the Texas tradition,” he said. For perspective, some women test sizes by filling sandwich bags with rice: 275 cubic centimeters is the equivalent of 1 1 / 5 cups of rice; 800 cubic centimeters is almost 3 1 / 2 cups of rice.)
Ciaravino then led me to his new $40,000 Vectra imagingmachine, which would simulate how the implants would look in my breasts. He ducked out, and I, still half-naked, stood motionless in front of the small-saguaro-sized device, with its white plastic trunk and arms, while it captured me in 3-D. Katye clicked a mouse on a computer and then told me I could get dressed behind a small curtain. Soon an image of my torso popped up on her monitor, and together we watched while she punched in some magic codes. Two images appeared on the monitor, me with my real B-plus breasts and then me with big breasts getting bigger and bigger.
“Oh my God,” I said to the screen. I was va-va-voom. But not in a good way. My breasts were big and pendulous and pointing outward. My nipples had the strabismic look of a walleye.
Dr. C popped back into the room and looked at the monitor.
“Oh, that’s huge,” he said.
“I kind of have a sideways thing going on,” I said.
“Yeah, that doesn’t look too good. I would back it up to about half of that,” he told Katye at the controls. “Keep going, keep going.” My cyber boobs were shrinking before my eyes. “Sometimes the machine distorts things,” he explained. “Your nipples won’t really go out like that.” Katye next brought up the profile images, which looked much better. Instead of my breasts having the regrettable ski slope above the nipple (something I never noticed before), now they had the curves of an upside-down cereal bowl.
“You’ll do wonderful,” said Dr. C.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE AMERICA’S CONSUMER CULTURE TO convince us that what we have isn’t quite good enough. We didn’t used to be this way. Americans have traditionally been toughskinned and self-reliant. At the same time, of course, we’ve been great reinventors of the self. Hollywood may celebrate the heroes of the former, but its images reinforce the latter. In breasts, these two strains of character found a new tension by the middle of the last century. Somewhere along the line, lured by Jean Harlow and Jayne Mansfield and the technological promise of postwar America, American women tossed out the make-do-with-what-you-have mentality and embraced a burning desire for outsized nose-cones.
Highly engineered bras helped, but only if you had something to put in them. Kleenex was popular, and so were socks. Falsies, made out of wire, sheet metal, papier-mâché, rubber, cork, elk hair, or cotton, became a multimillion-dollar industry. In its 1951 catalog, Sears offered twenty-two different versions. At that time, surgical solutions to a larger bust were dangerous and
“Well, first off,” he began, “let me say you’d be a great candidate for breast augmentation.” He assessed me some more. “Where you’re lacking a little is some upper fullness here,” he said, referring to the slope above my nipples. “You actually have a decent amount of breast tissue to begin with. We just need to give it a little boost. Silicone would really serve you best. What I would say if we were truly just trying to gain a little upper fullness and enhance its look, we would want to work with implants in a 250 to 275 cc range. This would move you into an average C size.” (Silicone implants from Mentor, for which Ciaravino is a paid consultant, come in a range of about 100 to 800 ccs, or cubic centimeters. Most women in Texas go much bigger than what he was recommending for me. “Big breasts are part of the Texas tradition,” he said. For perspective, some women test sizes by filling sandwich bags with rice: 275 cubic centimeters is the equivalent of 1 1 / 5 cups of rice; 800 cubic centimeters is almost 3 1 / 2 cups of rice.)
Ciaravino then led me to his new $40,000 Vectra imagingmachine, which would simulate how the implants would look in my breasts. He ducked out, and I, still half-naked, stood motionless in front of the small-saguaro-sized device, with its white plastic trunk and arms, while it captured me in 3-D. Katye clicked a mouse on a computer and then told me I could get dressed behind a small curtain. Soon an image of my torso popped up on her monitor, and together we watched while she punched in some magic codes. Two images appeared on the monitor, me with my real B-plus breasts and then me with big breasts getting bigger and bigger.
“Oh my God,” I said to the screen. I was va-va-voom. But not in a good way. My breasts were big and pendulous and pointing outward. My nipples had the strabismic look of a walleye.
Dr. C popped back into the room and looked at the monitor.
“Oh, that’s huge,” he said.
“I kind of have a sideways thing going on,” I said.
“Yeah, that doesn’t look too good. I would back it up to about half of that,” he told Katye at the controls. “Keep going, keep going.” My cyber boobs were shrinking before my eyes. “Sometimes the machine distorts things,” he explained. “Your nipples won’t really go out like that.” Katye next brought up the profile images, which looked much better. Instead of my breasts having the regrettable ski slope above the nipple (something I never noticed before), now they had the curves of an upside-down cereal bowl.
“You’ll do wonderful,” said Dr. C.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE AMERICA’S CONSUMER CULTURE TO convince us that what we have isn’t quite good enough. We didn’t used to be this way. Americans have traditionally been toughskinned and self-reliant. At the same time, of course, we’ve been great reinventors of the self. Hollywood may celebrate the heroes of the former, but its images reinforce the latter. In breasts, these two strains of character found a new tension by the middle of the last century. Somewhere along the line, lured by Jean Harlow and Jayne Mansfield and the technological promise of postwar America, American women tossed out the make-do-with-what-you-have mentality and embraced a burning desire for outsized nose-cones.
Highly engineered bras helped, but only if you had something to put in them. Kleenex was popular, and so were socks. Falsies, made out of wire, sheet metal, papier-mâché, rubber, cork, elk hair, or cotton, became a multimillion-dollar industry. In its 1951 catalog, Sears offered twenty-two different versions. At that time, surgical solutions to a larger bust were dangerous and
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