Elizabeth Wurtzel:BODY LANGUAGE
In 19th-century France, the art academies considered it less than respectable to have students paint posed nudes. So, lest all the fun be quashed, the budding artistes made paintings of other people painting naked models.
Now Esquire’s at it, too. How else to explain its February issue’s devotion to the topic of women’s breasts? Some odd intellectual distinction has allowed the magazine’s editors to think that having three essays on the meaning of mammary glands alongside their pictures of Pamela Anderson’s big ones somehow separates it from the air-brushed, frosty-lensed naked truth of every issue of Playboy. Instead of breasts themselves, Esquire looks down at its navel and produces meta-breasts, the meaning of breasts, sexy social science with a journalistic edge.
The notion that breasts were a topic of respectable journalistic discussion and not mere masturbatory fascination began with Nora Ephron’s 1972 article in Esquire entitled “A few words about breasts”. It was basically the work of a woman who spent her high school years wearing padded bras and was fed up with flat-chested life. I like this Ephron essay because, though I have always been comfortable in my own body, I still have a complaint for The Creator: he has made me a 36D trapped in the body of a 34B.
I have a chesty, busty personality and I would like boobs to match.
I believe that if I were buxom, I would maximise the mammarian purpose. I would not just have cleavage to flaunt for fancy soires when low-cut is de rigueur; no, not me – I’d go for the plunging neckline every day. I’d carry this flowering fleshiness with gratitude, not like those full-figured gals who contemplate – even go through with – reduction surgery, complaining of backaches and catcalls. I’d make a very good, very honourable 36D and I cannot see why God did not see fit to create me so.
Of course, nowadays I can address this problem through a simple surgical procedure. But there’s the rub: aside from the reality that fake boobs look and feel like fake boobs, there is some inbred moral imperative that tells me plastic surgery is a foul thing. Someday, when I’m scrunched up and wrinkled enough to need a facelift, I will deal with it; but I really don’t need plastic baggies of silicone floating around inside what is basically a perfectly good pair of breasts.
Of course, there is the issue of sagging, which usually comes up post-pregnancy, after the gestation period’s tendency to turn even cardboard-flat women into busty fetal tents. This transition would be lovely – if only one did not have to gain 18kg as part of the deal.
Just the other week, Cindy Crawford announced that she was pregnant, which interested me mainly because she initiated the era of the sexy, sensual supermodel. In 1988, Crawford decided to pose nude in Playboy, in black- and-white arty pictures taken by Herb Ritts. She looked fresh and fleshy, proudly displaying the rewards a girl could reap if she just has a little meat on her.
Ten years after, in the October 1998 issue of Playboy, there are new nudes of Cindy, again by Herb Ritts – and this time she is almost the opposite of sexy. Years of working out have given Crawford a buff and barely-there body with well-etched muscles built for speed instead of comfort. But worst of all, her breasts are surely a size smaller – and they sag.
Now that she’s pregnant, of course, Crawford won’t need to worry so much about that: I’ve been told vanity goes right out the window in the last trimester. But after the birthing process is complete, no doubt she will be faced with the knowledge that even working out does not change one’s breasts from looking like a pair of silver-dollar pancakes.
And like Courtney Love, who admits to having her breasts augmented after pregnancy, perhaps Crawford will consent to go under the surgical knife. For after pregnancy, breast surgery somehow becomes less vain and more acceptable, as if the body wears battle wounds and the reparations are performed by reconstructive, not cosmetic, surgeons.
Once I’m a mom, if I still feel like a 36D trapped in the body of a 34B and I decide to do something about it, my decision will be sanctioned – once you’ve had a kid, you’re getting such an operation for yourself and not just to attract men. (Presumably, if you’re a mom, you’ve already got a man.) Big price to pay for big boobs, though.