Proprietary Body Parts

Trying to sneak out the door as a teen-ager in a mini-skirt was harrowing enough

I must have “fall gal” tattooed on my forehead in indelible ink. There have been a number of times I’ve been the patsy that gets pulled on stage at a Las Vegas venue. On one occasion, my duty was to remain engaged in eye-to-eye-contact with a magician to prove he wasn’t sneaking a peek into the audience during a psychic demonstration. When I playfully tapped his broad chest, he pantomimed patting mine.

“Uh uh!” I waggled a finger at him. “These are real!”

My knee-jerk reaction is generally typical of women who have not undergone breast augmentation. I’ve discerned it’s a rare few enhanced women who aren’t eager to share their new bounty: “Look at these! Want to touch them?” With nary a thought to the forces of Mother Nature, these women (barely) bounce around braless and in the skimpiest of t-shirts, tank tops and cocktail dresses. A naturally endowed, slightly asymmetrical woman like myself, however, shops only in the Victoria’s Secret pushup bra section, laments about over-nipple exposure, and wouldn’t be caught dead (floating) topless at the “European beaches” at the more posh hotels on the Strip.

I’m fully aware of the basis of my modesty. I’m a recovering Catholic raised in a conservative family of a mixed six (three boys, three girls). Back in the Day, trying to sneak out the door as a teen-ager in a mini-skirt was harrowing enough. Going braless was never, ever, an option.

Hollywood, on the other hand, has never entertained any notion of modesty. Faux nipples went on the rise (yes, indeed) after a certain Sex and The City episode. Tyra Banks promoted padded panties and implanted silicon buttock enhancers on her show.

Today, even teenage girls are eager to enhance their budding bosoms. If you believe everything you read, breast augmentation in many cases is considered to be a psychological cosmetic tool that “boosts self-esteem.” Supposedly, it has nothing to do with a sexual imaging. (Any more, I imagine, than buying a super-sized ass or one-and-a-half-inch nipples has anything to do with sex.)

I know plenty of men who, while they enjoy a visual feast of synthetic mountainous mammary glands, lament the mystery, variety and suppleness that Mother Nature’s own provides. After all, variety is the spice of life and men are anthropologically predatory sexual creatures.

Nature isn’t perfect and neither are we. Perhaps if people were made more aware of that concept, self-esteem wouldn’t be such an (expensive) issue after all.