Do Big Breasts Make a Difference?
by Ms. Doe, CHICAGO MAGAZINE
I had 2.4 miles to go on the treadmill when she sauntered down the aisle of the health club. How could she have? I wondered, fixing her with a glare. I had seen this woman many times before, and noticed that we shared the same body type: tall, thin, and completely flat-chested. But now the change beneath her spandex top was impossible to miss. She had been supersized. She had gotten a boob job. And I felt as if I were the last small-breasted woman at the East Bank Club.
Sixteen years earlier, my mother had dragged me into the local intimate apparel shop to be fitted for a training bra. “Oooh, honey, soon you’ll come in here for bras my size!” trilled a saleswoman with pendulous breasts. But as time went on, my bosoms never filled anything more than a 32 A-cup. Apparently, they were untrainable.
While my breasts never did develop, my attitude toward them changed depending on things as arbitrary as clothing styles and seasons, and as earth-shattering as male attention and popularity. They remained a source of unhappiness and anxiety, deeply embedded in my sense of my femininity. Last year, just before I turned 28, I did something about them—I got implants. This is a choice I share with hundreds of thousands of other women, whose numbers are growing. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reports the frequency of breast augmentation jumped 114 percent between 1997 and 2001. Last year about 50,000 fewer implant procedures were performed in the Midwest than in the West. But even Middle America’s women are seeking help more often. “Roughly 65 percent of my daily surgeries are breast implants and rhinoplasties,” says Jay Pensler, one of Chicago’s top aesthetic plastic surgeons. “This is up from 40 percent in the past three years.”
Some of these women are married, with loving husbands, but I suspect that many, like me, are single. And I’ll bet that many of them once shared my disdain for the idea of getting implants. No two case histories are alike, but this is the story of what brought me around. Read more