Books

We are a nation obsessed with breasts

An author with obvious credentials takes on this infatuation in Stacked, but she fails to explore why we care so much.

By JEN A. MILLER
Published April 1, 2007

Twenty-five years ago, Nora Ephron wrote about the perils of having small breasts in the much anthologized A Few Words About Breasts: "I suppose that for most girls, breasts, brassieres, that entire thing has more trauma, more to do with the coming of adolescence, with becoming a woman, than anything else."

Susan Seligson takes a different look at breasts in Stacked: A 32DDD Reports From the Front. Seligson is one of the women Ephron loved to hate: As the title suggests, she has large breasts. By the time she wrote Stacked, she had already had back surgery and been subject to hundreds of catcalls. She even had her nipple tweaked at the Louvre.

Seligson uses her experiences with a (naturally) large chest as her point of entry into a book about boobs of all kinds - big and small, real and fake - and the implications of our obsession with them. Even though half the population has them, we're obsessed with them, whether you're the guy staring at the cover of Maxim or the teenage girl willing hers to grow.

Unfortunately, the balance between Seligson's research and personal commentary is uneven, which makes Stacked a much less interesting book than it could have been. Even parts with laugh-out-loud humor, such as one about how many terms we have for breasts, aren't enough to save the book (" 'Boobs' is the most innocuous and the only one that has gained wide-spread audience. That's because it's the term women are most likely to use in reference to their own breasts . . . but I strongly doubt that anyone has ever shared concerns with a girlfriend about discomfort in her hoots.").

Even though fake breasts play an obvious role in breast obsession, Seligson only interviews one person about to undergo breast augmentation and spends much more time describing the surgeon, Dr. Robert Rey, also known as Dr. 90210 from the E! reality show about his plastic surgery practice. What about the teenagers who get boob jobs for high school graduation? And the parents who pay for them? What about the women whose implants rupture? Or any of the 60,000 women who have their implants removed each year?

Off-target interviews

Even when interviewing that one patient, a 29-year-old mother of three, Seligson fails to investigate why this woman is so severely unhappy with her appearance as to undergo major surgery. It's not as if Seligson isn't capable of digging deep into someone's reasoning for wanting breasts. One of her best interviews is with Brian, now Bonnie, a cross-dressing heterosexual man. Seligson talks with Bonnie and his wife and aptly describes the tension between the two, and the wife's bitter sorrow at her husband getting breast implants.

But these insightful interviews are few and far between, and sometimes Seligson comes across as just lazy. She flies to Las Vegas to track down Maxi Mounds, who is reportedly a size 156MMM. Even though she couldn't find Mounds, she was surrounded by strippers and their fake breasts for days at the Gentlemen's Club Owners Expo and Exotic Dancer Fan Fair. But their conversations were only surface chatter, mostly the dancers complaining about Mounds. Who better to interview about breast obsession?

The strongest parts of Stacked are when Seligson writes either as memoirist or reporter, but not both. Her experience posing topless for Jordan Matter's Uncovered: A Celebration of the Women of New York City series is a well-written and funny account of the emotions that go through one woman's head: "Later I would learn that I had gone through all the predictable, normal phases of being photographed bare-breasted in public: Fear. Denial. Rage. Acceptance." Her honesty in these memoirish chunks is entertaining and funny, and she has a lot to say about how being ogled can make a woman feel. But, mixed with research that isn't particularly deep or insightful, the personal narrative is diluted, leaving Stacked far from the exploratory expose on breast obsession it could have been.

Jen A. Miller writes for Poets & Writers, Psychology Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pages and Paste.

THE BOOK

Stacked: A 32DDD Reports From the Front

By Susan Seligson

Bloomsbury, 240 pages, $23.95

[Last modified March 29, 2007, 13:29:09]