Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

Five Fear of Fake Breasts

Until a man has actually made love to a woman with fake breasts, he can never really know what they are like.

Round, juicy and tempting they may be.

But then so is a bowl of plastic fruit.

For no matter how good they look, the spell is broken the moment they are touched by human hands. The real things somehow manage to be both firm and soft, they feel undeniably human, they move, they are alive.

In comparison, counterfeit breasts feel as though they have been stolen from the morgue. Replicant breasts are so hard. Bogus breasts are so numb, so lifeless, so dead. Once they are outside the two dimensions of celebrity magazines, a pair of phonies are suddenly a million light years away from the objects they seek to imitate.

And real breasts are warm. The fake breasts I have encountered have always seemed cold to me, but that may have been my appalled imagination. Certainly you will get the best out of them if you look but don’t touch.

But then that’s almost the point of fake breasts. They are not there to be fondled, kissed or felt, they are there to be admired, discussed, lusted after and photographed.

The moment they are touched – and I mean in the heat of passion, rather than out of curiosity or in the interests of scientific research – then the spell is broken. And this is true of all fake breasts, no matter how much money has been spent on this act of female self-mutilation.

Some women have reconstruction forced upon them. I watched my wife’s mother die of breast cancer. The battles that women like my wife’s mother have fought are insulted by the pumped-up twiglets on the cover of Heat.

The women who survive breast cancer – and even today, only lung and colon cancer kill more – are faced with hard choices. A lumpectomy – breast-conserving surgery – has to be followed with radiation treatment. A mastectomy – total removal of a breast – can be followed by reconstruction. But that means yet more surgery. These are all devastating choices for any woman.

But the overwhelming majority of women who have breast enhancement do not do it because they have fought cancer. They do it because of vanity. They do it because it has become a fashion option. They do it because they have an IQ somewhat smaller than their bra size.

And the brutal irony is that breast enhancement – boob jobs, in the baby talk that portrays it as akin to a getting a spray-on tan – makes everything from a benign lump to a malignant tumour infinitely harder to detect.

You would think that would be enough to put anyone off. And yet somehow it isn’t.

In a bar at the end of the world, there was a story they told of a man who loved a dancer although the dancer could not love herself.

She was a great dancer, and most nights of the week, if you were in that club at the rough end of a rough street in that rough city, you might see her. And if you saw her dance once, then you would never forget her.

Physically, there was not much of her. She had the natural-born dancer’s lack of waste. This man loved to look at her, and he thought that she was an undeniably beautiful woman. But-like many women who are told they are beautiful by men who have only just met them – she disagreed. The dancer had what a head doctor would call ‘body issues’.

She was small-breasted. That was the heart of her complaint about herself. The man had always liked her exactly as she was, and thought she was perfect – but these small breasts were a big thing for her, an insurmountable barrier between her and true happiness.

She had great legs, a great little bum, a lovely face-but in her mind it all added up to nothing because of her small breasts. She started talking about her breasts more and more – how she would have more confidence if they were bigger, how she would dance better, how she would finally reach a point in her life when she felt good about herself.

She wanted surgery.

Naturally, he told her that he thought she looked great already. And he meant it. But it became clear that what he thought really didn’t come into it.

She wouldn’t be doing it for him.

She would be doing it for herself.

And he thought that made sense – it was her body and she was free to do what she liked with it. And also he was young and dumb – he didn’t realise how the surgery would change everything between them.

So he got the money and gave it to her. He did it because he loved her. Then he went away. And when he came back to her town, he watched her dance and he drank his San Miguel and then he held her hand all the way home.

And – how stupid was this man? – he only realised that he was having sex with a woman with fake breasts after the moment of penetration. He had not noticed them when she was dancing.

But now he noticed them, because he could hardly miss them. They did not feel even remotely real. They felt as in-authentic as alcohol-free lager or sugar-free sweetener. Even faker than that – because they were no substitute for the real thing. They were impostors.

How unnatural those breasts felt in his hands and mouth, how bogus on the tip of his tongue, how hard pressed against his chest – that’s the thing that shocked him most of all, the knock-on-wood hardness of the bloody things.

She had ruined herself. Really, he could not think of it any other way. Her silhouette now had something of the pouter pigeon about it. It broke his heart to see what she had done.

He did not stop loving her.

But they never made love again.

Why aren’t there armies of thinking women protesting about the grotesquely booming trade in bogus breasts? Why don’t women’s magazines stop slavishly printing pictures of pumped-up stars with their pathetic plastic tits sticking out? Is it because to really and truly know how rotten fake breasts are, you have to be a heterosexual man?

Buying off-the-peg breasts is becoming as acceptable as a woman colouring her hair or whitening her teeth. But it is of a totally different order. There is something obscene about seeing healthy young women mutilate themselves by stuffing two plastic bags full of gel into their breasts. Having a ‘boob job’ – society’s coy euphemism that hides the scarring, the risks to long-term health, and most of all the way good breasts get so casually traded for bad – is far closer to female circumcision than it is to any kind of cosmetic surgery.

But they look nice – right, girls?

‘There are so many images of women with amazing fake boobs, I didn’t think mine were good enough,’ said Jodie Marsh, at the grand unveiling of her new, allegedly improved 32GG superboobs. ‘I think society has forgotten what real boobs look like, and women like me end up thinking our boobs aren’t nice because they disappear into our armpits when we lie down.’

And now Jodie’s ‘boobs’ can point at the chandelier until the end of days. And I ask you – is that really better than breasts that can move around of their own free will?

Some of the most written about women in the country-Victoria Beckham, Jordan and Kerry Katona – have given Mother Nature a helping hand in the breast department. No doubt this love of fake breasts among the rich and famous (not to mention ageing and constantly photographed) is directly linked to a record number of teenagers having breast-enlargement surgery.

They don’t know what they are letting themselves in for.

There are plenty of female celebrities with healthy breasts that do not feel like a sailor’s wooden leg – off the top of my head, I think of Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Leona Lewis-but unfortunately no operation exists to artificially inflate an insecure young woman’s self-esteem.

‘My boob job made me feel better,’ says EastEnders actress Lacey Turner.

What she means is that the operation made her feel better about herself. Trust me on this one, Lacey – no boob job ever made a woman feel better.

Don’t do it, girls. Renounce all breast enlargement. Turn your back, and your breasts, on that surgeon’s knife. If not for your man, then for your health. These breast-job babes blow my mind – these are women who would not dream of smoking a cigarette or going to the beach without sun block, yet they willingly undergo surgery that practically guarantees a health hazard in coming years.

Those vain – or insecure, or neurotic, or self-loathing – women willingly risk infection, breast pain, changes in nipple sensitivity, visible wrinkling, complications with breast feeding and asymmetric appearance (i.e. breasts so completely different that they resemble the brothers played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny de Vito in Twins).

And what they never tell you in the celebrity rags is that off-the-shelf breasts can rupture.

You can give it a fancy name like mammoplasty enlargement or augmentation mammoplasty, but in the end it is just a bog standard boob job where a silicone shell is filled with either gel or sterile saline liquid and stuffed inside a woman’s breasts via various types of incision.

Inframammary incisions are inserted under the breast, and make a woman look like she has had some terrible domestic accident. Periareolar incisions go in through the nipple, which leaves less scarring but increases the risk of capsular contracture, when the body’s immune system tries to repel what it sees as a foreign invader.

There are other incisions – the transaxillary goes in through the armpit, the transabdominoplasaty through the stomach and the transumbilical goes in through the navel.

They all hurt like hell.

I have never met a woman who did not find breast enlargement the most painful experience of their life – including childbirth and watching their boyfriends dance at weddings. But this initial pain is likely to be just the start of her problems.

Those silicone shells can break, leak or slip. A woman can be left with her nipples pointing in different directions. Breast sensitivity often goes out the window when a woman goes for the fake boob option. The pain she feels after the operation can endure for years – perhaps forever.

It spoils sex for the man. And for the woman too.

So that’s sex spoilt for everyone then.

But last year in America alone, nearly half a million women had breast-enlargement surgery. I would suggest that not one of them is the woman they were before – imperfect perhaps, but with a natural beauty that no plastic surgeon could ever improve upon.

And speaking purely from the male perspective, sex with a woman wearing replicant breasts is no fun. That’s the vicious punchline – there’s this mirage of perfection, this pert promise of ultimate pleasure, and the vision evaporates the moment you reach out to touch them.

Fake breasts are the cock-tease from hell.

The dancer’s breasts were well done. On an objective level, the man could see that the surgery had been efficiently performed. There was none of the horrific scarring on the underside of the breasts that he had seen elsewhere. And yet they repelled him.

As well done as they were, these fake breasts did not belong on a real woman. They were artificially created monsters from some doctor’s menu of butchery.

In the cold light of day, she looked like a porn fantasy-sporting replicants that were there to attract, to be looked at, leered over, lusted after and remembered. But they were not really there to be touched.

They were not there for any man who might love this woman, or for any baby she might give birth to. It felt like those breasts were there for the rest of the world.

Don’t do it, girls.

Love what God gave you, no matter how much or how Double-AA. Small can be fun. Medium can be lovely. Large can be grand. Those hard, fake things are always awful. Do you really want to present those lifeless objects to the man you love? Do you really want to shove some surgeon’s rock-hard creation in your baby’s face?

Fake breasts desecrate a woman’s body. Fake breasts take the joy of sex and pump it full of lifeless gel. Fake breasts look bad, feel bad and will one day make you sick. And they are so horribly, unforgivably dangerous.

Keep your health, keep your self-respect, keep your man. It should not take a man to tell you – learn to love yourself the way you are.

Keep them real.

Six Humiliation

In my first year at school, my little chums played a wonderful joke on me. ‘I know,’ they giggled. ‘When we get changed for PE, let’s get Parsnip’s grey flannel shorts and hide them behind the toilet.’

And so they did.

And when the rest of my class had changed back into their school uniforms, there was I, searching the locker room in my baggy Man from U.N.C.L.E. underpants.

Hilarious – for them. Humiliating for me. Especially when I entered the classroom in my pants, gulping back the tears and holding a trembling hand in the air. ‘Please, miss,’ I gulped. ‘I can’t find my trousers ….’

How they roared. I remember every excruciating second. The glee on their faces, the choked-up feeling in my throat. And it was my first experience of that brutal, shameful, cheek-burning, eye-stinging dip in self-esteem that makes you wish you had never been born – or been born, but never lost your trousers.

It would be nice to think that we outgrow the world’s ability to humiliate us. It would be comforting to think that when we leave schoolbooks and playgrounds behind, we say good riddance to all that. And then one day – decades after the vicious japes of childhood are past – the terrible truth sinks in.

Someone is always hiding your trousers.

How can a grown man be humiliated? Losing something you were planning on keeping – your wife, your job, your underwear – these are the classics.

In the personal realm, being dumped by a woman you love immediately makes you feel as though you are five years old and some snickering bastard just stashed your short trousers in a secret hiding place. In the professional realm, losing your job is an infallible shortcut to humiliation.

Those two million unemployed will one day forget the sickening practicalities of unemployment – struggling to pay the bills, and confronting a cashpoint machine that has learned to say no. But they will never ever forget the feeling of not being wanted. They will never shake off the shame of being surplus to requirements. Bills get paid and bruises fade. A good woman can be replaced by a better woman. But the sting of humiliation stays with you forever.

Yet we are so ill equipped to deal with it. Humiliation – the ability of the wicked world to steal our trousers – always seems to sneak up on us.

The hard knocks of the working world, the fickle nature of romance, even the subtle betrayals of our body as we age-we see all these coming over the horizon and slowly marching towards us. But humiliation always feels box fresh.

At the end of an American book tour I sat in a radio station in California listening to the most loving introduction I had ever heard in my life. ‘Tonight,’ said the DJ, ‘we have a man in the studio whose work has touched the lives and the hearts of literally millions … a man who is just a man and yet – through the power of his work – unlike other men … Yes,’ he said, ‘Michael Douglas is coming into the studio later. But first … someone called Tommy Perkins.’