The Itty-Bitty Titty Committee

One thing you'll notice, if you watch old TV shows, is how small everyone's breasts used to be. This picture of Farrah Fawcett, taken right before her success in the role of Jill Munroe on Charlie's Angels is a good example. Tina Louise, in her role as Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, is an even better one:




Back in 1976, the style for women's bodies was to be slim, athletic-looking. Plus Jill Munroe was supposed to be a crime fighter, albeit a sexy crime fighter; too much up top might have gotten in her way, when she went to kick ass on some bad guys. Ginger though, was written as a starlet, the sort of woman whose livelihood depended on her glamor. Every few seconds on the show, it seems like, there will be film shots calling attention to her shapely body. It's the kind of character that nowadays, might be played by someone who looks like this:



Or like this:



This is because our expectations for what a woman's body should look like have changed, and the reason for that change is the increasing proliferation of breast implants.

Silicone implants first entered the public consciousness in a big (you should excuse the expression) way, back in the 1960's, when professional dancers started to get them so they could make more money on the topless dancing circuit. At the time and for some time afterward, there was something tacky, almost comical, about the idea of very large breasts. Take for example, the 1980's-era book The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, by Jane and Michael Stern, which included an entire entry, devoted to "Breasts, Enormous," and linked together images well-endowed 1950's-era film queens like Jayne Mansfield, with those of early-model Barbie dolls and the projecting automobile bumpers known as Dagmars, because they stuck out like the breasts of another star from the 1950's, known by the screen-name Dagmar.



As late as the end of the 1980's, breast implants were very rare, and women, even onscreen, tended to be smaller rather than larger. People still saw C-cups, or even B-cups as normal, in celebrities as well as in regular women, so much so that when the fashion industry chose to highlight the breast at the end of the decade, and cosmetic surgeons began to advertise very aggressively, Susan Faludi chose to highlight these as dangerous, anti-woman trends, in her bestselling book Backlash.



Stylish bustier-dresses, with poofy skirts meant to create an hourglass figure, provided that a woman had the breasts for it, and articles like this one from April, 1989, that proclaimed, "Good news, ladies: Breasts are IN," (Lehman, Gigi: "Thou Shalt Have Breasts". April 11, 1989. http://articles.dailypress.com/1989-04-11/features/8904100187_1_ten-commandments-breasts-betty-ford-center) were not enough to create the change that has taken place, that now makes us see normal-sized breasts as being too tiny, and has created a new "normal", where any woman who is seen onscreen anywhere, always has to have big huge enormous titties.

Two things, I think, came together to create this change: First of all, implants became safer. Silicone gel implants, the commonest type used from the 1960's to the early 1990's, had a long record of malfunction, and were linked to higher rates of breast cancer for the women who used them. In 1992, the FDA banned them altogether, and even today, they are allowed only for use by women seeking breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. The breast-implant industry survived by improving the quality of saline-filled implants, which are now the commonest type used.

The other development which helped the industry I think, was the short economic boom the US enjoyed during the George W. Bush presidency. From an article published by USA Today in 2006 at the height of the boom: "From 2000 to 2005, the number of U.S. women who enlarged their breasts with implants jumped 37%, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons." And, "In 1998, according to the plastic surgeons' society, 132,378 U.S. women had their breasts augmented — fewer than half as many who had the operation in 2005." (Rubin, Rita: "Buoyed by Bigger Breasts". December 19, 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-12-18-breast-implants_x.htm)

Sadly, I think ubiquitous breast implants are here to stay. They join Botox, and rigorously styled hair and the mandatory pedicure, as things a woman is obligated to do these days, if she doesn't want to look untidy and frumpy. Myself, I think this is an unfortunate thing. I long for the day when young women looked like this:



And older women looked like this:



For the days when a woman could have a little bit of flab on her or a couple of wrinkles, or even a less than ginormous bosom, and still be considered attractive.