A glance at the numbers tells the story.
Some 100,000 women had implants inserted beneath their breasts in 1990. That plummeted to 32,600 in 1992, the year the Food and Drug Administration imposed a moratorium on silicone gel-filled breast implants because of health and safety questions. But 87,704 women, their confidence apparently restored, received the still-marketable saline breast implants in 1996.
In just four years, the number of women opting for cosmetic enhancement of their breasts (this number does not include breast reconstruction following breast cancer surgery) has nearly rebounded to pre-moratorium levels. Last year, plastic surgeons did more breast implants than face lifts (53,435) or nose jobs (45,977). It was the sixth most popular procedure done by American plastic surgeons. And this even though the FDA’s inquiry into the safety of saline implants is still underway.
The soaring demand for saline breast implants raises a fundamental question:
Why? Aren’t women of today supposed to be more valued for their brains than their breasts?
The answers are as provocative as they are complex, and they say as much about our culture as they do about evolutionary forces.
“Everybody knows you have better luck if you have better breasts,” says Emily Martin, a Princeton University anthropologist. “I don’t think the point is arguable. I think it is true. I think people are picking up on something very real.”‘
Martin describes societal messages on the ideal breasts as legion. She has overheard her own daughter’s teenage girlfriends express that message themselves when they casually described another girl as “that girl with no breasts.”
At face value, the reason women get implants is obvious enough.
Plastic surgeon Dr. Ronald Iverson is president of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. He says the women getting their breasts enlarged “have the basic desire to improve their body and their body image.”
But Martin, among others, argues that there is a greater force underlying individual desire.
“I’m sure people do feel better,” Martin says, “but it’s not because, as individuals, they have an individual idea of beauty. But because there is a general sense in the culture that it is desirable to have a certain body type or shape. You feel that you have more value if you can approximate that.”
Most American women who enlarge their breasts–56,087 of them–are between 19 and 34. The 35 to 50 age group comes in second, with 27,328 women. The greatest concentration of artificial breasts are found in the region that includes Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington followed by the region encompassing Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
Tamee Miller fits the profile. She is 31 and lives in California’s Bay Area. After the 1996 birth of her baby and the toll of breast-feeding on the shape of her breasts, she decided to do it.
Miller describes her decision to go from a “droopy B cup” to a “full, large C cup” as being more about aesthetics than self-esteem.
“It’s really hard to convince people, even girlfriends,” Miller says. “They might think you must be really insecure or you think you’re going to have a better marriage.”
From her experience working in a plastic surgeon’s office, Miller says that there are women having the surgery to meet other people’s expectations–say a husband’s–or to make more money, like an exotic dancer. But most she found were like herself, women in their 20s and 30s, married with children who just wanted to look better.
What she has done is not much different than what women have done for centuries–that is, altering their appearance to conform with prevailing ideals of beauty. Corsets, for one, pushed up and defined breasts in the 19th Century.
“The interesting thing about fashion history is that basically itt does through clothing what breast implants try to do through the body,” says Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
“We often think of body image and clothing image as being what society demands of us.”
There have been waves of interest in larger breasts dating back at least to the 17th Century, when depictions of fleshy breasts became commonplace in the art of the time, says Marilyn Yalom, author of “A History of the Breast” and a senior scholar at Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Women. Prior to the 17th Century, large breasts had not been in style artistically since the fertility images of pre-historic societies. In the period immediately preceding the early 17th Century–during the Middle Ages and up until the late Renaissance–the ideal breasts portrayed in art were small, high and virginal.
The last, most obvious wave of preference for larger breasts was during World War II and the post-war period when, as Yalom puts it, “Breasts represented everything feminine, both sexual as well as maternal, as well as the dangerous part of women.” Sex symbols like actress Jayne Mansfield exemplified the erotic equation of that ideal.
“Why after women’s liberation and `bra-burning’ and the androgynous form, breasts crept back into prominence in the 1980s and 1990s is difficult to answer,” Yalom says.
She speculates that the number of breast reductions–numbering 57,679–might also reflect, along with health concerns over strained necks and backs, that oversized breasts do not conform to the current ideal either.
“It’s part of the American ideal of self-realization and perfectability,” Yalom says. “If it’s possible to do something to improve or upgrade, you do. For women, self-improvement usually starts with the face and body.”
The perceived advantage in such self-improvement is clear enough to Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School and author of “Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality.”
Human beings, like other animals, he writes, have evolved “signals” to attract the best mates. And like other animals, we’ve learned to enhance our own advantages, even if the signals we send are deceptive.
“We, too, rely on signals as arbitrary as a widowbird’s tail and a bowerbird’s crest,” Diamond writes. “Our signals include faces, smells, hair color, men’s beards and women’s breasts.”
He poses this question:
“If we think that we have a signaling system immune to cheating, why do so many people resort to makeup, hair dyes and breast augmentation?”
