By Lisa
I saw in the newspaper that some genius conducted a study on what constitutes the perfect female breast.
Oh, good.
They decided that the perfect breast has a 45:55 ratio, and if you’re wondering what that means, it is the “ratio of the upper to the lower pole of the breast.”
These people might be crazy.
If you have poles in your breasts, you’re in big trouble.
But the way they describe it, the nipple is the dividing line between “the upper and lower poles.” So in a breast with a 45:55 ratio, 45 percent of the breast is above the nipple, or the upper pole, and 55 percent is below the nipple, or the lower pole.
If you ask me, these people are splitting hairs.
Nipple hairs.
By the way, they conducted the study by showing one thousand three hundred people pictures of breasts.
I wonder how much they paid the people to look at breasts all day.
Or if the people paid them to look at breasts all day.
Because the one thing that’s true in this world is that people never, ever get sick of looking at breasts.
Generally speaking, men look at them because they’re sexy, and women look at them to compare them to their own.
This means that after looking at breasts, one group will feel really great, and the other will feel really crummy.
Breasts have made tons of money for magazines, websites, restaurants, and beer companies. In fact, there is probably no company on earth that has not used breasts to sell something.
Breasts are busy.
And they work for almost nothing.
Of course they do, they’re female.
By the way, of the one thousand three hundred people in the perfect-breast survey, 53 of them were plastic surgeons.
This surprises me.
I would have expected all one thousand three hundred to be plastic surgeons.
Because if I made my living out of making human beings look perfect, I’d make damn sure that I got on the Perfection Committee.
The funny thing is that if you were a girl growing up a while ago—let’s say you were born in 1955, hypothetically speaking—you had no idea what breasts looked like.
Okay, I’m talking about myself, really.
When I was little, the only way to see breasts was in Playboy, and you better believe we didn’t have any of those magazines around the house.
Mother Mary didn’t approve.
But when I was fourteen, I started babysitting, which was the same age I discovered Playboy, because I found it accidentally on purpose, in the bedroom drawers of the couple I was sitting for, after the baby was in bed.
Sorry, unnamed people.
Anyway, I looked at the breasts in Playboy magazine, and all of those breasts were perfect.
Perfectly large.
I don’t know what the poles or ratios were, but all I knew was that when I got breasts, I wanted them to look exactly like that.
Of course, when they didn’t, I felt inferior.
I assumed everybody else got the good breasts and that all of the good breasts looked exactly alike.
It took me a long time to figure out that everybody’s breasts were different.
Like until last year.
And I didn’t realize that everything about everybody’s breasts was different, whether it was shape, nipple size or color, or anything like that. Nor did I realize that breasts change with time, and gravity, so that even if they were perfect once, they won’t be perfect forever.
Because breasts are no different from every other part of your body, which is different from everybody else’s parts, all of which change over time, and it generally ain’t for the better.
But for some reason, women still want to be perfect.
Whatever that is.
And it’s not only breasts.
Nowadays it’s faces, too, and we’re flocking to plastic surgeons and paying them to inject and fill and puff our cheeks and lips, too, so that we all look completely alike, evidently closer to the ideal.
Which is a fish.
To be precise, a very young fish.
So, in my opinion, what constitutes the perfect female breast?
Answer: Whatever you’ve got on your chest.
If it’s little or if it’s big, if it’s flat or if it’s skinny, if it’s old or if it’s young, no matter what it is, it’s perfect.
If you have two breasts, that’s perfect.
If you have one, that’s perfect.
And if you’ve had breast cancer and had your breast reconstructed, it’s perfect.
And if you had breast cancer and decided not to have your breast reconstructed, that’s perfect, too.
Why?
Because you’re alive.
Because you’re an individual, and as such, unique.
And because nobody’s perfect.
At least nobody human.