A tale of two titties

One mammary-challenged girl tries out the breast pill.

By Abigail Goldman

IT STARTED WITH an infomercial and a dream: that glowing beacon of late-night trash TV, the breast-enhancement-pill ad. Soft lighting, softer porn, women exiting pools, women in low-cut dresses, women hopped up on bovine growth hormone and debatable confidence – the soothing sounds of mammary glands swelling across the screen could lull any insomniac to sleep with subliminal messages, my less than chesty self included.

Can you blame me for trying? Who among us, deep into the 4 a.m. TV dregs, has not felt a bit compelled? If you cut us, do we not bleed? If you bombard us with silicone perfection, do we not wearily covet? And America is steeped in the tradition of aesthetic self-improvement. George Washington's dentist, chiseling a set of mahogany chompers, is the historical bedfellow snuggling up to our modern-day plastic surgeon. It's just a matter of how much shame you want to put on the table.

And frankly, I have no shame.

The only customer in the local General Nutrition Center on a Monday afternoon, I strolled up to the surly minimum-wage grommet at the counter and chimed, "I'm looking for the breast-enhancement pills." The grommet led me without (apparent) judgment to where the pills sat behind Plexiglas, under lockdown. "They're stolen nationally," he said. "Not so much here, but they still make us secure them. Which ones do you want?" He pointed to seven options, two of which involved slathering a cream on the affected areas, one of which involved a pump, and all of which featured gauzy pictures of women gazing at themselves in shades of pink and purple. "The cheapest," I said. This left me with Natural Curves, a product of Biotech Corp., manufacturers "jitter free" weight loss products and something called Virile 1. Thanks to Natural Curves, I would finally be awarded the chance to "supplement [my] body's natural estrogen production" like a dairy cow on the move.

The science behind the boob-pill spin generally operates under three E-Z-to-swallow medicinal principles: the law of phytoestrogens (soy), the law of "women's" herbs (black cohosh), and the law of generic holistics (saw palmetto, dong quai, whathaveyou). Natural Curves includes all of the aforementioned and a smattering of others, such as BioPerine, an ingredient for which there is no explanation and no apology.

And why apologize when there's money to be made? The "body shaping" product industry grosses somewhere between $5 billion to $10 billion a year and includes anything from supplements to suction cups. BioTech sells its product via "mass market accounts" with Walgreens, CVS, Albertsons, Longs Drugs, GNC, Whole Foods, and Wild Oats. Ah, how sweet the profits we squeeze from feelings of inadequacy.

Preliminary observations: A bottle of 30 Natural Curves capsules costs $40. They could have stood head-to-head with horse tranquilizers. Bottle-side words of caution included the basic ("Soreness may result"), the foreboding ("Lactation may result"), the bleak ("Statements not evaluated by the FDA"), and my favorite: "Excessive consumption may impair ability to operate heavy machinery." Twice daily I would say to myself, "Two big pills equals two big tits, or one big sucker."

The initial side effects? At best, a lack of appetite, some obscure stomach pangs; at worst, the lingering feeling that the aforementioned were psychosomatic. In the calm before the breast, about two weeks in, with no "tingling sensations" as of yet, I called Dr. Annie Sprinkle, the Bay Area's self-described "prostitute-porn star turned sex guru-performance artist," to talk tits. Why? First, she's got them. A lot of them. Second, she knows how to use them. At her one-woman show Tits on the Head, audience members could pay $10 to get a Polaroid of themselves with Sprinkle's breasts on their head. "People make Christmas cards out of them," she said. She uses her breasts as paint brushes. She can light a match with her nipples. She has become my mentor.

I told her what I'd done to myself. She laughed. Sprinkle fights the breast battle from a spiritual front. "Breasts are paths to the divine," she said. "To the divine mother, to accessing bliss." She also preached from a pulpit of infallible experience. "As soon as I turned 18 and went into prostitution," she told me, "I realized breasts meant big tips. I got picked more out of a lineup because of my breasts, so I realized there was gold in them there hills. America is obsessed with breasts. I've traveled around the world, and definitely Americans are the most breast-obsessed – they have boobs on their minds, boobs on the brain."

And boobs in a bottle, and boobs in the White House, and boobs with buffalo wings for lunch at Hooters. So where do we draw the line between anatomy and addiction? According to Sprinkle, "we have to improve our self-image and love ourselves unconditionally and just enjoy our breasts and ... well, get them sucked a lot, you know, decorate them, play with them, pierce them, if you will." I praised her words of wisdom; she wished me "all the breast."

It was one month into the treatment, no results to speak of, when I encountered the most nagging side effect of all: apathy. I was putting my breast foot forward, but I couldn't convince my other foot to follow. I wondered, Were the heights of beauty really lurking at the bottom of a bottle? Perhaps I needed to invest more in the solution (like $800 dollars for a supply of Bloussant). Or maybe I needed to spend less on the problem. The pills weren't working, and maybe they weren't supposed to.

Would I swoon if I woke up tomorrow with a body of pinup proportions? Probably not. Would I enjoy filling out a goddamned T-shirt for once? Yes. But I'm cheap, lazy, and maybe, it turns out, a little skeptical. Call breast enhancement a private indulgence or a public concession to that elusive beauty myth – in the end, popping pills, slathering creams, and romancing the surgeon's knife or the suction cup strikes me as good late-night TV fodder and little else. No matter how hard I try, I can only envision any addition to the paltry amount I've got as twin quasi-kitsch novelties whose politics (let alone dimensions) I wouldn't really feel like negotiating. Big breasts are no little subject. Love them, leave them, buy them, grow them – it's your call. I think I've made mine.

Abigail Goldman is a freelance writer and former Bay Guardian intern.