`Oooo,” hissed Missy. “This is so totally, totally tasteless.”
“What?” said Sissy. “The froth on your cappuccino isn’t frothy enough?”
“Froth?” Missy howled, spitting some. “You want to talk froth?
Missy hurled the newspaper across the Inner Self Cafe, a self-help bookstore and espresso bar in a Lincoln Park strip mall, where she and her fictional friend, Sissy, meet to analyze politics, lies and other people’s sex lives.
“Why is it news,” seethed Missy, “when Pamela Anderson Lee has her breast implants removed?”
Sissy clutched her chest in horror–“She what?”–and with her free hand snatched the flying paper from midair.
“Page 2,” Missy snarled.
Sissy rustled the paper open. “Ah! `PAMELA FEELS SEXIER SINCE HER DOWNSIZING.’ “
“So juvenile,” said Missy. “What is it about women’s breasts that brings out the giggling 6th grader in so many headline writers? I saw one moronic headline that said, `PAM SPLITS WITH BOSOM BUDDIES.’ “
Sissy cleared her throat, mostly to swallow a giggle, then read aloud:
” `I feel much sexier,’ says actress Pamela Anderson Lee, fresh from surgery to remove her breast implants. `I feel like I’m a petite person, and just having these large breasts was, it just didn’t feel right anymore. . . . I wanted my natural body back.’ “
Sissy snapped the paper shut. “Well, bravo for the `Baywatch’ babe! A woman is entitled to change her mind. And her body.”
“If she knew her mind, she wouldn’t have put those things in her body in the first place,” Missy snapped.
“Oh, like, right,” said Sissy. “Like you never did anything with your body that you wouldn’t change your mind about if it were still an option?”
Missy shot Sissy a look as dark as a triple espresso. “I’m just saying that putting those implants in to begin with wasn’t very smart.”
“Wrong,” said Sissy. “It was brilliant. She made fame and fortune with those things. If anybody’s not smart, it’s her infantile, gullible audience.”
Missy sniffed, “You know what really bugs me?”
“Hmm,” mused Sissy. “Everything?”
“What bugs me, Sissy, is that Pamela Lee became the poster girl for breasts and those weren’t even real breasts. Do you know how she upped the ante for other women? Only she was playing with bogus chips?”
“Gee, Missy,” said Sissy. “I didn’t know you played poker.”
“Do you know how many men thought those were real?” Missy went on. “Do you know how many men have made their wives or girlfriends feel inadequate because their breasts didn’t look like Pam’s?”
Sissy shrugged. “Those women should develop better taste in men.”
“Did you know,” Missy went on, “that the number of breast implants in the U.S. tripled between 1992 and 1997?”
“And you blame all that on Pam?”
“No. But Pam set the breast standard for a generation. She was an enabler. She embodied the myth. And the myth was a lie.”
“And that,” said Sissy triumphantly, “is why it’s news when she gets her implants out. All those people who bought the myth–all those guys drooling over Pam’s Web sites . . .”
“Drooling is a polite word for it.”
“Yeah, well, we’re in public. Anyway, all those drooling guys will now get a dose of the real woman.”
Missy sighed. “I just find the whole thing sad, Sissy. I mean, we live in a world where small-breasted women puff themselves up with implants and big-breasted women deflate themselves with surgery.”
“In other words,” said Sissy, “we live in a world with options. Cool.”
“So many options,” said Missy, “that no one is satisfied with what comes naturally. Will women ever learn to love their breasts the way they are?”
She and Sissy were quiet for a moment. Sissy finally spoke.
“What do you think will happen to Pamela Lee now?”
“Maybe she’ll get rid of the fake lips and the phony blond too.”
“Then what?”
“She’ll finally be as gorgeous as we are.”
