|
|
Photo Sue Harrison
Susan Seligson, in her Truro writing studio, strikes a blow for all sizes and shapes of breasts with her book “Stacked — A 32DDD Reports From the Field.”
|
|
|
|
‘Stacked,’ and proud of it
Seligson shines her wit and intelligence on the baffling power of boobs
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
When author Susan Seligson turned her attention to writing a new book, she took the sage advice often given to wannabe writers — write what you know. In her case, that meant turning her discerning eye, researcher’s tenacity and humorous overview toward something very close to home: her own chest.
Parlaying a lifetime as a petite woman with serious upfront endowments into words, she wrote “Stacked — A 32DDD Reports From the Front” (Bloomsbury), a book that delivers what its title hints at and much more.
It may seem quite a leap from her earlier book, “Going With the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life,” but not if you know her. She’s inquisitive, observant and always keen to see, experience and understand a bit more about the world around her.
In fact, she says she had a completely different idea for a book that her publishers sweetly said they loved but no one would buy.
“I began to wrack my brains for a subject,” she says. “I had done a lot of columns [about breasts]. It seemed I tapped a nerve with them and everyone loved it. I just started writing and it flowed.”
She started by talking about her own experience and how she continues to be amazed that a woman with a large set of, you know, will turn the average straight guy slack-jawed and glazed-eyed. Why, she muses in her book, do men talk to women’s chests? Why is the mere sight of two mounds of what amounts to mostly fat enough to elicit wolf whistles, rude remarks, lame come-ons and even quick grabs for the goodies?
“Like the guys who say, ‘Hey baby, how about it?’ Has anyone ever said, ‘Wait, stop the car, I’d love to jump in and go somewhere with you,” she says disbelievingly when the Banner talks to her about “Stacked.”
She looked into the slang for women’s breasts and pours out a breathtaking litany in the book, enough to keep a soft porn writer in words for many a sweaty palm-dampened page.
After loosening up the reader with some laughs, Seligson starts down a very entertaining path strewn with easy-to-read science, memoir, history and interviews with some very unusual folks.
Did you know the bra was invented 100 years ago? Or that, from an evolutionary viewpoint, large breasts may have had the twin advantages of indicating good ability to nurture offspring and mimicking the come-hither allure held by lovely round buttocks way back before the missionary style became de rigueur?
Seligson jumps into the search for the perfect bra, not easy if one is blessed with a considerable bosom. And while she searches for that perfect bra she finds that an ever-increasing number of women are searching for perfect breasts, leading to a huge business in elective breast enlargement surgery.
“College girls are saving their money for breast implants instead of cars,” she says. “Female soldiers are having it done and their insurance pays for it.”
The cult of the surgically enhanced breast has created a completely false idea of what breasts are actually like, she says. “In the United Kingdom the whole population is up a cup size, and in China hundreds of women have poisoned themselves injecting polymers into their breasts. Cross dressers have a reverence for breasts. The subject is way bigger than I thought.”
Seligson heads to Beverly Hills to interview Dr. Robert Rey (TV’s Doctor 90210), that most esteemed surgical enhancer of female flesh. She ventures on to Las Vegas to the Gentlemen’s Club Expo and Exotic Dancer Fan Fair in search of Maxi Mounds, possibly the bearer and barer of the world’s largest set of enhanced breasts. Giving Maxi a run for the roses are dancers Kayla Kupcakes, Crystal Gunns and Chelsea Charms, all working the shows.
The author, used to being a bit of a show herself, was amazed.
“I felt like a 12-year-old boy,” she says. When asked if she got offered any jobs, she laughs. “The only job I might have been offered was to clean up after they left.”
On the flip side of the bigger-is-better is the less-is-more crowd, and she met plenty of women who opted for breast reduction after suffering back pains along with public taunting and teasing for their large size. But some of them were just chasing that elusive best-in-show look by substituting perky and rounded for pendulous droop.
Either way, adding on or taking away, Seligson says she’s amazed at the number of people who will undergo major surgery in search of the perfect body.
She held a “boob party” and got a bunch of her girlfriends (all shapes, ages and sizes) to talk about their experiences and feelings. She had thought it would be all laughs but said the conversation had a serious side as well.
In fact, the book has quite a bit of serious information, from the surgical risks to the anguish some women (and a few men) feel about having too much, too little or just not the right stuff.
One of her interviews is with a heterosexual man and his wife. He is a cross dresser who has gone so far as to have implants, which his wife hates. Seligson also talks to a young woman who always felt she was a young man and is well on the way to becoming one, the removal of her breasts being the first step in her long journey.
It turns out that breasts have a deep emotional charge for almost everyone and, whether they should be or not, are very much a symbol of being female.
“It was not an easy book to write,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be completely frivolous. I wanted it to be slightly more than, as one friend put it, ‘tit lit.’”
Now that the book is in reviewers’ hands she has gotten some unpleasant new attention. One blogger read a piece she wrote for an Internet site and then wrote a scathing bit about her on another site, even including an old grainy photo from many years ago. She was shocked by what happened next. Nasty and personal comments rolled in and were posted about her, comments whose level of malice she can’t fathom.
On the other hand she’s already been on satellite radio, and People magazine will be doing a piece as will Playboy. TV is bound to follow.
Her promotional dream would be to go on camera with Jon Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and the women on “The View.”
Regardless of what happens next, the train has left the station and Seligson is on board.
“I think I’m in for a pretty wild ride.”
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
|
Clubs & Concerts
In the Arts
|
|
|
|
|
Feb 1st, 2007