Implants Are Becoming More Acceptable Than Real Breasts as Conflicting Pressures to Be Simultaneously Thin and Voluptuous Increase

Right now, women are torn between two extreme ideas of beauty. The first, most prevalent standard is the increasing drive to be thin, even to the point of looking completely emaciated. The second standard is the older, nearly ever-present ideal of the hourglass figure - for women to have large breasts and a large rear paired with a thin waist.

These two standards are impossible to simultaneously achieve naturally, as when a woman becomes as thin as many trendsetters in Hollywood, she gives up her ability to maintain large, natural breasts. This happens even to women who may have had larger breasts before - as a woman diets, some of the first fat stores they lose are in their breasts. Girls who begin dieting heavily before or during puberty might never develop breasts to begin with unless they later gain weight. Letters sent to 007 Breasts (a women's health website) by anorexic girls or girls who became extremely thin attest to the fact that many girls have difficulty recovering the size and shape of breast they used to enjoy even after they gain weight.

For girls who adhere to the style of being very thin, fake breasts are their only option to beauty industry's standard of sexiness. Contrary to popular belief, most women who get fake breasts don't get the extremely large variety. It seems the most common size of implant, according to Ned James at Articlesbase.com, is 350cc, which on average only increases the breast by two cup sizes at most. For a very thin woman, this might mean she is increasing her breast size to a small C. Implants often look smaller than real breasts, so her small C might actually have the appearance of a B cup, which is far from being the extremely large implants often featured in tabloids.

This might lead one to wonder how may women are compelled to get breast implants because they are too thin to produce even modest sized breasts. At this time there do not seem to be any statistics that give us an image of the average breast implant patient, but we can conjecture that a woman willing to go to extreme measures in order to be thin might be more willing (and perhaps more financially able) to purchase breast implants.

As we examine this new image of womanhood, extremely thin with manufactured curves, we should also examine the media and culture's treatment of women with natural breasts. After wearing a dress at the Golden Globes that flaunted her naturally voluptuous curves, Christina Hendricks was described as "big" in an article in the New York Times that also featured a distorted picture that made Hendricks look wider than the original, as was sighted by Jen Carlson at Gothamist, who also noted that another reporter at the New York Times claimed that thin starlets Kate Hudson, Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox had "put on a little weight", "sporting sexier curves... in their upper arms." The fact that a woman like Christina Hendricks, who has a figure very similar to Marilyn Monroe, would be criticized as "big" shows that standards of beauty are changing very drastically. It is also distressing that women like Kate Hudson who are visibly smaller than average would be subject to criticism concerning their weight.

Both these articles, published on the same day and seemingly intended as reflections on Golden Globes fashions instead paint us a disturbing picture of the increasing, conflicting pressures to simultaneous be very thin and have large breasts. Paired with criticism of Christina Hendricks's smaller than average figure (according to ChaCha, she is no more than a size 10), it seems that some day soon fake breasts might become more acceptable than real breasts. As for right now, there is still a certain stigma about breasts that don't "look real", but certainly as surgical procedures, techniques and materials improve it will be less possible to distinguish real breasts from fake. Eventually, we might get to the point where women who choose not to have their breasts enhanced will be subject to the same criticism as women who are viewed as overweight. When this happens, beauty will more than ever be a commodity of those who can afford it instead of being viewed as a natural attribute.

007 Breasts, "How Does Anorexia, Bulimia or Dieting Affect Breast Development and Breast Size?"
Ned James, "Can We Talk Cup Size" and "350cc Breast Implants: What Cup Size Will I Be?" Articlesbase
Jen Carlson, "NYT Distorts Image Of Christina Hendricks, Calls Her "Big""Gothamist
ChaCha, "What dress size is actress Christina Hendricks"