For today PervScan was debating between two stories. The first concerned the woman whose 34ZZZ breasts were removed by doctors because they were causing her too much pain. The story is not so novel but the article happened to feature two pictures, one of the lady’s chest prior to surgery and another during surgery. You don’t see that in the newspaper every day.

A second possibility, submitted by the indefatigable “Chris Finch“, concerns a new book titled The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking With Balls. Evidently the tome offers a variety of ways to cook up yummy meat dishes using the nuts of stallions, ostriches, bulls, pigs and turkeys. Testicles, of course, are thought by some cultures to have aphrodisiac properties when eaten. But really there is nothing perverse about cooking testicles, unless you happen to be this guy.

So in the stead of an extended analysis of either of these stories, how about this — the other day there was a person walking through Union Square here in New York wearing a t-shirt that said: “I run like I fuck.” I run like I fuck? What does that mean? I fuck with a limp? I get out of breath? I sprint to the finish? Some googling suggests the phrase might come from a fanfic called Gaedhal’s Queer Theories series. Evidently the whole line is “I run like I fuck. With my whole body.” After the spectacle of amputated breasts and fricasseed testicles, such wholism might even constitute a happy ending.

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

A number of sites have run this story (or non-story, as the case may be), and commenters seem to be particularly outraged at the suggestion that breastfeeding can be pornographic. Here’s one at random: “What kind of perverted weirdy beardy sexualises something so pure and innocent? No wonder breastfeeding rates are so abysmally low.” There are two answers to that. First, a lot of “weird beardy” perverts get off at the sight of breastfeeding and pregnant women. Have a look around the internet and you’ll see that it forms a very popular genre of pornography. Second, lots of people lust after feet, but that doesn’t automatically mean that a picture of a woman wearing open-toed sandals is pornographic. The “pornographicalness” of a picture doesn’t come just from what it represents but from the use to which it is put. In practical terms, a photograph only becomes pornography when a viewer experiences the physiological symtpoms of arousal.

In that sense, a photograph of a woman breast-feeding isn’t pornographic in itself. Ms. Spears’ mother could view the picture in a perfectly benign, un-erotic light. But the photograph could become pornographic when it is plastered all over web sites serving the celebrity porn and “nipple slip” market. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the photograph is pornographic. It only means that the photograph is potentially pornographic, and you can’t indict it for that. Any photographic has the potential.

Even more interesting, however, is the question of whether the photograph somehow constitutes child pornography. Ms. Spears is currently seventeen years old. She became pregnant at age 16. State laws typically enable a person to consent to sexual relations at that age, but federal law still defines the individual as a minor — hence the paradox that the father of Ms. Spears’ baby has never been arrested for statutory rape, but a picture of her breast might qualify as kiddie porn. That’s clearly absurd and suggests that the definition of child pornography ought to coincide with the age of consent. If it’s legal to fuck at age sixteen, it ought to be legal to bare a tit to a camera.

Sometimes it is easy to get discouraged about the state of the world. Pollution, global warming, overpopulation, war, famine, fire, flood — the world seems doomed. If you’re a religious person and you think that God is wreaking all this havoc on you, it’s hard not to conclude one of two things: on one hand, mankind must deserve some major wrath (but not me, God! I’m good!); on the other hand, God must be one mean motherfucker. If he wanted to annihilate mankind, he could always rain Demerol from the sky and put us gently to sleep. Instead he seems to delight in tossing crazy shit at us, like those plagues he inflicted on the Egyptians.

But then every once in a while you’re reminded of God’s goodness. You can no longer believe that God is such a jerk when you behold a rainbow, a baby’s smile, or Salma Hayek’s breasts. You know that bullshit about the “word made flesh?” Well, one day during Salma Hayek’s adolescence God woke up and thought, “That son of mine wasn’t much in the flesh department. I can do better than that.” Salma dipped her fingers in the holy water and shazam! Salma joined the ranks of those who have experienced a great miracle. Saint Paul was hit by a lightning bolt on the Road to Damascus. Salma Hayek was hit by a boob job from above.

What could be greater proof than Salma’s 36C chest that God listens to your prayers? Maybe famine, fire, and flood are just collateral damage in an otherwise wonderful universe, and God really is good after all? Or maybe God just pays especial attention when hot young things pray to him for improvements in their female parts. Beseech the man upstairs for world peace and maybe he’ll hear you, maybe he won’t. Plead for bigger boobs or a tighter vag? He’ll be all ears.

The world’s population is almost seven billion. It’s difficult to say how many people have lived and died in “recorded medical history,” but suffice to say that it is a very large number. Poor Ms. Edington is only the third person in recorded history to suffer from gas gangrene, a particularly nasty flesh-wasting bacterial infection, in the breast region. Imagine that — of some ten billion or more people, you’re only the third to get hit with this awful freak anomaly. If you were contemplating buying a lottery ticket, you probably wouldn’t bother if you realized your odds were only about one in three or four billion. And yet here is this poor girl, mutilated by the unlucky mutilating eqivalent of a miracle. Damn.

No doubt this will inspire a flood of muckraking news articles that warn of the dangers of piercings and other body modifications. And it’s true that, if you’re thinking about making yourself more beautiful by means of a wound, it’s always better to use a licensed professional. But all the same, let’s not get hysterical. Ms. Edington is the victim of some serious bad luck. Nothing more than that.

There probably isn’t much you can say to reassure a young woman who has gone from accoutring her breasts to reconstructing them. It’s a cruel fate. But maybe she can interest the film director David Cronenberg in her story. There is something very Cronenbergian about the image of breasts afflicted with a mysterious flesh-wasting ailment. It would be a perfect case for the Institute of Neo-Venereal Diseases, a fabrication of Cronenberg’s early film Crimes of the Future. You can imagine the director imparting a metaphysical element to the affliction, as though the deteriorating chest were a physical incarnation of an inner depravity. It might not provide much consolation to poor Ms. Edington, but a royalty check would assist with the surgery bills.

Dirty Old Men everywhere will laud this ruling for all the “wrong” reasons. They’ll sign up for the Topfree Equal Rights Association not because they’re concerned with equal rights but because they like the idea of (female) tops being freed from clothes. Who cares, the Dirty Old Men will think, about civil liberties and political protest? Just bring on the boobs.

But if you think about it, there is something rather strange about the notion that baring a body part deserves First Amendment protection. Apparently Ms. Book’s breast-baring constitutes, in the court’s opinion, a form of free speech. It’s a peculiar sort of sign language, though. What do breasts say exactly? “Here we are!” It’s noteworthy that Ms. Book exposed her breasts only in order to protest the law preventing her from exposing them. The point was to earn the right for the breasts to say about the only thing they can. “Here we are!” In that sense, breast-baring is a very limited form of “speech.”

The rejoinder to this is that breasts can possess a wide range of symbolic values — everything from the obvious (maternity) to the abstract (freedom itself). But then you have to wonder why baring the breasts should mean anything at all. Why does going topless in a Breasts Not Bombs demonstration have the least bit of political, not to mention semantic, value? (And look who else attended the rally: Mr. Dicks Not Death.) Is everybody really so uptight that the sight of a boob can inspire a political revelation?

At first blush, you’d have to agree that charging about $2500 USD to grope some breasts is a bit excessive. But then, who’s to say? Maybe the young lady in question had genuinely phenomenal breasts. After all, if the seller were Angelina Jolie or Salma Hayek, you might think that a few grand per grope is quite a reasonable fee. But does that mean that the breasts of a celebrity are intrinsically more valuable than those of some girl next door? How do you put a price tag on human flesh? How do you establish the going rate for a body part?

In the final analysis, though, this case comes down to one thing: the pensioner “paid the price willingly at the time.” Yes, he seems to suffer from some dementia, but if his dementia isn’t sufficient to prevent him from recognizing ex post facto the error of his ways, and if his dementia isn’t sufficient to prevent him from hiring a lawyer and pursuing a complaint, then how is it sufficient to compromise his original consent? It doesn’t make sense. If someone offers you a million dollars for a kiss, then plainly it must have seemed worth it to him. So too in this case: if the pensioner was willing to pay a few grand a grope, over and over again, then it would seem that he thought he was getting fair value for his investment. How can the law say otherwise?

Readers of PervScan will be familiar with the site’s objections to breast implants. It only seemed fair, then, to mention this astonishing case in which a woman’s implants actually saved her life. Weirdly, though, the case somehow reminded PervScan of the movie Saving Private Ryan. You know how the irony of the film is that a number of guys end up dying in order to save the life of one other soldier? This implant story is like that: how many other women have suffered through pain, side effects, and complications in order for this one woman to live?

Meanwhile, you have to wonder whether this will cause a rush for implants in areas afflicted by terrorism and war. You can imagine the advertisements now: bullet-proof boobs, billboards featuring curvaceous babes gushing about how their cleavage saved their lives, “Go ahead, big boy: fire your load at my chest…” Maybe men will start getting implants too, it’ll be a macho thing, “I have man-boobs not because I’m fat. I have man-boobs because I care about my life. They’re the flak jacket you never take off — and they’re not bad to have around when you’re lonely too…”

Here is a picture of Ms. Hatcher. She’s an attractive girl, though the picture makes her eyebrows look like they were spray-painted on by a graffiti artist.

PervScan has stated its objections to breast implants numerous times, so there’s no point regaling you with that again. And to be fair, at least one recent study has shown that implants can enhance a person’s sexual satisfaction. So hopefully Ms. Hatcher and her husband will be deriving all sorts of pleasure from her inflated bosom.

But will television viewers derive pleasure from her surgery? No doubt it will be informative to many. And given that there seems to be someone, somewhere, with a kink for everything, there’s probably some freak out there who gets hard or wet (as the case may be) at the prospect of watching endoscopic surgery. Meanwhile, two minor points stick out to anyone who brings a logical mind to the analysis of these things. First, why does Dr. Vitale-Lewis talk about reverting Ms. Hatcher’s body to its pre-pregnancy state? After all, breasts typically get larger during pregnancy. Ms. Hatcher’s goal is really to simulate milk boobs or better. Second, what does it say about the mind of a young woman — or about the world — that’s she’s more nervous about appearing on television than about having irreversible surgery performed on her body? Jesus, those are some topsy-turvy priorities. You’d think it would be more important to worry about your health than your image.

Every year Wimbledon’s obsession with traditional tennis whites becomes an issue in one way or another. In a way, you can understand Wimbledon’s position, since a dress code helps keep the focus on the sport. On the other hand, though, it’s hard to frown on a little bit of cleavage. Professional athletes tend to be exhibitionistic anyway — why shouldn’t they be? They’re young people with well-defined bodies — and really that contributes to the overall spectacle of the game. If you can enjoy the sight of Maria Sharapova’s thighs in those little white miniskirts, what’s the matter with enjoying the sight of her cleavage? It’s not like female tennis players tend to be the best endowed in that department anyway. You’d never mistake Maria Kirilenko for Dolly Parton.

It all makes you wonder if, on the back courts, there are shadow tournaments staged by the young and the rebellious. Maybe they sneak out at night and play strip tennis, where you remove an article of clothing every time you lose a game. Or maybe there’s naked tennis, breasts swinging on the baseline and asses flying through the air to smash a volley. Maybe there’s even sex tennis, players doing it through the net or doubles matches that break down in rampant fucking….

Here’s an image showing a printout of the offensive email. It’s not especially offensive in itself, though certainly there will be people to take umbrage at Mr. Gold’s assertion that his fictive holiday beats the shit out of MLK day. The offensive part of his email, if offense is to be taken, principally derives from the fact that he’s a (minor) politician sending this to his colleagues and employees. By most standards, that crosses the line between collegial humor and inappropriate behavior.

The ironic thing, though, is that there’s truth to Mr. Gold’s joke. Even if you polled the people for whom MLK day has some meaning, wouldn’t at least fifty percent of them — the male half — prefer a National Breast Appreciation Day? Hell, can you imagine the attendance a parade would bring out? Most of you probably don’t even know whether there’s a parade for MLK day, and yet you’d slobber all over yourselves to go see the festivities on National Breast Appreciation Day. Just imagine the ranks of cheerleaders filing by, proudly pushing forth their bosoms, chanting a sort of marching band version of the Lords of Acid’s I Must Increase My Bust.

Maybe the smart thing to do, in order to please all parties, would be to combine MLK day and National Breast Appreciation Day. One could pay special tribute to the breasts of Negro women. (”Negro” was of course the term used by MLK.) Mr. Gold could mount the podium and give an inaugural address, “I have a dream,” and in the stead of MLK’s rather flat-chested metaphors (”every hill and mountain shall be made low”) he could sing the praises of those hills of flesh and mountains of fat.