How to Know What Your Normal Boobs Feel Like

You notice when your chest is swollen, sore, or squeezed into a probably-too-tight bra, but do you know what your normal boobs feel like? According to a new campaign from the U.K. charity CoppaFeel (ha, get it?), that's actually really important information.

The breast cancer charity is specifically aimed at raising awareness in young adults and encouraging women to get to know what their "normal" feels like so that they'll know when something is up.

With their hashtag #WhatNormalFeelsLike, they're telling women to get to know their breasts using whatever language feels right and familiar to them. Aside from the lumps or puckering your gyno has reminded you to look for, they suggest using your own descriptive words, whether it's "doughy," "firm," or "spongey.

An Open letter to anyone wanting a boob job

Of course, as a man, I have no knowledge of what it's like to live in that situation.  But there's one thing I do know: in our society, it's the norm for women to find fault with their bodies and the exception to feel like you're good enough, and that's true even for the most physically perfect people.  Isn't that basically insane?  If you look around at other people, you wouldn't proclaim that four fifths of them are defective and only a few are adequate, would you?  Yet that's how too many of us treat ourselves.

I once listened to a talk by a guy named Dr. Stan Dale, who told a story about how he was once, many years ago, hired by Hugh Hefner of Playboy.  Hefner's problem was that he'd recruit these gorgeous women to pose for his magazine, but they were often so ashamed and inhibited about it that it was a big difficult effort to get any photo shoot accomplished.  So he asked Dale to work with them and see what he could do... and Dale gave a bunch of these playboy models a questionnaire to investigate how they felt about their bodies.  He asked them, how do you feel about your hair, your forehead, your eyebrows, your eyes, your cheekbones, your nose, etc etc all the way to their toes.  And what he found is that almost every one of these women found a way to despise almost every part of themselves.  The only body part that didn't come in for intense negative criticism was their teeth.  And these were women who had already been selected to be in the most perfect-looking top tenth of a percent of the population.

Isn't this crazy?  Why do this to ourselves?  (I say "ourselves" because this is not rare among men either and I've certainly felt ashamed of my looks sometimes.)  When so many people fall into this kind of fault-finding, obviously the cause is not that everyone's body has so many faults.  This means the problem is in the way of looking at the body, not in the body itself. Read more

48 reasons not to get a boob job. -

1)  According to the National Institute of Medicine, 25 to 40 percent of people who get breast implants end up needing another operation to correct something wrong with the first one.  (The rate varied in particular studies, depending on things like how long women were monitored, the typical time being five years.)

2)  A study by a maker of saline breast implants, Mentor, found that 27 percent of implants put into breast cancer patients had to be taken back out again within three years, due to side effects.  Another 13 percent had to have lesser corrective surgeries.  The competing manufacturer McGhan/Inamed/Allergan has similar numbers.  Even for healthy patients, both were forced to admit that "most women experienced at least one complication over the three year period".

3)  In general, breast cancer patients have complications with implants far more often than healthy people do.  Many of the complications are about three times as likely for mastectomy reconstruction patients as for cosmetic augmentation patients.  We regard this as socially the most acceptable and necessary time for implants to be used, but medically it is the most risky and unjustifiable time to use them.  If you don't have a healthy body at the start when you're getting the implants, the odds of keeping healthy with them in place plummet.

4)  Up to 9 percent of saline implants end up deflating within just three years, according to the Food and Drug Administration.  The FDA also found that complications become more and more common for each year implants spend in the body.

5)  Another FDA study found that even among women who had not complained of any perceived trouble with their implants, MRI scans showed two thirds of them have ruptured implants on at least one side.  The rate was actually higher in 10 to 15 year old implants than with 20 year old ones, because the older ones were made with thicker containers.  In 21 percent of women in the study, significant volumes of silicone were found to have migrated elsewhere in the body.  Doctors removing implants often claim that they ruptured at the time of removal.  This study makes me suspect, as some patients long have, that many doctors are lying about this for some reason, perhaps to avoid liability. Read More

Even More Reasons Not To Get A Boob Job

In the time since I put up my "48 Reasons Not To Get A Boob Job" page, even in the early days when there were only about 27 reasons, quite a number of people have written to me in response to it, and many of these correspondents had gotten breast implants themselves.  Though some wrote just to say that they were happy with their implants and had not experienced any problems with them (and, in some cases, suggested that I should therefore shut the hell up), many others had unfortunate experiences with them.  Others have written to me who have not gotten implants, but have strongly considered buying them, offering a different perspective.  I have also sometimes heard from friends and partners of those with implants.

Among these different points of view are many more reasons not to get a boob job that I could never have expressed myself.  So here they are, in the correspondents' own words with minimal editing.  Of course, I have kept all quotes as anonymous as possible.  (Emphasis in boldface or italics is my own, not the original writer's.) Read More

25 Reasons Not to Get Breast Implants

Take a look at the list below and decide if you would let someone you love take these risks with their health ... just to have a bigger boobs ... What price are women willing to pay? Why are women so unhappy with their breasts? Do we really think we will be loved more if we have a bigger bra size? Maybe men could let us know how lovely small breasts really are. Hey guys ... step up to and save some women's lives. Tell us we are beautiful and you love us with any size breasts and that you would rather have us healthy than sick, alive, not dead.
   Now I agree, a breast cancer survivor is justified in wanting her disfigured body restored to symmetry and wholeness. But does she really want to risk another cancer and more surgeries? And what about healthy women who go under the knife willingly?
     Stop, take a breath and understand the real risks and the possible complications. Get educated. Get smart. Look before you leap.Read more