that’s just yet more of the good stuff.
Did you ever notice how, in today’s world, the most notoriously-breasted woman are all triple-namers? In the past, it was the alliterative that had it, the Marilyn Monroes. Nowadays, it’s the Pamela Sue Andersons and the Anna Nicole Smiths. Which is really bizarre, because that triple-namer thing means there’s still room left on-bimbo-board for…Scarlett Jane Stein?
Okay, now here’s the really killer part:
I do not—repeat, do not—have notorious breasts, not like those other women do.
I have spectacular breasts, which is nowhere near the same as notorious breasts, but is the same as average breasts…which you’ll soon see.
All of those triple-namers—who, by the way, are all blond, which I am not—have breasts that are creeping up on or have even tipped over to the other side of the forty-inch mark. Plus, they have cup sizes that all equal or surpass the enough-is-enough alphabetic place mark embodied by the fourth letter.
I, on the other hand, am a 36C, which is—collective gasp here!—average.
Yes, folks, that statistic is really true: the average American woman is a 36C.
So, why so much fuss about me? Why have all the men I’ve been naked with each uttered some version of the personalized phrase, “Man, Scarlett, but you’ve got great breasts!”? I’ve heard that phrase so often, it’s been so universal in my life, that on more than one occasion I’ve been tempted to inquire of whichever man was humping above me, “Um…uh…excuse me? But this is really an honest question here: Do you say that to all the girls? I mean, is saying that, like, some kind of thing with men?” But I’ve never had the nerve. And, truth to tell, the guys, even though they all say the same thing and all look the same way when they say it, all somehow also have that “Eureka!” look on their face, like they’ve discovered hooter gold where previously they’ve only encountered hooter tin.
Oh, and, parenthetically speaking? Yes, I do know that a lot has been made over the years of the fact that men have a tendency to be—hmm…what’s the most delicate way to put this here?—penis-obsessed, but we gals can be pretty breast-obsessed ourselves, this entire chapter standing as some kind of monumental proof of that fact. We just don’t like to publicize it.
But back to my breasts. Which I still maintain are average.
Did you ever notice how the most spectacular thing that any American kid can aspire to is to be average? Being top of the class is nothing to boast about; being head cheerleader is an open invitation for people to wish obesity on you later in life; being too good at chess is like requesting to get your ass kicked. On the other hand, being stupid means people calling you that; being fat means people calling you that and stupid; being not good at even chess means there’s not even a lowest rung for you to stand on.
The middle. Keeping to the middle ground in everything is the safe place to be as a kid in America.
And this middleness extends to adulthood as well. The wealthy are resented, the poor are blamed, and the message is clear: the safest place to be, even if it’s getting harder to keep up with the housing payments, is middle class.
In the breast department, if in nothing else in this life, I represented the national average, which was interpreted as being a smashing success, breastwise.
So, basically, I was spectacular mostly by virtue of being so damned average.
Oh, and plus the fact that with a waspish waist on a short Jewish woman, my 36Cs really did look like they might be one of those triple-named women’s 40+s.
There was that, too.
5
One of the things about being quarantined for seven to ten days: it gives you a lot of time to think.
Pam herself was not as much of a slouch as she liked to think she was, except for when she slouched, of course, which was often. This had been a big stumbling block in her attempts to build a bridge to the opposite sex; it’s been my observation that, while some think meeting Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong or even Mr. Anybody has to do with the luck of the draw, it’s really all about not being a slouch. A slouch says, “I’m worried about what you think of me, but I don’t think much of me, so why should you?” The non-slouch, on the other hand, says, “Even if you’re not interested in me, I’m having a pret-ty fucking good life here all on my own. So there.” Or she might just say, “My annoying mother always elbowed me in the back when I slouched.” Whatever. The real point is how the world interprets the non-slouch, and the world sees her as confident. Oh, I suppose there are times when the world sees her as arrogant…but who gives a fuck what the world thinks?
Slouchers, that’s who. Slouchers give a great fuck about what the world thinks, which neatly leads us back to our physical description of Pam.
Pam, an attorney, mind you, looked like she made a daily conscious decision to distance herself as much as possible from the thankfully archetypal uber-skinny female lawyer usually portrayed on TV. Now, I’m not saying that Pam was fat. Rather, in an effort to make sure that every male she came in contact with would not even think of treating her like a Twinkie, she had made herself work-asexual. Never mind those micro-mini-skirted suits that the TV lawyers seemed to favor, Pam was determined to furnish her entire career wardrobe from the sales rack at the back of Casual Corner. Thus, Pam owned a lot of brown.
The perverse flipside of Pam’s determined daytime devotion to a dour dress code was that whenever we went out on the town at night, she always went overboard. She tried too hard. Looking at her was like leapfrogging back in time twenty years to the heyday of all those shows about oil barons with wives who never had to work, instead spending their days beating one another up in the swimming pool. She was the epitome of big hair and shoulder pads and enough sequins to choke Liza Minnelli. She was the exact opposite of Daytime Pam, and it required sunglasses to look at her.
Oh, and scary makeup. Truly scary-scary makeup.
I couldn’t tell her, of course. I mean, obviously she thought she was making wise decisions.
Underneath the neutered daytime version and the vamped-up nighttime version, Pam was average: average height (5’4”), average weight (which, in America, currently equals a size 14), average coloring (neither albino nor African-American), average-average-average. Which wouldn’t be a problem for most people, since, as pointed out previously, average is currently the most desirable thing for any American to be, except that in Pam’s case she wanted to be below average in the daytime and above average in the nighttime and she was mostly a dismal failure at both.
Oh, and she did have average American breasts—36C—but, coupled with a size 14 waist, as opposed to my own 2/4/6, well, let’s just say that she was of the belief that side-by-side was never a fair way for us to stand.
If she’d asked me, which she never did, I would have maintained that her failures were caused by being a slouch, both literally and psychologically, while I know she would have insisted that she’d just been cursed with faulty packaging and a low self-image.
“Take you, for instance, Scarlett,” she’d said the Saturday night following the Saturday night when she’d first shot down Bachelors #1, #2 and #3 like duckpins at the carnival.
As I looked into yet another mai tai in yet another bar on yet another Saturday night, I thought to myself, I hate it when we take me, for instance.
