Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
What’s the deal with women who have huge knockers getting boob jobs? I don’t mean lifts or reductions; I mean surgery to make their already giant boobs even gianter.
Case in point: legendary nude model Veronika Zemanova. If you were a young guy on the internet in the late ’90s and early ’00s, you likely have fond memories of Veronika. She was hard to miss. She had that bee-stung, almost Bardo-ish pout; that light dusting of freckles on her cheeks; that hard-to-pin-down, sorta exotic ethnicity. And of course she had the boobs. Now, I’m not much of a boob guy — I’m more interested in a girl’s legs and ass — but it didn’t take a hooter connoisseur to realize that Veronika had something special. Not only were her tits large, they were perfectly shaped and balanced; they hung there like art nouveau dew dollops.
Content below the drop is NSFW.
Veronika in her natural state
Then she went and got a boob job, and the dew dollops turned into distended water balloons. What?! Why?! How?! The internet seemed to buzz with speculation. Many of us understood that a great work of art had been desecrated: On the timeline of Western art tragedies, Veronika’s boob job fell somewhere between the Camposanto bombing and the botched Spanish fresco.
Veronika 2.0
Why did she do it? My guess: When a girl has so much wrapped up in her breasts, she’s sensitive about ’em. Maybe she even obsesses over them, and is prone to think: “Boy, if having big boobs has made people love me, maybe having even bigger boobs will make me a superstar!” Sigh. Someone like Danni Ashe should have pulled Veronika aside and told that with great boobs comes great responsibility. All physically blessed women should be taught this.
I note that Veronika’s write-up on the wonderfully named Boobpedia includes the following passage:
Zemanová married in the autumn of 2003 to a man who Zemanova said was “the first real guy who cared more about my brains and less about my breasts” and retired from modeling.
She came out of retirement in 2007.
Well, let me just state for the record: I loved you for more than just your boobs, Veronika.
A quick Google reveals she appears to have undergone yet another operation. Here are the results:
Veronika 3.0
I’m gonna stop before I get depressed.
Related:
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
I miss you, Fabrizio.
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Haha. Are you going to Comic Con? I might…
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“As a physicist, I am accustomed to learning and experiencing some of the more unusual phenomena of the world.”
As a grizzled veteran of 20 years of the internet, it still has the power to stun me at times. How did you dredge that ‘fan site’ up?
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Google. It’s a pretty fascinating one…
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She was *somewhat* natural in the first photo. Could have been worse.
Peter
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The influence of porn and nitwits like Howard Stern have caused this (Stern has said in his show he prefers fake breasts to real).
The result, I think, is that because of all the fake breasts, men are now looking more at legs or bottoms. It’s harder to fake that.
And if you think looking at the above breasts is gross, try touching one someday. It’s like rubbing a beach ball. Gross.
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Addendum: on the plus side, at least she doesn’t have any tattoos — those trendy, ugly, masculine eyesores that are ruining modern women. At least she still looks like an actual female, not like some scary, tatted-up trans creature who you’d meet in prison. So there’s that.
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It’s another symptom of social isolation syndrome that’s been plaguing us for the past 20 years. The less connected you are to other people, the less clear of a self-image you have (self-image coming from contrast with others, and their feedback), and the less clear you are about your value (relative or absolute) on any socially defined trait, like attractiveness.
It used to be that a girl came to discover how attractive she was by how many dates she got per week, what the quality of the asker-outers was, how into-the-moment vs. how bored they appeared around her, and so on. But once boys and girls began segregating themselves during the ’90s and 21st century, they came to have precious little social feedback that could clarify where they stood in the eyes of their peers.
Hence the widespread “body dysmorphia” of the Millennial era. And, for guys as well as girls. Breast implants and steroids are only the extreme tail of the bell curve; most of these folks congregate apart from each other at the gym.
“Working out” in order to “look good naked” comes from having zero contact with other people. Otherwise you’d already know how good you look naked, or at least how appreciative, how into-it, how etc. the opposite sex feels around you. And you’d already know how overall-desirable you are from how many dates you get asked out on, or how many of them accept (for guys).
During their reproductive years, people can’t help but wonder what their sexual-romantic rank is. A near constant lack of relevant information, from not interacting with others, leaves them in a free-floating state of anxiety. To try to alleviate the nervousness of uncertainty, they pick up all these OCD rituals to convince themselves of their rank — whatever that may be in their minds, as long as they don’t have to form an active social life and learn directly.
So, like, I just got breast implants — I must be at least a 7 now, not necessarily a 10 (hey, I’m realistic and not arrogant). Yeah, a 7 — I can live with that. I feel fine about being a 7. So then… a 7 it is… right? (Or for guys, repeat with “getting ripped” for “getting fake tits.”)
Trying to convince yourself of what others think cannot satisfy your curiosity, so another ritual will be taken up after the first, and then without end, since no private activities or private ruminations will ever tell you what others think about you.
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Then there’s always that nagging doubt — what if you’re ugly? Socially integrated people tend not to think that — except for the *truly* ugly ones. But when people refuse to connect with others and pay attention to the signals they’re sending, even quite attractive folks may be plagued by that nagging doubt.
Hence, not only our age of anxiety but also our age of depression — and of antidepressants. Breast implants and OCD gym rituals are only a rather extreme form of trying to block out the anxiety and depression that comes from self-doubt and atomization. To their credit, at least they’re not screwing up their entire brain chemistry like the Prozac-poppers.
“Well, whatever makes them feel better about themselves…” — does Veronika look any happier in the second or third picture compared to the first?
In fact, women who get breast implants have about twice the suicide rate as other women. More likely to die from drugs and alcohol, more likely to have psychiatric problems. (Google.) Probably not caused by the implants, but part of a correlated web of symptoms.
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Veronika’s case in particular shows how impotent the internet or text-world is to replace social connections that the users have foregone in real life. These porn chicks have to know how many copies their DVDs have sold, how many downloads their videos have gotten, how many millions of guys have given the girls’ bodies a big thumbs up.
Yet they don’t feel any happier. (“Studies show” that their higher scores on self-esteem surveys reflect their blunted sense of embarrassment). And it’s not just because they think every viewer is some fat, bald, old, ugly loser. They must know that there are some date-worthy, attractive dudes in their audience somewhere.
But that’s all abstract knowledge, not an intuitive conviction. Virtual life cannot give you intuition about your real-life traits. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.
You see the same thing among YouTube “celebrities,” even one-hit wonder types. Or Facebook junkies with hundreds or thousands of others on their Friends list or contacts list for texting, when they actually let their guard down around maybe 1 or 2 of them, if that. No degree of exaggerated virtual-world behavior will bring them any satisfaction — even in the short term. Cocooners have only a lifetime of anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and distraction to look forward to.
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One final historical note. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen widespread body dysmorphia. It was absent in the ’80s — no boob jobs back then, even among strippers or porn chicks, and no bra stuffing either (often because there was no bra there to stuff). Girls in the ’70s and ’80s even made up a self-deprecating term of pride to show that they had no hang-ups about a small chest — the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. Or maybe guys made that term up, but girls adopted it in any event.
Now, go to Google Images and search for “sweater girl” — oh, that’s riiiight, that whole bullet bra phenomenon from the mid-century. The state of the for plastic surgery didn’t allow for outright boob jobs (or not affordable / safe ones at any rate). But they did everything else to blimp out the volume of their chest: make the bra cups huge and point straight out, stuff them with tissue if necessary, and pull the sweater so tight that you’d have to be blind not to see the contours.
That was another era of social atomization and cocooning, and all of its symptoms — anxiety, depression, cosmetic pharmacology. And body dysmorphia — not just the bullet bra thing, but also “Send $5 to Charles Atlas, and he’ll turn you from a 97-pound weakling into a Hercules.”
Looking over some of the lookers from the mid-century, you scratch your head asking, “Why did she feel she had to blimp out her chest to the max? She looks pretty nice already. With that bullet bra thing, it’s distracting and weird.” But in her mind, it’s never enough when she’s attempting to convince herself of her own value, to reduce her anxiety or depression from not knowing directly from others how good she looks.
Go back to the Jazz Age, and you don’t see that caricatured chest anymore. Guys and girls were more outgoing and socially connected back in the good old Roaring Twenties, before the coming of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. They knew where they stood in the eyes of others, and whether that was higher or lower didn’t matter — just having clarity allows you to accept it, adapt to it, and move on.
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What you see in the Jazz Age is the collapse of proper posture (for women, a social statement to show that they weren’t wearing a corset) and atrocities like the Mies chair and others. It’s no coincidence that we see the rise of various forms of Brutalism at the same time, as man’s machines begin to dictate even posture.
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The problem is that the woman is an attention whore and a cognitive miser. The logic goes something like this; if boys like me because I have big boobs then they’ll like me even more when I have bigger ones. (It’s a the cognitive error of assuming that the properties scale linearly.) Meat heads in the gym use exactly the same type of logic.
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So many natural beauties have ruined themselves by going under the knife to blow them up…
It’s sad and revolting.
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“atrocities like the Mies chair … the rise of various forms of Brutalism.”
Nah, you didn’t see much or any of that if you were there. That’s the International Style revision of design history. Sadly and shamefully, it’s the only narrative the appears in standard books on the history of 20th-C design and architecture. The servile critics and historians all want a climax with mid-century authoritarianism, so what came just before that has to have been an incubating period for it — otherwise the triumphal story about Modernism’s long slow build-up wouldn’t make sense. It would seem, instead, like some passing fad of a couple decades — which of course it was (though it’s back in vogue as of the ’90s).
What was truly popular during the Jazz Age was Art Deco, Egyptian Revival, Tudor Revival, Collegiate Gothic at schools, the motherfucking bungalow, and so on. It’s as though everybody just ignored the Bauhaus movement — yep, they did. Ornament, color, tradition, exoticism, novelty without naive progressivism or futurism — what a time to be alive!
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“Nah, you didn’t see much or any of that if you were there”
How old are you, Agnostic? The way you lecture people about what the 20’s, 50’s, 60’s and 80’s were really like, I’d guess about 113… And there was so breast augmentation in the 1980’s. I saw some of it. Not as common as today, but it was there.
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I think they probably just started sagging a bit, and it’s easier to get implants than to lift natural boobs. Of course gravity having its way wouldn’t matter if she didn’t still want to pose nekkid. Can you even make money doing that anymore? My assumption is that people do it for reasons other than big buck$
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I like both versions of Veronika. She did half a porno movie once. She was undressed and stroking the guy’s dick between her boobs, but she freaked out and ran off the set before blowing him or allowing herself to be penetrated. There was an interview with the director at one of the porn review sites where he confirmed what had happened. A great loss to XXX movies
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The director probably tells that particular “one that got away” story every week.
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