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Recently in Salon People

People Feature
The trouble with the Whitneys
Artwork that slams Rudy Giuliani's reaction to "Sensation" leads to a little dynastic squabble that may cause the family to withdraw its name -- and not-so-little fortune -- from the museum.
By Frank Houston
[03/15/00]

Nothing Personal
Halle on wheels
What do savvy Hollywood insiders do when they see Halle Berry's car coming? Run. Plus: Sex and the senior gal Helen Gurley Brown's still milking it after all these years.
By Amy Reiter
[03/15/00]

Column
The pussy-whipped princelings of the press corps
Shame on the media for mistaking a stunted Uriah Heep for a real man; all hail Rush Limbaugh's cultural indispensability!
By Camille Paglia
[03/15/00]

People Feature
Take my wife, please
After his televised nuptial debacle, quasi-multimillionaire and erstwhile groom Rick Rockwell milks it -- for a lot less comedy than it's worth.
By James Hibberd
[03/15/00]

Nothing Personal
Gobsmacked II
Rupert Everett muses on transubstantiation; Trevor-Rees Jones dabbles in exploitation; Julia Roberts half-naked before the nation. We're gobsmacked!
By Amy Reiter
[03/14/00]

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I've always been stacked. I just woke up one morning at the age of 9, and -- boom -- I was already a B-cup. I was the first girl in my grammar school to get a bra, and the first to start drowning myself in large sweatshirts. It takes a little while to get used to that sort of thing. I swear I tilted for a few weeks. It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I realized that, while my breasts were sometimes unwieldy, I was pretty glad to have them. I arrived at this moment of clarity during my first semester, when I attended a Thursday night happy hour wearing a tight white T-shirt and jeans. Where I formerly had been ignored, I was suddenly bestowed with drinks. (OK, Coors Light drafts, but you take what you can get when you're 18.)

And so went my late teens and early 20s. Boys like breasts. Breasts get you things. Go, breasts, go. I got over the negative attention pretty quickly ("Hey, buddy, my eyes are up here."), but I was always aware of their power. It's a continuing fascination for me because that was the first time I got that kind of attention. No matter how many feminist tracts you read, you never forget what boys like.

Now I'm in my late 20s and while my breasts are still beautiful, they've started to lose their perk. That's right, the girls are feeling a little down, a little tired, and are losing their battle with gravity. I don't know how to deal with this exactly. Should I feel sad? Should I buy them a little nip and tuck on their birthday? A friend once told me, "No one judges mountains for shifting and changing, so why should they judge you?" Of course, he's right -- but every once in a while you need a little reassurance.

It's particularly rough watching young Hollywood in action. I'm starting to take their perkiness personally. Jennifer Love Hewitt (or Jennifer "Love My Breasts" Hewitt as she's often referred to) is a perfect example of someone genetically predisposed to make me feel like crap. Unless she had a little silicone help ...

In the 1998 music video for her one and only single, "How Do I Deal?" (an enthralling piece that starred her then-19-year-old breasts), she wore a white tank top, and bounced around angrily in the rain, her breasts buoyant, large and damp. I remember watching it for the first time with my roommate, shaking my head, blinking my eyes, and then saying, "Oh, come on. Come on! She's not wearing a bra. Goddammit, they just can't be real. They can't."

My roommate just grinned at the television set. His head bounced ever so slightly to the rhythm. A small trail of drool formed on the corner of his mouth. I don't think he cared either way -- a nice rack is a nice rack, real or not. I, however, am one of those people who need to know if things are real: noses, eyes, hair color and especially breasts. I know it's none of my business. I know it's rude. I don't care. I want to know. So when I had the opportunity to find out if Love's best asset (surely it's not her singing voice) were store-bought or homemade, I decided it was worth it to invest my time in a little research.

Last September, I was walking home to the East Village from my office in Soho. I took Bowery, and when I hit the corner of Third Street, I saw a camera crew setting up for the night. A man walked by me with a walkie-talkie, and I heard a voice crackle through, "Love and Jonathon are coming this way."

Love? Wasn't that Hewitt's nickname?

Next page | Love my breasts, I began chanting internally ...