# 13 CLEAVING TO CLEAVAGE

           
    If you do a Google search for “bigger cleavage,” you get 28,800,000 websites.
On the other hand, a search for “dental hygiene” brings up only 13,500,000. That should tell you something about where the country is headed -- though you don’t need the internet to apprise you of how over the top the current display of cleavage has become.  Go to the malls, restaurants, food stores, and offices.  Peruse magazines, watch TV, and go to the movies.  Cleavage is everywhere.  In your face. Women are obsessed with flaunting it.  Men possessed by seeing it.  And -- as with any other product in a free market system – suppliers compete to fill that demand with the biggest and the best. Unfortunately, there is only one big winner in this cleavage war -- the clothing industry, which sells millions of dollars worth of seductive garments each year to the wannabes. At the front of the winner’s pack are the bra-makers.  

Once upon a time there were only a few bra choices -- wire/wireless, lace/no lace, straps/strapless -- but today’s women are going where no women dared go before.  They can chose from a seemingly endless number of bra designs, personified with names such as Balcony, Tease Me -Thrill Me, Hustler, Hollywood, Heartbreaker Push-up Bra, Wonder of Gel, the Wonderbra Bra, and Over the Shoulder Holder, to name just a few. One cleavage professional suggests that if you want to look like a porn star, you can reach new heights by wearing two plunge bras simultaneously.  This double plunge approach, however, comes with a caveat: “Beware of fall-out!”

     

Despite this plethora of bras for cleavage enhancement, there are few choices for the modest maid who doesn’t want to maximize or publicize her breasts.  Finding a bra that isn’t molded, padded, wired, enhanced, plunged, pumped, cupped, sponged, gelled, or foamed is virtually impossible in today’s market. The Modest Maid holds onto her tattered old bras and prays she expires before they do.

Another outsider in this cleavage competition is the less endowed 32A,  who often grows up feeling inadequate.  Some will resort to buying “illusions” while others may undergo cosmetic surgery.    

            This mammary mania is promoted by the media – both print and broadcast…

….

… Politicians….

                  ...  leading ladies of the film industry...

                           

and, of course, the social media.   

A Twitter Tweeter with the moniker of “cleavagetweet” tweets that he/she wants to “honor” the biggest and best cleavage” and invites would be competitors to send him/her photos of their jugs.  And what’s the reward (the “honor”) for being among the biggest and the best?  No, it’s not cash. And, no, it’s not coupons or points.  And, no, it’s not a year’s supply of sunscreen (which they will need as a protection against cancer of the cleavage). Cleavagetweet’s gift to the “biggest and the best” is a RE-tweet of their tits to his/her 44,876 followers!

            Whereas most cleavage exhibitionists are up-front about why they’re juggling their jugs (I want to be noticed), the owners of the most bandied about boobs are a bunch of hypocrites. At this year’s Oscars, Hollywood icons were “outraged” when Seth McFarlane sang “We Saw Your Boobs.”   “He’s trivializing us,” they complained.

Two sets of cleavage out of many at the Oscars.

Hey, ladies!  You can't have it both ways.  When you flaunt your breasts in public, YOU are trivializing yourselves.  Instead of attacking McFarlane, you should thank him for confirming (and musically, no less) that your self-promoted cleavage has been noticed. 

     Now the ones who should be outraged are the political activists of the 1960’s and 70’s who led the long, hard fight to liberate women – to end the self-limiting role of sex-object, and, ultimately, to be empowered. How depressing it is that less than fifty years later women who have choices voluntarily choose to use their tits to titillate, thereby spending precious time and money on marketing a commodity that has a short shelf life. In no time at all, bountiful breasts wither on the vine, a 36C becomes a 36 Long and tattoo'd cleavage turns to wrinkled decolletage.

….. Better to spend time developing long-lasting skills. There is also the law of diminishing return to consider since it applies to mammaries as well as economics.  The more you see, the less its impact and value, which may explain why breasts now

look like cows' teats to me. 

     

Oh, come on.  Admit it!  There is a resemblance!         

Tits on parade have also created a number of social problems, such as what’s the protocol for cleavage-looking?  Is there an “appropriate” look (i.e. staring vs. glancing);  for how long may one look; and do the rules of looking differ for men and women?  The only etiqutitty I could find on the subject was that given by Jerry  Seinfeld to George Constanzas after George was reprimanded for looking  “too long.”  “What’s too long?” George asked.  Jerry’s answer: “Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun.  If you stare too long, it’s risky.”  

Another problem raised by breast-baring is that some men don’t understand the concept of “look but don’t touch.” To them, a public display is an invitation.  But the biggest problem of all -- though an existential one now -- is the future of titillation.  And I’m all for it – titillation, that is.  We need it – to keep our hormones moving and the population replacing itself.  But the objects of titillation are waning and will probably continue to diminish in the future.  

Once upon a time all it took to excite a man was the sight of a woman’s ankle. 

 

                         (www.julianpeterscomics.com)

After a time, ankles became ho-hum and women began displaying whole legs.  Legs are now commonplace, and the female of the species has taken to flaunting her cleavage. But when cleavage no longer titillates, what’s next in the arousal arsenal?

 

Hopefully, before crotches and cracks see more daylight, men will have taken over the role of titillator.  I know.  It would require a cataclysmic event to redirect our cultural history, but just for fun let’s consider it.  Would it excite women if men exposed their chest hairs? Tottered about on 5” heels? Displayed muscular pecs?  Left their flies open?  I say “go for it!”  Let men shop for low-cut shirts, buy Rogaine to grow blankets of chest hair, spend hours at the gym, developing their pecs, and destroy their feet by the time they’re fifty.   

Of course, within a few hundred years, even those stimuli would also fail to excite, and in the interim, we may have lost through disuse the greatest aphrodisiac of all -- the imagination.  When you leave nothing for the imagination to imagine, the imagination becomes vestigial.  Remember: less is more and more is less.  Hello!  Is anyone listening? 

                        Whiningly yours, Carol