Thirty thousand French women and their deadly exploding breasts. It sounds like the plot of a gory, low-budget grindhouse film. So, before we get on to discussing the serious fact that a manufacturer of breast implants for cosmetic and reconstructive surgery has allegedly been using unsafe industrial silicone to make little bags that women pay thousands of pounds to have sewn into their flesh, I'm going to give you a few moments to laugh. Go on, have a little giggle. Get it out of your system.
Finished? Good. Now, the problem with these breast implants is that they were found to have a higher chance of bursting which can lead to infections and terrible pain. One thousand of the 30,000 French women who have silicone implants made by the now-defunct French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) have already suffered ruptures. At least eight women with the implants have developed cancer, one of whom has died from the disease, although the link is not confirmed. The French government is planning to pay for thousands to have their implants removed. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of British women and countless others are walking around with these potentially dangerous pouches stitched into their chests.
On the face of it, this looks like a straightforward tale of surgical horror. Humans do something silly to their bodies because of what happens when money and vanity meet technology that doesn't quite work yet, and a grisly made-for-TV movie ensues. All the ingredients are there: blood, tits, medical procedures gone wrong, and the French. But don't get the popcorn out yet: hilarious as it always is to blame those silly women for responding to social pressure, there's a bit more to this story.
Breast enhancement is by far the most common cosmetic surgery procedure in both Britain and the US, and the number of operations continues to rise, despite the recession. A significant proportion of those surgeries are performed on women who have lost their breasts to mastectomy, or on trans people as part of gender reassignment surgery, but most are straightforward choices made by women seeking to make their healthy, normal mammary glands look a little more like the pert, rigid teats you see in the pages of Nuts and Loaded.
It's a major undertaking, even without dodgy implants. Having a boob job is not like having a tooth pulled. It's a serious operation under general anaesthetic that comes with hefty healing time and risk of infection and scarring. It may only last for 10 years, and around 15% of patients suffer a loss of sensation in their nipples, so the surgery is hardly about personal sexual pleasure. Until recently it was even believed that silicone implants could cause lupus, but women still queued to pay £5,000 for the privilege. Why? Because we're stupid, right?
Wrong. Plenty of smart women get breast implants just like, a century ago, plenty of smart women wore corsets. How wonderful that we now live in an age where expensive, restrictive, potentially lethal underwear has been replaced by expensive, restrictive, potentially lethal dieting, over-exercise and surgery. The sad thing is that many bright, interesting women and girls consider the social rewards of this sort of physical trauma worth the risk.
What are the rewards? If we are to believe the ads for Harley Street surgeries that plaster the walls of the London Underground, boob jobs are all about "confidence", empowerment and "choice". Well, how wonderful that we live in a world where any woman with an understanding bank manager can choose to have her body sliced into a more acceptable shape. How brilliant that we can choose to respond to a culture that makes women feel like little more than pieces of meat, judged like cattle on our separate parts – rump, breast and thigh – by paying doctors to butcher us into more delicious forms. How fantastic that we can now indebt ourselves to afford the sort of confidence that only comes with major surgery.
We do not need an implant scandal to tell us there's something deeply messed up about all this, and it has nothing to do with delusion. The tens of thousands of women currently worrying about the sacs they have paid to have sewn under their skin are not all vain, or stupid, or duped by patriarchy. Among the very worst things contemporary capitalism does to women is its manipulation of our desire for independence, our legitimate longing to be confident and respected, in order to sell us shoes, handbags and dangerous medical procedures. Then it has the gall to tell us we are empowered. Go on, I dare you. Laugh.
