> "A boob job is certainly safer than eating arsenic or
> removing ribs, things earlier generations of women did
> for beauty......Feminists always wanted women to
> control their own bodies. Doesn't this count?"
>
> http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/clevey/?id=110003782
Here's a story y'all might get a kick out of. I did an article a few years back about the problems in communicating science in the news media-- touching on things like concentrated ownership, the role of public relations companies, techniques like video-news releases and "astroturf" organizations. I also talked about how even peer-reviewed medical journals weren't immune to these things. While I discussed some cases of medical research fraud, one topic I _didn't_ discuss was the then-current controversy over breast implants. That would've required a whole article in and of itself.
Well, after the article appeared, I got this angry letter from a dentist in New York State. The guy complained about how I was "excessively tolerant of junk science"-- the same kind of junk science which took silicone breast implants off the market, depriving women such as his _own wife_ from the most effective treatment possible for breast cancer. This is just a paraphrase, but this really was his argument.
So I got to write a reply. I pointed out that the most effective treatment for breast cancer was-- and sadly, still is-- a radical total mastectomy. I explained that, while most women who undergo mastectomies use implants as prostheses, but the "filler" has no bearing on the treatment. And it was a _real_ pleasure to say that this dentist was trying to use the suffering of thousands of women, including his own wife, to score cheap and fallacious points.
Which brings us back to Miss Levey. She obviously hasn't bothered to learn that there are _other_ fillers for breast implants, and nobody's objecting to those, which sorta undercuts her whole argument. And I'll bet she'd become a feminist _real_ fast if, say, a coworker asks her why she doesn't get implants for those pitiful, dried-up, nicotine-suffused waggly li'l milk-bags on _her_ rickety frame.