The XX Factor: What women really think.

The World's Biggest Boob Job

In other news of the peculiar and amazing, via the Drudge Report: NBC just posted a story about a woman who went to Brazil to get a breast enlargement. Not just any breast enlargement: She wanted to set a world record for breast implants. (This was her ninth surgery, they say.) Interestingly, it turns out Texas, where she had traveled for surgery, has a law limiting the size of breast implants. Libertarians among us: Care to get outraged? I tend to be all for women's right to do whatever we want. But I confess (guiltily) that I found it hard to respond with equanimity to the photograph of Sheyla Hershey. What I couldn't answer: whether that lack of equanimity was the same as what I'd feel in response to any other extreme elective surgery, such as people who amputate their limbs. Because this surgery seems to me to have more in common with the extremity of fetishism than with the  desire for sexual allure.