Road Remedies

WITHOUT TITS, THERE IS NO PARADISE?
MEDELLIN, Colombia – "In this city, we have no ugly girls, only poor ones," a local observes.

The area enjoyed an exemplary gene pool – blending blacks, Latins and indigenous people – long before its nip and tuck heyday.

"Colombia's passion for implants is almost unmatched," Joshua Goodman noted in an Associated Press article. "According to the Colombian Society of Plastic Surgeons, more than half of the 450,000 operations performed last year were breast augmentations, costing about $2,000 to $3,000 per procedure – more than half a year's salary for the 58 percent of the country living below the poverty line."

Caracol TV captured the plastic-fantastic culture in a 2006 telenovela, Sin tetas no hay paraiso (Without Tits, There is No Paradise). A teenage girl attempts prostitution to pay for her boob job and thus attract a traqueto (gangster) boyfriend – except her small cup size deters clients.

"The show, based on a true story, is both loved and hated for displaying the culture of easy money here," a Reuters article stresses.

The sculpted curves of Medellin range from pleasant to the XXX-tra large sort usually covered only by brown paper. I struggle not to stare – or judge.

Chopping, inflating and hoovering the human body – pick n' mix vanity – is distasteful to me. But would I feel differently if DNA hadn't dealt me a hand acceptable in this era? Or if I'd grown up in Colombia, where women levy beauty pageant crowns into cabinet seats?

As a tomboy, I had other ambitions; I dreamt of becoming a Navy SEAL. A bosom, being unstreamlined and all, clearly needed to be defused before detonation.

Enter Nietzsche.

No, really.

I twisted the will-to-power concept – most famously misappropriated by the Nazis – into the firm belief that intense concentration could stunt my development.

Let's just quietly bury that theory in the junkyard of applied-philosophy, eh? And maybe slap a PG-13 rating on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Except there's probably no need. Sin tetas no hay paraiso, The Girls Next Door and their ilk dominate the bandwidth anyway...