I’m sweating bullets right now because I’m in a coffee shop and there are families around and I’m trying to get a better understanding of this freakish, kinky, creepy, cultish, sad, tragic, underground subculture of men who take perverse pleasure in turning themselves into these grotesque Barbie-esque characters by slapping on kitschy drag makeup, colorful wigs, and freakishly large prosthetic breasts, which someone somewhere actually manufactures and sells online – like, who is this businessman who decided to start a prosthetic breast business? – and yes this is a real “sub-culture,” and yes, Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon, appears to have been a prosthetic breast aficionado, and yes, there’s a kid outside the window in the stroller smiling at me right now, and his dad is giving him a snack, and you never know, contrary to this man’s clean-cut white dad appearance, he may be the kind of secretive, pervy father of four who moonlights as a bimbo named “Betty Buxom,” and I hope not, because if his wife and kids ever found out, they would suffer deep psychological scars, and the divorce would be brutal, and imagine the town rumorville, the gossip that would spread like the bubonic plague, and how spiritually crushed the family would feel forever.
It’s all really depressing. The more I read about this culture, the more I try not to judge. But it’s impossible. I cannot help it: my inner conservative Yankee is utterly repulsed. I just learned that there’s a pair of self-adhering fake knockers that typically go for $579 but are on sale for $499.
Prosthetic breasts have been the talk of the social media town square in recent days. As you may have heard via the most Daily Mail story ever, Bryon Noem allegedly had a thing. By thing, I mean he would put on one of these sets of missiles and chat it up with cam girls who specialized in “bimbofication,” which is roughly the act of making oneself a parody of a Miami housewife who’s had far too much plastic surgery. There is this photo making the rounds that shows him posing in front of the camera, and the family’s golden retriever is on the edge of the frame, poking his head through the door, watching his dad, and if dogs could talk, the dog would probably say something to the effect of, “What the f***?” I think that best sums up the collective reaction to this story.
To learn more about this bizarro sub-culture, you must go to the place where members of this bizarro sub-culture gather to talk shop, throw around the bull, share trade secrets, give advice: Reddit, of course. So I am lowering the brightness on my screen so the man sitting two tables down from me doesn’t get the wrong idea, and I am now skimming through these Reddit threads, and I can safely say these are not the r/’s you want to be reading. I would much prefer to read an r/ about how to unclog one’s toilet or an r/ about obscure French writers, but here we are.
A sample of the kinds of more technical discussions you may encounter:
Note the absurdity here. A lot of people in these threads have undergone self-mutilating mastectomy surgery, but they feel this “phantom boob syndrome,” which is apparently when a biological female slices off breast tissue, and her body does a double-take and goes, This shit ain’t feeling right, and so her body sends signals like itching and tingling around the flesh craters to indicate that something ain’t right, and, of course, something really ain’t right, because humans aren’t supposed to cut off natural parts of their body for fetishistic purposes. To deal with this, they wear fake boobs.
LAST DAY: New, group, and gifted subscriptions are on sale. It’s a great time to join if you haven’t already.
But then what about the heterosexual dudes who cross-dress and wear prosthetic breasts? Frankly, I am not dedicated enough, nor do I have the stomach, to pore through the Reddit threads that may give us real clues, owing to the following caveats: 18+ and NSFW. There is, however, one thread in which a seemingly straight dude asks transgenders on whether it’s okay for him to wear fake boobs even though he has not undergone any sex change surgeries. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants him to go for it.
No, I think we may have to dig deep into human nature. A couple has just sat down next to me, at the table directly to my left, and the tables here are rather uncomfortably close together, and the last thing I would want is for them to see a pop-up ad for fake boobs, and, again, get the wrong idea that I am some kind of creeper here in the corner of the coffee shop, shopping fake boob deals during Holy Week of all weeks. Yeah, let’s go on and close up these Reddit tabs.
I am going to turn to the British writer John Gray and his 2002 book, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. It is one of those books that just totally, irreversibly changes the way you see the world – for better or worse – and its ideas and its arguments are sticky as hell, like blackened bubble gum on the bottom of your shoe that has since dried up and hardened inside the tiny crevices of the sole. They’re not going anywhere. As he weaves together historical tidbits about wars and genocide, revolutions and political purges, the famous works of Western literature and philosophy, the forgotten works of novelists and thinkers cast aside by establishment academia, Eastern philosophy, and the Tao Te Ching, he blows up every assumption you’ve held about what it means to be a human being. Light beach reading stuff.
So, anyways, Gray has this idea that, because people in the West are living in a time of such staggering and unprecedented material abundance, in a time when all possible pleasures under the sun, from designer drugs to marijuana, prostitutes and porn, online gambling and video games, are at one’s finger-tips, that, for humans to really feel something, to really feel alive, they have to resort to more and more transgressive behaviors. The modern baseline is now flatly too plain, too vanilla, too boring. The transgressive behavior or attitudes that would have caused someone in the 19th century to gasp in horror and faint on the spot are now so commonplace in our society, so out in the open, that if you want to feel transgressive thrill, you have to go even further. You have to strap on silicon breasts and pretend you’re a female Barbie doll as your golden retriever looks on and your wife, one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, is in the process of trying to turf Diego the drunk driver to a prison in El Salvador.
I suspect that the middle-aged man who puts on these fetish devices is suffering a severe midlife crisis. Whereas the old midlife crisis was pretty banal – you shed your beer gut by going to the gym and training for a marathon; you get a six-pack; get a tan; get a hair transplant; get testosterone pumped straight into your blood; get a sports car – a quarter of the way through the 21st century, you might start seeing troubled men getting much weirder, kinkier, pervier, in order to alleviate the sense of boredom, the sense of feeling trapped, the sense of impending mortality.
If you have followed this Friday newsletter for a while, you will know that I am a firm believer in the 20th century midlife crisis management style, which should be sufficient to ward off those nasty feelings of inadequacy and having failed to live the life you envisioned as an 18-year-old. Perhaps the best way to live is to be like water and flow peacefully in the river of time. But tragically for a lot of men out there – and maybe for the middle-aged man who has just entered the coffee shop and is ordering a cappuccino – they will take the midlife crisis to new extremes. They will go to “www.dragqueencloset.com” for that $499 spring deal. The shipping is free, but the destruction of one’s soul is not.
