Tony Parsons - Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

Perhaps male rage will die out with time. Perhaps decades of peace and prosperity will make the anger fall away, like a coat of fur on Neanderthal man, or a set of fins that are no longer needed on dry land. Perhaps angry men will disappear into history – like men in hats, and men in uniform. But not yet. And not for you and not for me. For us there can be only one honest response to cruelty and wickedness and stupidity, and people who don’t say please or thank you.

Grumble, old man, grumble.

Until a man has actually made love to a woman with fake breasts, he can never really know what they are like.

Round, juicy and tempting they may be.

But then so is a bowl of plastic fruit.

For no matter how good they look, the spell is broken the moment they are touched by human hands. The real things somehow manage to be both firm and soft, they feel undeniably human, they move, they are alive.

In comparison, counterfeit breasts feel as though they have been stolen from the morgue. Replicant breasts are so hard. Bogus breasts are so numb, so lifeless, so dead. Once they are outside the two dimensions of celebrity magazines, a pair of phonies are suddenly a million light years away from the objects they seek to imitate.

And real breasts are warm. The fake breasts I have encountered have always seemed cold to me, but that may have been my appalled imagination. Certainly you will get the best out of them if you look but don’t touch.

But then that’s almost the point of fake breasts. They are not there to be fondled, kissed or felt, they are there to be admired, discussed, lusted after and photographed.

The moment they are touched – and I mean in the heat of passion, rather than out of curiosity or in the interests of scientific research – then the spell is broken. And this is true of all fake breasts, no matter how much money has been spent on this act of female self-mutilation.

Some women have reconstruction forced upon them. I watched my wife’s mother die of breast cancer. The battles that women like my wife’s mother have fought are insulted by the pumped-up twiglets on the cover of Heat.

The women who survive breast cancer – and even today, only lung and colon cancer kill more – are faced with hard choices. A lumpectomy – breast-conserving surgery – has to be followed with radiation treatment. A mastectomy – total removal of a breast – can be followed by reconstruction. But that means yet more surgery. These are all devastating choices for any woman.

But the overwhelming majority of women who have breast enhancement do not do it because they have fought cancer. They do it because of vanity. They do it because it has become a fashion option. They do it because they have an IQ somewhat smaller than their bra size.

And the brutal irony is that breast enhancement – boob jobs, in the baby talk that portrays it as akin to a getting a spray-on tan – makes everything from a benign lump to a malignant tumour infinitely harder to detect.

You would think that would be enough to put anyone off. And yet somehow it isn’t.

In a bar at the end of the world, there was a story they told of a man who loved a dancer although the dancer could not love herself.

She was a great dancer, and most nights of the week, if you were in that club at the rough end of a rough street in that rough city, you might see her. And if you saw her dance once, then you would never forget her.

Physically, there was not much of her. She had the natural-born dancer’s lack of waste. This man loved to look at her, and he thought that she was an undeniably beautiful woman. But-like many women who are told they are beautiful by men who have only just met them – she disagreed. The dancer had what a head doctor would call ‘body issues’.

She was small-breasted. That was the heart of her complaint about herself. The man had always liked her exactly as she was, and thought she was perfect – but these small breasts were a big thing for her, an insurmountable barrier between her and true happiness.

She had great legs, a great little bum, a lovely face-but in her mind it all added up to nothing because of her small breasts. She started talking about her breasts more and more – how she would have more confidence if they were bigger, how she would dance better, how she would finally reach a point in her life when she felt good about herself.

She wanted surgery.

Naturally, he told her that he thought she looked great already. And he meant it. But it became clear that what he thought really didn’t come into it.

She wouldn’t be doing it for him.

She would be doing it for herself.

And he thought that made sense – it was her body and she was free to do what she liked with it. And also he was young and dumb – he didn’t realise how the surgery would change everything between them.

So he got the money and gave it to her. He did it because he loved her. Then he went away. And when he came back to her town, he watched her dance and he drank his San Miguel and then he held her hand all the way home.

And – how stupid was this man? – he only realised that he was having sex with a woman with fake breasts after the moment of penetration. He had not noticed them when she was dancing.

But now he noticed them, because he could hardly miss them. They did not feel even remotely real. They felt as in-authentic as alcohol-free lager or sugar-free sweetener. Even faker than that – because they were no substitute for the real thing. They were impostors.

How unnatural those breasts felt in his hands and mouth, how bogus on the tip of his tongue, how hard pressed against his chest – that’s the thing that shocked him most of all, the knock-on-wood hardness of the bloody things.

She had ruined herself. Really, he could not think of it any other way. Her silhouette now had something of the pouter pigeon about it. It broke his heart to see what she had done.

He did not stop loving her.

But they never made love again.

Why aren’t there armies of thinking women protesting about the grotesquely booming trade in bogus breasts? Why don’t women’s magazines stop slavishly printing pictures of pumped-up stars with their pathetic plastic tits sticking out? Is it because to really and truly know how rotten fake breasts are, you have to be a heterosexual man?

Buying off-the-peg breasts is becoming as acceptable as a woman colouring her hair or whitening her teeth. But it is of a totally different order. There is something obscene about seeing healthy young women mutilate themselves by stuffing two plastic bags full of gel into their breasts. Having a ‘boob job’ – society’s coy euphemism that hides the scarring, the risks to long-term health, and most of all the way good breasts get so casually traded for bad – is far closer to female circumcision than it is to any kind of cosmetic surgery.

But they look nice – right, girls?

‘There are so many images of women with amazing fake boobs, I didn’t think mine were good enough,’ said Jodie Marsh, at the grand unveiling of her new, allegedly improved 32GG superboobs. ‘I think society has forgotten what real boobs look like, and women like me end up thinking our boobs aren’t nice because they disappear into our armpits when we lie down.’

And now Jodie’s ‘boobs’ can point at the chandelier until the end of days. And I ask you – is that really better than breasts that can move around of their own free will?

Some of the most written about women in the country-Victoria Beckham, Jordan and Kerry Katona – have given Mother Nature a helping hand in the breast department. No doubt this love of fake breasts among the rich and famous (not to mention ageing and constantly photographed) is directly linked to a record number of teenagers having breast-enlargement surgery.