Tony Parsons - Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

They don’t know what they are letting themselves in for.

There are plenty of female celebrities with healthy breasts that do not feel like a sailor’s wooden leg – off the top of my head, I think of Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Leona Lewis-but unfortunately no operation exists to artificially inflate an insecure young woman’s self-esteem.

‘My boob job made me feel better,’ says EastEnders actress Lacey Turner.

What she means is that the operation made her feel better about herself. Trust me on this one, Lacey – no boob job ever made a woman feel better.

Don’t do it, girls. Renounce all breast enlargement. Turn your back, and your breasts, on that surgeon’s knife. If not for your man, then for your health. These breast-job babes blow my mind – these are women who would not dream of smoking a cigarette or going to the beach without sun block, yet they willingly undergo surgery that practically guarantees a health hazard in coming years.

Those vain – or insecure, or neurotic, or self-loathing – women willingly risk infection, breast pain, changes in nipple sensitivity, visible wrinkling, complications with breast feeding and asymmetric appearance (i.e. breasts so completely different that they resemble the brothers played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny de Vito in Twins).

And what they never tell you in the celebrity rags is that off-the-shelf breasts can rupture.

You can give it a fancy name like mammoplasty enlargement or augmentation mammoplasty, but in the end it is just a bog standard boob job where a silicone shell is filled with either gel or sterile saline liquid and stuffed inside a woman’s breasts via various types of incision.

Inframammary incisions are inserted under the breast, and make a woman look like she has had some terrible domestic accident. Periareolar incisions go in through the nipple, which leaves less scarring but increases the risk of capsular contracture, when the body’s immune system tries to repel what it sees as a foreign invader.

There are other incisions – the transaxillary goes in through the armpit, the transabdominoplasaty through the stomach and the transumbilical goes in through the navel.

They all hurt like hell.

I have never met a woman who did not find breast enlargement the most painful experience of their life – including childbirth and watching their boyfriends dance at weddings. But this initial pain is likely to be just the start of her problems.

Those silicone shells can break, leak or slip. A woman can be left with her nipples pointing in different directions. Breast sensitivity often goes out the window when a woman goes for the fake boob option. The pain she feels after the operation can endure for years – perhaps forever.

It spoils sex for the man. And for the woman too.

So that’s sex spoilt for everyone then.

But last year in America alone, nearly half a million women had breast-enlargement surgery. I would suggest that not one of them is the woman they were before – imperfect perhaps, but with a natural beauty that no plastic surgeon could ever improve upon.

And speaking purely from the male perspective, sex with a woman wearing replicant breasts is no fun. That’s the vicious punchline – there’s this mirage of perfection, this pert promise of ultimate pleasure, and the vision evaporates the moment you reach out to touch them.

Fake breasts are the cock-tease from hell.

The dancer’s breasts were well done. On an objective level, the man could see that the surgery had been efficiently performed. There was none of the horrific scarring on the underside of the breasts that he had seen elsewhere. And yet they repelled him.

As well done as they were, these fake breasts did not belong on a real woman. They were artificially created monsters from some doctor’s menu of butchery.

In the cold light of day, she looked like a porn fantasy-sporting replicants that were there to attract, to be looked at, leered over, lusted after and remembered. But they were not really there to be touched.

They were not there for any man who might love this woman, or for any baby she might give birth to. It felt like those breasts were there for the rest of the world.

Don’t do it, girls.

Love what God gave you, no matter how much or how Double-AA. Small can be fun. Medium can be lovely. Large can be grand. Those hard, fake things are always awful. Do you really want to present those lifeless objects to the man you love? Do you really want to shove some surgeon’s rock-hard creation in your baby’s face?

Fake breasts desecrate a woman’s body. Fake breasts take the joy of sex and pump it full of lifeless gel. Fake breasts look bad, feel bad and will one day make you sick. And they are so horribly, unforgivably dangerous.

Keep your health, keep your self-respect, keep your man. It should not take a man to tell you – learn to love yourself the way you are.

Keep them real.

In my first year at school, my little chums played a wonderful joke on me. ‘I know,’ they giggled. ‘When we get changed for PE, let’s get Parsnip’s grey flannel shorts and hide them behind the toilet.’

And so they did.

And when the rest of my class had changed back into their school uniforms, there was I, searching the locker room in my baggy Man from U.N.C.L.E. underpants.

Hilarious – for them. Humiliating for me. Especially when I entered the classroom in my pants, gulping back the tears and holding a trembling hand in the air. ‘Please, miss,’ I gulped. ‘I can’t find my trousers ….’

How they roared. I remember every excruciating second. The glee on their faces, the choked-up feeling in my throat. And it was my first experience of that brutal, shameful, cheek-burning, eye-stinging dip in self-esteem that makes you wish you had never been born – or been born, but never lost your trousers.

It would be nice to think that we outgrow the world’s ability to humiliate us. It would be comforting to think that when we leave schoolbooks and playgrounds behind, we say good riddance to all that. And then one day – decades after the vicious japes of childhood are past – the terrible truth sinks in.

Someone is always hiding your trousers.

How can a grown man be humiliated? Losing something you were planning on keeping – your wife, your job, your underwear – these are the classics.

In the personal realm, being dumped by a woman you love immediately makes you feel as though you are five years old and some snickering bastard just stashed your short trousers in a secret hiding place. In the professional realm, losing your job is an infallible shortcut to humiliation.

Those two million unemployed will one day forget the sickening practicalities of unemployment – struggling to pay the bills, and confronting a cashpoint machine that has learned to say no. But they will never ever forget the feeling of not being wanted. They will never shake off the shame of being surplus to requirements. Bills get paid and bruises fade. A good woman can be replaced by a better woman. But the sting of humiliation stays with you forever.

Yet we are so ill equipped to deal with it. Humiliation – the ability of the wicked world to steal our trousers – always seems to sneak up on us.

The hard knocks of the working world, the fickle nature of romance, even the subtle betrayals of our body as we age-we see all these coming over the horizon and slowly marching towards us. But humiliation always feels box fresh.

At the end of an American book tour I sat in a radio station in California listening to the most loving introduction I had ever heard in my life. ‘Tonight,’ said the DJ, ‘we have a man in the studio whose work has touched the lives and the hearts of literally millions … a man who is just a man and yet – through the power of his work – unlike other men … Yes,’ he said, ‘Michael Douglas is coming into the studio later. But first … someone called Tommy Perkins.’