LEG MAN, BOOB FAN

Four of us were having a dress-up, champagne dinner at a very fancy restaurant one night when something jarred me. Joyce was talking about plans for the following week.

“My girlfriend, Mandy, is coming to visit for three days.”

“You'd really like Mandy, Ed. She's really pretty,” I said, jokingly.

“Does she have big boobs?” Ed exclaimed enthusiastically.

I was really shocked on several levels. I glanced over at Cindy (Mrs. Ed), but she had kept her perfect composure. Ed was normally a gentleman with impeccable manners. Shouting about boobs in a quiet, elegant restaurant seemed out of place for anybody, let alone Ed. Besides, Cindy is a real knockout. She has great red hair, a complexion to kill for and the longest sexiest gams outside a celebrity model show. Suddenly it hit me. With legs like Cindy's, the younger, courting Ed had to be a leg man, not a boob man.

Then another realization hit me. I hadn't heard anything about legs in two decades. Everything is about boobs now. Sometimes sexiness is about behinds, but not legs. The editor of one of the men's magazines described her career to me as “tits and asses” publishing. Legs weren't even in the picture. Everybody and her sister seems to be into breast augmentation surgery these days. Exercise peddlers on television enthusiastically sell you equipment that produces “buns of steel.” (A big turn off for me, who visualizes images of giant ball bearings held in place by a steel mesh thong.) Most men like me seem to prefer a shapely, soft bum.

Now it wasn't always about boobs. Back during the Second World War, the beautiful and sexy pin-up girls were real leggy. Betty Grable was the queen of the pin-ups, and with her and her millions of servicemen admirers, it was all about those gorgeous gams. Boobs and behinds weren't even mentioned. Rita Hayworth, another extremely popular pin-up, posed in a bathing suit, sitting on a ledge with one beautiful leg cocked up and one pointing straight out. Rita was all face, fantastic red hair and incredible legs. There weren't any Hollywood stars boasting big boobs outside of Mae West, whose front was so outlandish that the Navy named the life jackets that stick out in the front after her. Sailors were instructed on how to properly inflate their “Mae Wests” –life vest augmentation, not breast augmentation.

After the war, the hottest book was Forever Amber, which was filled with lots of “really good parts.” But none of these made that much of breasts, and Miss Amber, according to the author, had an attractive bosom but not one of dynamic dimensions. James Michener's classic Tales of the South Pacific had lots of love stories and island sex, but Nurse Nellie had pretty slim upper equipment.

The only female performers with big boobs in Cleveland, Ohio during World War II were the strippers at the Roxy Theater on Ninth Street. But these were pretty low caliber – nothing like Gypsy Rose Lee, who was queen of the strippers and had rather modest boobs that hardly detracted from her long, slim, sensuous legs.

Now I admit that boys in Cleveland did like to cop a feel of a boob or two during the double features, but that was just preliminary petting. The real excitement came from getting the hand under the skirt and feeling a pretty leg. Stroking the inside of a thigh was an incredible experience. The thigh was the real goal, especially if you were out with a “nice girl” – one who didn't go all the way.

Big boobs didn't break into the entertainment big-time until Jane Russell starred in Howard Hughes' The Outlaw and performed steamy sex with Billy the Kid in that torrid roll-in-the-hay scene. During the rest of the picture she moved around stiffly, with a hard face and enormous breasts held up with a bra designed from materials Hughes used to build airplanes – lots of tensile strength, but very lightweight. She never was much of an actress, but she did find a male audience that wanted to see big boobs.

At Northwestern University, I ran into the beginnings of the big boob movement. At the Tri Delt sorority house, the young ladies, wearing only Marshall Field's labels, exercised in a properly-spaced military formation. They stood at attention, feet together, and flung their arms away from their chests, then back again, repeating the movement while chanting: “You must! You must! You must develop a bust!” But the exercise pretty much failed. None of the Tri Delts that year sported big boobs. But if my experience was at all representative, Northwestern coeds were wearing a lot of falsies in the ‘50s. During the 1952 NU panty raid, most of the men were astounded to find they had brought home more falsies than panties. (But that was America's first panty raid, so we were all pretty inexperienced.)

I knew legs were dead and boobs were queen when Dolly Parton came along sporting a technicolor watermelon patch hanging out over a guitar. Country-western female vocalists were supposed to be slim, thin and wailin' sad over some man or lost love. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Bonnie Raitt never exhibited such frontal effrontery. Of course, the whole boobal movement reached a peak at the 2004 Superbowl, when one exposed boob eclipsed the whole game. Nobody seems to remember who played or won or lost, but everyone remembers Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction.” We have reached a sorry state when one briefly exposed boob can dwarf the greatest sports event in American history.

What has happened to men? And where have all the leg men gone?

I think the leg men are still out there, but what has happened to men is insecurity. Massive insecurity. Women have invaded the world of men, knocking apart the foundations of male self-esteem. Women have invaded the work force, dominating once formidable male preserves like advertising, public relations, personnel. How can a man be a man when his boss is highly likely to be a woman? Girls are so much better at school that boys are dropping out in increasing numbers. Women now outnumber men at the nation's colleges. Women are becoming doctors and men are becoming nurses. She gets the glory, he gets the bedpan. The Connecticut women's basketball team outdraws the men's team. Same for the University of Tennessee. The biggest Tennessee hero used to be Andrew Jackson, but “Old Hickory” has long given way to Mrs. Pat Summit – the Lady Vols' basketball coach. She even had the chutzpah to turn down the head coaching job of the men's team!

Modern man is no longer a “father figure,” having been long demoted to “parenting” and changing diapers. He isn't even allowed to spank anymore. He doesn't go out and bring home the bacon because she's ordering in the Chinese. His formidable upper body strength has been rendered meaningless in an economy which has switched from manufacturing to service. Nerds, once bullied by men and rejected by women, are now the hotties in our high-tech society. John Wayne is dead and Bill Gates is king.

Against this massive attempt to make men more like women, the male is forced into a backlash mode. He hones in on things that are highly male and entirely un-Frasier-like. Testosterone. Football. Brewskies. Boobs.

Legs are no longer sufficiently hormonal.