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Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?
By Veronique de Turenne
He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay
(12/07/98)

Getting the boot
By Jon Bowen
Kicked out of college for immoral conduct, the only son of a Baptist preacher takes a vacation from reality
(12/04/98)

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

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BREASTS ON THE BRAIN | PAGE 1, 2
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After class, the guys in question immediately began their own discussion of the female pelvic region, but the subject quickly returned to breasts. While the women seemed repulsed by what they had just seen, the guys seemed, well, turned on. It's not that I'm naive -- I know that many men are on some level obsessed with breasts, but I always thought it was quality and not quantity that mattered. I, for example, wear an A-/B+ bra, which is a pretty good GPA but not a very good cup size. The guys in high school always went for the girls with the C cups and the C grades, and I'm just realizing the correlation now. In any event, it was due to this particular male fascination that breast implants became a highly profitable cottage industry, and living in Los Angeles, I'm perfectly aware of how important breasts can be.

What struck me about the incident in anatomy class, though, was how permissible such a blatantly offensive comment seemed in an academic setting. In advertisements, at bars and in the workplace, breasts are subconsciously, subtly and secretly ogled, but nowhere is this obsession so completely out in the open than in the hormonally charged confines of a college campus. Here, guys don't even pretend not to stare; they impulsively express their drives aloud; and PC, if it rings a bell at all, refers simply to a machine in the computer lab.

I long ago accepted men's relationship with breasts as a fact of life, but I was deeply disturbed by this new fascination with breasts en masse. With only two hands and one mouth, what could a single guy possibly do with eight breasts anyway? I asked Mike, the student who had called everyone's attention to the hooters, about this. "Chicks don't understand," he explained. "Breasts are like, you know ..." Mike's not an English major, so I helped him out. "Beautiful?" I offered. Mike nodded and added, "And you can bury your head in them." "How Freudian," I sighed, but Mike gave me a quizzical look. Obviously, he's not a psychology major either. "The Louvre is beautiful, too," I said, "but I don't need eight of them to appreciate its beauty. What's so exciting about eight breasts?" Mike didn't need help answering that question. "Look," he said, smiling to his friends with the baseball caps, "men have certain needs. We're like, insatiable. I mean, it might sound obnoxious, but it's because of our biology. We can't help it, you know?"

That night, I complained to my friend Zipora about men's most irritating quality -- bravado. It was perfectly obvious to me that Mike -- whose beard consists of a few straggly hairs -- wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do with an eight-breasted woman. I'd like to take credit for this, but Zipora came up with a plan.

"Hey, Mike," I said the next day before anatomy. "I was thinking about what you said yesterday, and I have a friend who has four breasts." "Get out!" he replied. "No, I'm serious, I brought her to school today. Wanna meet her?" Before Mike could respond, his friends started chanting, "Meet her, meet her, meet her," and Mike had no choice but to agree. Then, from behind a nearby tree, out walked Zipora, wearing two bras containing what looked like four breasts. At the sight of them, Mike and his friends made a mad dash for the lecture hall. I guess they didn't want to see my friend's hooters after all.

I know what I did was immature, but in this environment of frat boys who brag about who got laid and who puts out and who has big hooters, maybe humiliating these guys the way they humiliate their female counterparts wasn't such a bad thing. Or maybe I just needed an excuse to drop anatomy.
SALON | Dec. 9, 1998

Lori Gottlieb is a pre-med student living in Los Angeles.