Now, more than a decade later, silicone’s dangers have been all too thoroughly documented. Breast implant manufacturers were faced with substantial legal action, and thousands of articles exposing the dangers of silicone implants have been published since the mid-nineties. By the year 2000, silicone breast implants had been taken off the general market. Again, not coincidentally, these days one rarely reads about breast-size anxiety. Why? Because increased scrutiny of the procedure has led to legal action, which closed down the expanding market for breast implants.
There is no longer an ad budget driving magazine articles about breast-size anxiety, articles that once fed that anxiety and created even more demand for the product. That is the glass half-full. Now, the glass half-empty. The influence of pornography on women’s sexual sense of self—which was just beginning to take hold at the time this book was first written—has now become so complete that it is al most impossible for younger women to distinguish the role pornography plays in creating their idea of how to be, look, and move in sex from their own innate sense of sexual identity.
Is this progress? I do not think so. When this book first came out, general public opinion considered anorexia and bulimia to be anomalous marginal behavior, and the cause was not assumed to be society’s responsibility—insofar as it created ideals and exerted pressure to conform to them—but rather personal crises, perfectionism, poor parenting, and other forms of individual psychological maladjustment.
