The Fig Leaf Comes to Hampton

 Let's talk about breasts. The best discussion I've ever heard about breasts was not in medical school, but from Lewis Black, who observed, in his best exasperated style, that most breasts are pretty, whether large or small, and he was perplexed about why women would undergo augmentation procedures.

Friends who are not doctors, male friends, occasionally ask me how I can resist getting turned on by my female patients, especially when I examine their breasts. Women, of course, never have to ask that question.  There is nothing arousing about a woman who is worried she might have breast cancer, and when you are focused on finding something nasty, and examining a breast and probing for lymph nodes in an arm pit, it is nothing close to an erotic experience. Frightened women are not a turn on. 

"Let me ask you, " I  usually reply, "Would a breast laid out on a stainless steel tray arouse erotic thoughts in you?"  The fact is, there is a woman attached to a breast when it becomes arousing and it is her attitude which is arousing, not the physical object, the breast.

Which brings us to a piece of folk art, a sand sculpture,  which appeared recently, on Rte 27 just before The Old Salt,  on a private lot.

The sculpture, a  mermaid, was a bit of whimsy and kitsch, and I liked it. She may have looked sensual, with her hand behind her head, and her face uplifted, but it was the pose, not the bare breasts which conveyed any sort of erotic or sensual content.  That mermaid looked happy to be in Hampton, in the water, soaking up the sun, enjoying the pleasures of our clean water, our clear, invigorating air, the sparkling, rocky beaches which we love. 

Today, however, the mermaid has acquired a bikini top or bra or fig leaf or whatever it is, and one wonders how that happened. Well, we know how what happened--there was a guy out with a trowel, apparently, but the question is: Why?

We ought to write letters to the editor, organize a protest.  Picket. Bring it up with the town elders.  Children pass by that sculpture on their school buses on the way to Marston, Hampton Academy, Winnacunet High. They have seen art defaced! This is what ISIS is doing in Syria, destroying art, defacing sculptures. 

Today, it's a mermaid in a bra; tomorrow it could be veils and head coverings for all females!  Then covered ankles and pretty soon all we'll see of women in Hampton are their eyes. 

And what of Madame Liberty?

I have an old silver dollar, (not the one shown, but like it) I've been saving, at home. Will the Hampton Police come for me in their black helicopters?  

My coin is from 1986. No so valuable

First it's breasts, then they'll come for our guns!

How quickly things get out of hand.