Amazon

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r. Olsen was not talking about promoting preventative mastectomy in order to avoid breast cancer. Instead, he wanted healthy young women to give up a breast. He called it "unilateral mastoplasty" but understood that he needed to come up with a better name, something more cuddly and ultra-cool. "Like what you guys did for the Macintosh," he said, "maybe something like 'the operation for the rest of us'."

He intended to mount a head-on assault against the prevailing ideals of beauty, he said, to induce a raging epidemic in the collective unconscious and thereby initiate the next great craze in plastic surgery. He kept referring to some confusing notion about balance and what he called "the perfect state of imperfection," but I cut him off.

"What you're suggesting," I said, "will be seen as pure defacement and deformity, like painting repugnant yellow flames onto a vintage Rolls Royce."

To which he replied smugly, "Oh? What about all those fake breasts out there that look like pregnant bellies? No, dear. Fashion elevates repugnant to the realm of heavenly beauty."

"But only for the moment," I said. "Today's avant-garde may be tomorrow's chic. But before long it's just cliché and then ugly and then hideous and finally laughable."

He shrugged as if my objection was self-evident. "Beauty norms change faster than the seasons. As long as we're in on it while it's chic, we're golden."

Maybe he sensed me overheating because in his suave and practiced academic tone he immediately changed the subject, assuring me that the preliminary research had been completed (granted, for another purpose), the safety data analyzed, the prototype machinery tested, and the patents applications filed.

I wasn't impressed. "Do you mean to tell me you feel no responsibility to your patients as a purveyor of fine taste? If you turn a bunch of impressionable young women into beautiful asexual cyclops, you'll get yourself thrown into court if not prison."

He asked me to quit interrupting and just listen.

"It's reversible," he said, as if that dismissed all objections. "With preventative mastectomy, we remove the natural breast tissue and then replace missing volume with an implant. With cosmetic mastoplasty, I simply leave out the implant. If the patient has second thoughts, it's back to the O.R. for another short operation. Hell, if she wants, we can make them both bigger."

When I didn't immediately agree, I think he grew worried and couldn't tell whether I was trying to digest what he'd just said or was about to call security and have him ejected.

"It only seems radical upon first hearing," he said. "People have been doing things like this to themselves for centuries. Tooth filing, head shaping, foot binding — don't you remember as a kid gawking at those fascinating photos inside of National Geographic? Well, guess what. Body modification is not only still alive but flourishing. Look at the blacks and Jews seeking ethnic rhinoplasties and all the Asians out creasing their eyelids. It's about fashion and psychology and little more. Besides, if you think about it, what's so fundamentally different about rejuvenation surgery to reverse the signs of normal aging? You've had a face lift, right?"

I recall blushing.

"Don't worry about it, dear, it's no big deal. Altering your body — it's neither sacred nor sacrilege." He paused to capitalize on my embarrassment. "Deciding to undergo plastic surgery is about making a symbolic statement for or against something, a statement about age or race, religion or sexuality, world view or, in this case, female solidarity."

"Wait a second. Removing a breast is an act of female bonding?" But then the theme of the movie flashed through my mind and I felt a wave of nausea.

"Yes, or so it will seem, just as long as you do your job. Mastoplasty shouldn't be seen as mutilation or a lessening of femininity. Rather, we present it as a new form of rebellion against gender norms set by the ruling male authorities. Instead of men ogling a woman's bouncing breast, we give a lady the option of saying 'yours is gone, buddy, and this one is all mine'."

I felt my heart racing. "You're treating your consumer like she's a moron. You'll be quickly uncovered as just another powerful patrician out to heap more abuse on the female body."

He nodded. "Yes, I do expect that sort of initial reaction. But as a marketing guru, you should be better attuned to prevailing attitudes. Haven't you noticed our modern fascination with primitivism? All the body piercings and scarification and the tattooing of pristine youthful flesh? And not just where they're visible but on the most private and sexual parts of the body."

"Sure, among the punk kooks and low-class deviants," I said as suddenly remembered my own small tattoo.

"Wrong, hon, among the housewives and college cuties and high-class businesswomen just like you. Why? Because today's female craves a return to some romanticized lifestyle of times past. Heavy stress is out; the primal and mythic are back in. Being relegated to a sex pawn is out; reasserting ownership over one's body is in, even if only symbolically. Unilateral mastoplasty should be seen as a meaningful act of affirmation, a political statement on women's liberation rather than some passing cosmetic fad or weird form of body art, a bold gesture of solidarity among the alpha females of the human species. Now do you get it?"

My mind went blank save for a single thought: My God, this man may be on to something. And this single image, too: Myself as an Amazon holding Olsen's shriveled head.

I tried researching the movie over the Internet but found little and so contacted Joanie Walters, a former associate who now worked for another ad agency catering to the film industry. I told her I'd heard some buzz and was interested. Joanie sounded excited, odd for a burned-out veteran who'd hyped A and B flicks for almost three decades. The film's shooting was long done, she said, and the director had been cutting and pasting for the last six months. A working final take of Amazon was about ready for private screening by industry insiders responsible for preparing the trailers and promos.

She invited me to the viewing, after which she said we could have dinner and catch up on personal news and behind-the-scenes gossip. I accepted the invitation but told her nothing about my client.

The studio, Joanie said, had conceived of this low-budget mid-list film more as high camp than high concept, but its director, a head-strong wildcat lesbian just barely out of film school but with plenty of Hollywood family ties, had delivered an unexpectedly professional product with strong plot and stellar performances. Those in upper management then decided to pour some serious money into post-production, and a number of innovative special effects had magnificently enhanced the nearly finished product.

The insiders were thrilled, almost certain they had a sleeper hit on their hands and seemed willing to plop down some big bucks on promotion. But so far and not unintentionally, there had been no advance hoopla. The strategy was to strike with a sudden bang.

All eight of us attending the screening left the tiny theatre feeling emotionally drained. Joanie and I were unprepared for what we had seen, and all we could talk about during dinner was the movie. Shot on location in Turkey, the visuals were stunning and the music score rich and exotic.

What really grabbed us, though, was the film's underlying political agenda. Amazon was, without a doubt, the biggest-ever movie about the battle of the sexes, about a small band of do-good courageous women being persecuted by a big band of no-good male deities. The finale came down to hand-to-hand battle between Queen Hippolyta and Hercules.

True to legend, Hippolyta was slaughtered. Though hardly a surprise ending, it seemed almost impossible for any lady to walk away without — no, not tears, this was hardly a matter for sentimental female emotion — no, rather, without a raging sense of outrage against the male establishment.

The movie contained all the required key ingredients for a big hit — gorgeous scenery, riveting plot, tons of action, yards of bared flesh, sex galore, and several all-new special effects. Without overtly making too much of the missing mammary, the director had cleverly turned it into a symbol of masculine subjugation of the weaker sex.

The Amazons were not only not deformed but absolutely beautiful. Most of the time, the side of the chest missing a breast was thinly veiled by gauzy fabric, hanging hair, or clever shadowing while the remaining breast was flaunted openly. When the emotionally-charged area was truly shown, it was done so without any holding back and resembled the smoothly contoured chest of a girl in early pubescence.

Joanie explained that the effect had been achieved by choosing local flat-chested extras, paying them to have one breast surgically augmented, and then tightly binding the natural smaller breast beneath a flesh-colored silicone body sleeve, and, of course, employing plenty of state-of-the-art computer alteration.

Early audience research had shown conclusively that the male viewers seemed titillated by all of the exposed normal flesh while the ladies focused almost exclusively on what was missing, as if the whole long history of female oppression had been compressed into that one iconic gland that had been cut off and thrown away.

With only that data in hand, two studio executives (both women) realized that they were sitting on a potential box-office bonanza.

I am neither a priest protecting a penitent's confession nor an attorney defending her jailed client. I am an advertising agent who helps her clients talk the public into buying things they don't even know they need. Joanie and I had a vested mutual interest in the fate of Amazon. In the business of marketing, any means to an end is considered valid. With the success of a given project more important than client confidentiality, I decided to share Dr. Olsen's plans with Joanie.

Joanie was no stranger to plastic surgery, having undergone far more than her fair share. I discussed my thoughts on strategy and explained to her what I had in mind. Fortunately, she felt generous and agreed that together we could make more of an impact than trying to go it alone.

I told Dr. Olsen only that I had established a connection with a well-placed insider at the studio, and he seemed very interested. As expected, he demanded a name. I declined and told him that in my profession long-term business relationships were so invaluable that confidentiality was always more important than the success of any given project. I assured him, however, that my source was well-known to me and had envious ties within the television and film industries.

Before bringing on another professional, however, I told him I needed to know how committed he was to the project. He said very. I told him no, that's not what I meant, that what I needed to know right now was how much cash was in his piggybank and exactly how much of it was he willing to part with to market his idea to fruition. When he hemmed and hawed, I reiterated that a new product launch required burning the brand's name into the public's consciousness.

"No," he shot back, "into the public's subconscious, into their very concept of taste and so deeply that it becomes a compelling force driving collective behavior." For a moment, he sounded like Adolf Hitler dreaming of a Fourth Reich.

"That's going to be expensive," I said, and then rattled off a long list of possibilities like magazine spreads, billboards, radio time, direct mail, telemarketing, infomercials, and half minute TV spots.

He told me to forget it, that a little skywriting and a few bumper stickers were more consistent with his budget, that he'd already exhausted most of his life's savings and pension fund getting to this point, that he was going to have a hard enough time just paying me, that the public was already ad-saturated and suspicious of all the traditional hard sell gimmicks I'd just mentioned, and "besides, for Christssake! — don't you have any fucking imagination?"

While the emotional tone of his reply caught me off guard, he was right. After all, he was not a typical client like IBM or the Republican Party, and everything I'd just suggested if employed even in extreme moderation would quickly impoverish him. I felt suddenly nervous and put on the spot. From out of nowhere, I blurted out a thought that was off-topic, anything to break the silence, some lamebrain utterance about how asking a young woman to de-boob was likely to cause a lot of suffering.

"So what?" he said. "Women are used to suffering in the name of fashion, like starving and overexercising to fit into new jeans. It's expected of them, by the people around them and even by themselves."

"But trying to convince a pretty young lady to cut off her breast just to obtain a 50% reduction in her chance of breast cancer twenty years hence is going to be about as easy as hawking stiletto high heels to seniors."

He looked frustrated with me. "You still don't understand? That's where the movie comes in, and it won't cost us a cent out of our own pockets. We just sit back and let the film carry us through the shock and awe phase of our campaign, the introduction of a radical new concept. After that, our battle plan seems all but obvious."

"Not to me. Your so-called 'new concept' will be seen to be in extremely bad taste."

"Oh? Most women have no taste, or, at least, none other than what they've been fed by the media. You simply wind them up and set them free."

"Okay, if it's so easy, then how do you propose I convince the world's women to deform themselves in the name of no taste with a working budget of next to nothing?"

He grinned at me like a self-confident fool. "You give them a complex."

"A what?"

"An Amazon complex. You make them embarrassed to have two."

"Well how obvious to even a dunce! And just how do you expect me to do that?"

"Easy. By commingling the worlds of beauty and entertainment."

(continued on page three)