Photo: John D Shearer/Shutterstock
I was thinking a lot about an old episode of it Ripley believe it or not!a TV sideshow from the early days that featured all sorts of unusual oddities, including a dog playing pool and a man covering himself in a full-length blanket of bees. This particular episode, which aired in 2001, featured a high-stakes player and magician named Brian Zembic, who, in 1996, got breast implants as part of a $100,000 bet with a friend, the only condition of which was to keep them for a full calendar year. He collected his winnings but then chose not to withdraw them. Just last year, still had the implants.
My hazy, forgotten pre-teen memories of Zembic, who also appeared in Inside Edition and The Man Show around the same time, I rushed back this summer after hearing about a different guy planning to get a breast job. In July, Steve-O was announced that she would have a breast augmentation as part of an upcoming trick. I found the news shocking at first, but less surprising the more I thought about it. the masochist Fool The star has built an entire career on self-harming in what most would consider taboo, from stitching his ball to his leg during a TV interview to throwing up on himself while strapped into the ” fart mask’, a device I’d prefer to engineer not unpack here. I found the prospect fascinating and even joked with friends that “Steve-O getting breast implants” might be the most interesting thing to happen to gender in who knows how many years.
As of 2022, Steve-O has been quite open about wanting to get breast implants, bringing up the idea in a series of podcast interviews, first with Dr. Terry Dubrowthe Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and star Wrong and The Swanand then with Doctor Mike, a doctor and popular YouTuber. While talking to Dr. MikeSteve-O acknowledged the political statement inherent in the stunt, noting that there is “a healthy dose of ‘my body, my choice'” [to it]in which I believe.” But curiosity was what drove him most of all, as well as a bit of Promethean thrill-seeking. “As a straight man who identifies as a man, does getting a breast job suddenly mean I can’t post pictures on Instagram with my shirt off?” she asked, adding that it’s also about “dealing with middle age — the wear and tear on my body in particular. With the boobs, I was horrified to see in the mirror that I am officially developing man boobs and already have that distinct underbust. [I’m] criticizing the god who allowed this to happen.” If she’s going to have breasts at all, he concluded, “she’s going to have big boobies.”
Two years later, Steve-O finally decided to put his plan into action. In interview with his hosts the X5 Podcast released in July, revealed that he had booked his surgery date with an unnamed world-class surgeon and planned to have the implants removed after two or three months. A clip from the episode went viral on TikTok and prompted media coverage MI! and Entertainment Weekly. After watching the interview clip during one of my daily ‘For You’ page streams, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, partly because I didn’t understand why it had ended up being a raise under the muscles. As a woman submitted ultra-muscle a little over five years ago, I can personally attest that the recovery from the latter is not only faster but also much less painful, which I would think would be preferable for Steve-O if he wants to keep them for a short period of time. (Then again, this is a man who once it was covered in jet fuel and caught fire. (Pain may be the point.) Mostly, though, I was obsessed with the stunt’s implication that in an age of intense hostility toward gender nonconformity, the most shocking thing you could do — that one of the major seekers emotion could think to do — would be to make your gender more illegible. That a man with breasts remains as taboo now as it was at the time of Zembic’s bet, even though it was far more common than the binary would tell us.
Only last year, More than 23,000 breast reductions performed on male patients to treat gynecomastiaa term that translates to “woman’s breast”. (The presence of such tissue has been considered so deviant as to warrant a medical diagnosis.) Procedures of this nature are popular among cis men and boys, because nearly one-fifth of all cosmetic procedures performed on male patients in 2023. So, too, are they popular among their diandry counterparts: If extensive, if admittedly dated, research conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality in 2015 found that more than a third of trans men had undergone some form of top surgery, and that the vast majority of the remaining two-thirds hoped to do so as well. a most recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association It similarly found that breast and breast surgeries were the most common types of gender-affirming procedures undergone by transgender patients of any gender. Steve-O’s process, on the other hand, reflected none of these trends. This discrepancy, I thought, was fascinating. Perhaps it signaled some kind of chaotically body-modified future to come, less bound by gender expectations than our present. Or maybe, and more likely, I found it so compelling because of how it rebelled against where American society is headed, at least for the foreseeable future—a wrench in the gears of whatever damn machine keeps churning out Vans and commercials.
However, learning the details of the trick itself dampened my excitement. In a recent episode of his podcast, Wild Ridesteve-o explained how he could use his new rack: He’d cover his face and stick out his chest, and then, after attracting the attention of some willing onlookers, reveal his true identity, either by revealing his face or saying something bro with a deep voice. It would essentially be a big charm, like, “Made you take heart for a dude,” a bait-and-switch that peddles the same middle-ground that’s in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; Dude, where’s my car?; and other popular comedies from a generation past. Puncturing this humor ridicules trans women as a failed simulator of femininity, while framing us as delusional and therefore deserving of the violence many of us suffer from our male partners, who may simply claim we tricked them and get away with it. to be killed. (According to the Movement Advancement Project, the “trans panic” legal defense. it remains a permissible justification for assault and murder in 30 states.)
My enthusiasm for the trick began to fade. And in time, so did its probability. The plan began to unravel in July, two months after the initial announcement, when Steve-O’s anesthetist pulled out of the procedure just ten hours before it was scheduled to take place. According to Steve-O, the Doctor didn’t want to be tied to such a spectacular sight. “That kind of set off a chain reaction where [other members of the medical team] they didn’t want to be associated with it anymore and were having a hard time finding another surgery center to do it,” Steve-O said. Consistency in September, the same interview in which she confirmed that she would no longer pursue breast augmentation. Even after the string of cancellations, he told the store he intended to continue the process. That was until a fateful conversation with a transgender female fan opened his eyes to the potential impact of the stunt. “They described how they were not allowed to use the bathroom at their workplace,” he said, along with other dangers they face on a daily basis. “Ultimately, it would be an exercise in celebrating violence against trans people. At least, it would be interpreted that way by some, and when it was put to me that way, I thought, “Wow, maybe I missed the mark on that.” He ended the interview by saying that he had called. from the bay. Steve-O, one of the greatest living practitioners of the concept of bodily autonomy, known for hurling his body to all sorts of unpredictable ends, had finally met his match. I was as shocked to hear the news as I was relieved.
Not to say, “Here’s how Steve-O can still get a chest job without being transphobic,” but I wonder how else this never-was stunt could have happened. He made the right decision – I’m not debating it – but I keep going back to how long he’s been talking about wanting to get his chest done. Could framing the procedure as a trick make it slightly more acceptable, less taboo, to actually do it? Were the implants simply a means of achieving provocation, or was this provocation the way to justify surgery—surgery that men, by and large, don’t do? I don’t know that his aborted breast augmentation would have amounted to any great victory, as much as I enjoyed his immediate flirtation with “my body, my choice” politics, but I don’t think it needed to. I don’t even know that it needed to be a complete trick.
Take Zembic, for example, who, despite the occasional media interview every half decade or so, seems to feel as satisfyingly ambivalent about mainstream attention as he does about his 38C chest. “They’re going to collapse, sooner or later, or they may last,” he said he said in Chicago Sun-Times in March of last year. “At my age, I don’t care. I took my child. I do what I want to do. I have few friends of mine. I used to do magic, things to impress people. Now it means the world to me if I impress a friend or two.” As of the publication of that interview, he had not yet had his implants removed. Maybe it’s because of the $10,000 he continues to receive annually for every year he doesn’t make it, but I don’t think money can completely explain things. As for what that reason might be, I don’t know, and frankly, I hope I never find out. His involvement in plastic surgery is a mystery to me, neither fitting into any clear narrative around aesthetic preference or gender affirmation, nor aligning with what industry trends would tell us men want when it comes to breasts their. It is illegible to outsiders and completely incompatible with anyone’s narrative but his own, whatever that may be. And in an age when everyone’s trying to be the main character, compulsively posting every thought that crosses their mind, this lack of clarity might just be the most shocking part of all—or, at least, it’s more shocking and far more disruptive than just trying to trick people into thinking some dude is a lady.
