In December 2023, Sophie Anderson's death at the age of 36 was announced. Anderson was a porn actress, activist, comedian, and social media celebrity (nearly 360,000 people followed her). She presented herself as pansexual, foul-mouthed and proudly vulgar. But the most recognizable thing about her was her extreme physique, with breasts that defied gravity and the shapes of the human anatomy.
His image clashes with the personality that Anderson displayed on the networks. She greeted with an affectionate “girls, boys and my non-binary people” and her demands for equality and her love of camp had made her something of a muse for a section of the British LGBT community, who sometimes invited her to LGBT parades Proud. Her style in her pornographic videos, artificial, theatrical, sometimes closer to slapstick comedy or adult comic heroine than classic porn actress serving male pleasure, had taken her to a place beyond adult entertainment. They photographed and interviewed modern bibles such as “Interview” and “Dazed”. It wasn't the first time that an extreme and hypersexualized body crossed a bridge to become an icon of post-irony, someone who could share his space with artists, designers and luxury brands.
Lolo Ferrari in Berlin in 1997.ullstein image (ullstein image via Getty Images)
Anderson followed in the footsteps of other women who sported disproportionate implants that made them famous. A line of actresses and erotic models who, thanks to surgery, liposuction, dyes and makeup, have a physique that transforms them into something resembling a living inflatable doll. The most famous was the Frenchwoman Lolo Ferrari (1963-2000), who in her time was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the woman with the largest implants in the world. He died in 2000.
A posthumanist fantasy
With Lolo (publisher Chinos Gratis), the author Miguel Agnes (forerunner of the Spanish podcast thanks to the long-lived EPSA) wanted to do some justice to a character underestimated by Ferrari for decades as a porn actress without much light. “The Bimbo Woman [como se define en inglés a la mujer atractiva, frívola y poco inteligente] We've always imagined this, but Lolo Ferrari took it a step further. She decided, probably at the suggestion of her husband Eric Vigne, to surgically transform herself into an inhuman silhouette. Lolo placed the body on the surgeon's table to form a posthumanist fantasy in her own flesh, an unconscious archetype previously only seen in the bodies of underground transsexual women.
There were more Lolos. The Argentinian Sabrina Sabrok (Buenos Aires, 53 years old) was recognized by the Guinness Book in 2006 and 2009 as the woman with the largest breast implants in the world. In 2020, he stated in an interview that he carried around five kilos of weight at a time. Pandora Peaks was the final muse of Russ Meyer, who became famous in the 1970s for producing a series of films that for some were heteronormative paradises full of women with huge breasts and for others the height of psychedelia, irony and humor. Porn or erotica was the natural territory of this body type, as perfected and extreme as cosmetic surgery, although Agnes points out that in reality Lolo Ferrari just made a porn film “that the industry dissected and disseminated.” many compilations that give the impression that this was his main activity. This stigmatized her and Lolo always regretted it. “Apparently she had done it at the instigation of her representative and husband.”
Russ Meyer at his muse Pandora Peaks in Germany in 1993. Kurt Krieger – Corbis (Corbis via Getty Images)
According to Tania Pardo, associate director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center, the stigmatization of the sexual object is not entirely accurate. For her, this body type “represents a hypersexualized image of women, but there is something contradictory in this extreme that can be understood as a justification for excess.” I am thinking of transvestism and the construction of diverse identities through hypersexualized aesthetics, which on the other hand are also dictated by heterosexual male dictates which are used from the perspective of justification and irony. The result is these excessive bodies. All this makes us think about the contradiction of the image in which we currently live: the use of filters and selfies are ultimately deformations and changes of reality.”
Raquel Manchado, creator of the editorial project Antorcha, which has been compiling the vivid history of misogyny and gender stereotypes in popular culture for years, agrees with this thesis. “The starting point seems to be the heterosexual male gaze, the most ubiquitous imaginary, but these body shapes may have their origins in the childhood fantasy that sublimates this very imaginary.” You can begin hypersexualization without transforming yourself into a simple sexual object. It is clear that this goes much further: it is about visualizing and shaping yourself in an almost unreal and excessive way that does not exist in nature. It doesn't even have to be done. Agnes agrees with this idea of the woman with extreme physique who presents herself to the male gaze as a mixture of sexual goddess and mother: “There is something like a paradoxical return to childhood in this hypersexualized woman, as if her impossible silhouette had triumphed. ” Battle. to the dominant and providing man, thus reversing the rules of the game. The man is infantilized at her side.”
But is that art?
The 21st century has brought a kind of condescending view of any form of aesthetic divergence, quickly labeled performance, revolution or art. “Whether these extreme bodies are considered art depends on the intention with which they were built,” says Pardo. The late Anderson, for example, had very clear clues and they weren't hanging in any museums. “When I was 18, I was already watching porn and I loved those fake bodies,” she explained to Dazed in 2019. “I always knew that I wanted to have a very fake and calculated look.” Raquel Manchado actually believes that “these personal construction is nothing other than art, although they are complete outsiders to contemporary art and some artists use and devour their image.” It also concerns their status as icons of dissidence, which often makes them icons, as in the case of Ferrari or Anderson to a section of the LGBT audience: “These women embody disobedience, they don't comply with what is expected of them.” Imagine their family gatherings. I don't think her parents are proud that their daughter voluntarily gained a pair of incredible tits. “They do.”
The two agree, however, on one reference: the French artist Orlan (Saint-Étienne, 76 years old), who in the 1990s, as Pardo explains, “underwent a series of aesthetic operations to recover the fleshly body:” lip augmentation and silicone inserts on either side of the forehead as a gesture against the Western beauty standards they impose on the female body.” They also mention Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic, Esther Ferrer and Cindy Sherman. “Contemporary art has delved deeply into all of this to talk about a deformed, fragmented or monstrous beauty and to dismantle the construction of female subjectivity,” adds Pardo.
French artist Orlan poses in front of a self-portrait at the Ceysson & Bénétière gallery in 2021 in Paris.Foc Kan (WireImage)
Beyond these artistic considerations, there are physical and psychological. Weeks ago, Sabrina Sabrok told Argentine television: “I know that [el peso de mis pechos] It's affecting my health, but I have to endure as much as I can. “At the moment I can't play sports, I can't do anything, they weigh too much and my back is very narrow.” For figures who have found fame and a way of life thanks to extreme anatomy, a change also means losing their job.
The Guardian news announcing Ferrari's death (a suicide that has been in doubt for years, with the figure of her husband and manager under suspicion) explained that “she wore a specially made bra day and night and “Couldn't sleep on it.” Place it on your stomach rather than your back, as your breasts may make breathing difficult. I was also afraid of traveling by plane because it might explode.” Another passage from the obituary: “Ferrari lived in constant fear that while she was playing songs and stripping in clubs across Europe, a madman would come upon her “I would jump on stage and try to stab her in the breasts.”
Pain and glory
Pandora Peaks never gained relevance in any cinema other than adult cinema. Other porn actresses such as Leanna Lovelace and Wendy Whoppers, who only gained fame in the industry after undergoing surgery to give them disproportionately large breasts, saw them lose them immediately after removal due to the health problems it caused . But while they persevered, Ferrari, Sabrok and Anderson gained fame on television shows and ventured into musical projects. Ferrari's best-known song was called Airbag Generation and she was a writer on the successful British show Eurotrash, which was hosted by Jean Paul Gaultier for several years. His fame transcended the boundaries of pornography or erotica.
In the case of the first two, they were greeted by television shows around the world with the usual condescension shown by someone confronted with a strange-looking mythical creature. This seemed to be the moral: The world is obsessed with oversized breasts and there is a loophole in the system that allows you to live off them if you can tolerate them.
On the other hand, while porn and entertainment glorify big breasts, fashion ignores them. And many doctors, out of common sense, refuse to increase the size of their prostheses. Sabrina Sabrok (who claims to have had 16 operations on her breasts alone) explained: “In the United States they asked me how I got it so big.” They told me: “Where did they get you did this?”
Sophie Anderson with her husband Damian Oliver (right) at Manchester Pride in 2021. Oliver died a month before her. Shirlaine Forrest (Getty Images)
Sabrina Sabrok in Toluca, Mexico, in 2023.Norte Photo (Getty Images)
The nightmare that Lolo Ferrari feared came true in the case of the late Sophie Anderson. In spring 2022, she showed her followers a video in which her left breast turned into a mass of skin after an infection caused sepsis and the implant protruded from the skin. The British tabloids simply stated that it had “exploded.” Anderson herself reported that the Belgian surgeon who operated on her should never have let her go under the knife. He had his chest reconstructed in the months before his death, but continued to suffer from problems. Another social media star nicknamed Mary Magdalene, who rose to prominence due to the excessive size of her breasts, announced that one of her prostheses also gave way in the spring of 2023. The Chron headlined: “Model addicted to surgery's chest bursts, leaving her a lone alien and a twisted chest” (caps are from the original headline). In the collective imagination, this tragedy is a joke, be it in the headlines or on television. That was back in the nineties. In the Lolo Pops room – which Lolo Ferrari featured in Eurotrash – one of the curtains showed Lolo's breasts exploding with weird sound effects as she flew away and disappeared.
The tradition continues, now sponsored by platforms like Onlyfans, which means the boundary between pornography and mass has finally fallen. The title of busiest woman in the world is now controversial as an apocryphal Big Mac index. A young woman named Lourdes García boasts of having the largest breasts in Spain. Leia Parker claims to have the largest in the UK. Brazilian Sheyla Hershey claims she has surpassed Argentina's Sabrok's record. “Porn is so accepted by everyone that it floods our daily reality,” concludes Miguel Agnes. “Today it is more accessible than music, literature or mineral water, in the sense that it is free, crosses niches and is perceived as a fundamental right. The shadows it brings are collateral damage, but its users are not yet ready to shine a spotlight on these places.”
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