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" IT HAS GOTTEN LOOPY OUT THERE. Everywhere you look: tits. From comics to movies to mannequins to ads on the sides of carbon-belching buses. It seems every sitcom episode has at least three breast jokes and enough cleavage to dock a yacht in. At ground zero--on the street and in the workplace--the proliferation is just as overwhelming. To stroll through lunch-hour crowds on a sunny day is to be sucker punched by cleavage: gym-honed, Wonderbra-supported, sometimes surgically enhanced, inescapable, on brazen display. Cleavage with business suits is now mundane. What&amp;#039;s a fella to do? Ah, what we always do: nurse the pain.It all started for me on the sweaty macadam behind my Catholic school just days after Tricky Dick flashed his last peace sign. Suddenly, we were nose to nipples everywhere we turned. What had happened? The girls, who had grown only vertically since kindergarten, came back from that summer vacation with curves and bumps and angles that flabbergasted us. Presto: They were willowy. We no longer saw them just as somebody from whom to steal those goofy beanies the nuns forced them to wear. And what made them so different, so alluring, so scary, was tits.    The ones who hormone-spiked the earliest still quicken the blood now, decades later. There was Gayle B. and Francine P. and Joannes both B. and D. and, yes, even Sister Donna, God save my savage soul. Maybe we did not know why, but we realized something had changed utterly. We were doomed, all of us, to a lifetime of fascination. I don&amp;#039;t mean justthe Mambo Jugs subscriber who burns his paychecks at Hooters. Let&amp;#039;s be honest: For any red-blooded male with a breath left to suck, ignoring the female chest is about as easy as falling off a roof and not hitting the ground.  Of course, in those days this was easier. Cleavage was still an event. We had to make do with I Dream of Jeannie and the Sears catalog, then we moved up to the occasional filched Playboy. Actual breast sightings were the stuff of legend. That is, until Lori Up the Block decided she wanted to brighten our lives.  Lori, Lori, Lori, you strumpet, you tantalizer, you shameless seducer. Lori Up the Block was a dirty blond who smoked cigarettes, loved to say &amp;quot;fuck,&amp;quot; which she did deliciously, and went to public school. She was a year or two older than us, which is like a quarter century in adult years. She delighted in standing at her second-floor bedroom window and flashing her teenage tatas, coyly at first and then brazenly, till she was squishing them against the glass, driving us to spastic delusions. Up the block we&amp;#039;d go to gather beneath her window--slack-jawed, wide-eyed acolytes worshiping dual idols. To our chagrin and relief, she pretty much ignored us once she left her stage, and no amount of begging or bribery could coax that tube top up once she hit the bricks. Her mother, oblivious to her offspring&amp;#039;s hijinks a few feet above her head, used to shoo us with &amp;quot;What do you kids want? Go on, get out of here.&amp;quot; What did we want, indeed?  What we always want. After Lori Up the Block came high school and actual contact with the breast. Size suddenly did not matter so much. There was the rustling of garments, the confounding bras, the awkward grappling, and, ah yes, the warm, inviting flesh. This, we learned, is what all the fuss is about. Well worth it.  And still the gratuitous sightings. I recall a gaggle of sunstroked, acid-gobbling tarts cavorting topless while thunderheads rolled over a Dead show. I remember drinking shots of tequila with my buddy Kevin and two tattooed young women from the right side of the tracks. We were in Kevin&amp;#039;s garage, amid the wreckage of several Harleys and a case of Bud cans, when our nominal dates got in a tussle over God knows what, which featured them ripping each other&amp;#039;s halter tops off. Well, we didn&amp;#039;t exactly rush to break it up. Call me a criminal.  What is a fella to do? Start with a basic premise: We all look, and they all know it. Yet women say this makes them feel stupid. How do they think it makes us feel? Do they realize how rarely it&amp;#039;s a conscious act? Here we are, thousands of years after the invention of the wheel, and a single pair of casabas knocks us three rungs back down Darwin&amp;#039;s ladder. Obviously, the gape and drool while a coworker is trying to discuss risk arbitrage is a violation.So we&amp;#039;ll give up the head-on ogle by exercising the kind of willpower it takes to beat back the eons of evolution that hard-wired us to gawk. But they must allow the peripheral vision, the stolen glance, the admiration from afar.  It would be easier if women came to a consensus on the subject. I have some friends who happily admit to pushing their necklines down to push tip counts up, and others who rant and rave because some guy who was probably half blind stared at them from across a city avenue. My girlfriend, who is topside-blessed, buys bras called &amp;quot;minimizers&amp;quot; and talks half seriously about some type of reduction operation. I nod my head and murmur soothingly while thinking, What, are you fucking nuts? Other women I&amp;#039;ve dated seem to have a pathological need to expose their breasts to fresh air, to use them as solar panels for the production of vitamin D.  Here in the Northeast, I am convinced that winter melancholia is at least partly caused by the dearth of cleavage on the street. Of course, you can cure this by ducking into any gym, restaurant, or brokerage house. And in any case, spring will come soon enough, and the battle between biological imperative and civil sensibility will rage on in each of us. Because I think John the bartender&amp;#039;s Irish grandmother said it best: &amp;quot;Those boy babies never get weaned.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1703/esq0299-feb-breasts-kelly/>