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Keith Knight: Right-handers got no reason to live

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R E C E N T L Y

Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?
By Veronique de Turenne
He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay
(12/07/98)

Getting the boot
By Jon Bowen
Kicked out of college for immoral conduct, the only son of a Baptist preacher takes a vacation from reality
(12/04/98)

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

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ANATOMY IS GRUELING ENOUGH WITHOUT
A GANG OF UNWEANED COLLEGE BOYS
DROOLING OVER THE SPECIMENS.

I told the professor I was dropping anatomy because I had too much on my plate, but the real reason had to do with breasts. Or more precisely, guys' obsession with breasts.

It took me a while to discover this. Each morning for two weeks, I'd stand in the shower cataloging the reasons I should drop the class. I have a hard time motivating at 7 a.m. and the prospect of dead cats in trays wasn't much of an incentive; the dissection room smelled, well, let's call it "organic" -- and I don't mean organic the way health food stores use the term; the cats were soon replaced by disembodied human arms and legs strewn about, reminiscent of wreckage from the Nova Scotia plane crash; and the professor had an annoying habit of using old songs as mnemonics like, "Puuut your head on (snap) my del-toid." Still, I figured I'd chug through the semester.

It was after a harrowing rendition of "Thanks for the Mammaries" that the breast issue arose. Dr. T gets a big kick out of imparting titillating but freakish trivia, as if he dreamed of being Jerry Springer but knew becoming a professor was a more respectable choice. He had just finished telling us about people who lack belly buttons (they're there, but they come out through the urogenital region), when he projected onto the screen a woman with eight -- count them, eight -- breasts. I'd seen a picture like this many years ago in a literature class on H.G. Wells -- we were reading "The Island of Dr. Moreau" -- but that was a half-animal fantasy creature, and this was, quite distinctly, a real human woman. I kept studying the slide to see if I could detect a bad cropping job like the photos in the National Enquirer with Oprah's head on Halle Berry's body alongside the claim that she's lost 60 pounds again. But the slide looked remarkably realistic, in a horrifying sort of way.

A nervous giggle filled the room. The women on both sides of me instinctively glanced away. Dr. T was droning on about how having multiple breasts is a perfectly natural phenomenon, but I couldn't really hear him because of the sighs and coughing and general discomfort growing in volume and echoing off the ceiling. Then, out of the blue, some guy in the last row yelled, "Would you look at those hooters!"

Fifty heads turned to the back of the room where three guys with baseball caps pulled over their eyes were giving each other high-fives. They sat up straight and tried to look serious when Dr. T addressed them: "Could you please, gentlemen, try to contain your enthusiasm for the subject matter of today's lecture? If not, I'm going to have to ask that you not attend tomorrow's discussion of the female pelvic region."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. The boys like the girls with the C cups and the C grades