Watching a reality show recently, I found myself empathizing greatly with a woman who had an enormous, indeed a grotesque nose -- so large that it embarrassed her into hiding at home, not going to her children's school events, not going out on the town with her husband. Clearly her family adored her, and this outsized honker made no difference to them, but one could understand her self-consciousness.

On this show, she won a major whole-body makeover -- free plastic surgery, liposuction, the works. After the announcement of this before her close and supportive circle of family and friends, they flew her to Hollywood and then filmed her first meeting with her plastic surgeon. What did she want? Nose job, nose job, nose job were her first three priorities. And then . . . breast enhancement.

My empathy with her and her husband drained out of me on the spot. Can the size of her breasts possibly matter to this man, who clearly loves her for something other than her looks? Are "bigger" breasts -- which not only he but the entire world will now know are artificially enlarged -- somehow reward him for years of devotion to her and acceptance of her "warts and all," so to speak? Do they, and whatever admiring/envious looks they might attract from some people, somehow compensate her (and him) for a lifetime of facial ugliness? I just don't get it.

It's one thing to confront social values related to appearance, especially if you fall outside the parameters of the normal, and to want to conform to the general standards of attractiveness. (As a friend of mine likes to say, "beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes all the way through" -- at least in our perception of it.) But it's something else again to revise and, in effect, falsify a secondary sex characteristic in order to appeal to a taste that doesn't qualify as universal. This woman's surgically reconfigured schnozzola remained, when all was said and done, her nose; her breasts became her breasts with sacs of gel or saline solution or whatever inside them.

This impulse toward breast augmentation -- on the part of women, and on the part of men who encourage it -- is simply beyond me. As I've written before, I've encountered a wide range of breast sizes and shapes in my love life. I have my preferences, but most of the variations were fine by me. A few weren't, and that probably affected the longevity of those relationships, because it qualified my physical attraction to those women. But it would never have occurred to me to ask any of them to revise their breasts surgically, nor would their doing so have changed anything for me.

So I stand firmly opposed to this form of cosmetic surgery. This is especially the case because I've had an encounter with "enhanced breasts," an experience I wouldn't care to repeat under any circumstances. In brief:

A few years ago, at a professional event, a very attractive younger woman I'd met a decade earlier at another professional event slipped me a note with her phone number and asked me to call her.

I did, and we began a flirtation that seemed headed toward a torrid affair, though it never got there. Along the way, I learned (from her) the following:

• that she'd been sexually abused by her father;
• that her previous boyfriend had recently left her -- for a pre-op transsexual;
• that she was, or claimed to be, a squirter (a woman who gushes when she comes);
• that my actual age (I'm 25 years older than she is), which she hadn't realized because I look much younger, disturbed her, since it made me almost as old as her father;
• that she was deeply depressed, had attempted suicide on several occasions, and felt suicidal at this point;
• and that she was inclined to call and fax me discussing her suicidal impulses at any time, day or night.

The relationship consequently moved from the potentially erotic to the necessarily therapeutic, with me putting my sexual attraction to her -- which was considerable -- on the shelf, trying to connect her with my own ex-analyst, and talking her through some bouts of suicidality.

On one occasion, she sounded so desperate that I went late at night to her apartment to comfort her. She met me at the door stark naked. She was a stunner, though her bare breasts seemed considerably larger than I'd imagined them from my first meeting with her and the kissing and nuzzling we'd engaged in more recently. She said she hadn't eaten for at least a day, so I sent her to her bedroom while I rustled up a meal and made tea in her kitchen.

After feeding her, I tried some relaxation methods I'd learned in a hypnosis workshop. This seemed to calm her down. She asked me to get into bed with her and hold her. I did so, keeping on my underwear. As we cuddled, my hand came to rest on her right breast, where it encountered . . . an edge.

Breasts, regardless of their size and shape, normally do not have edges. A bit of discreet investigation revealed that, indeed, she had implants. I couldn't imagine why she'd done it; she was delectable in every particular, and I recalled her as extremely sexy when we'd first met ten years previously. (In fact, the only reason I hadn't pursued her at that time was that I'd then had an involvement with someone else who attended the event with me.)

I don't know how to convey what an edge in a breast feels like to a man, except to say that it feels wrong. It simply doesn't belong there. Men may be (so the argument goes) visual, but we're certainly also tactile, and the only protrusion I want to feel beneath my fingertips, between my lips, under my tongue, or against my cheek when I'm paying attention to a woman's bosom are its nipples and areolae.

A short time later I slipped out of the bed, dressed, kissed her, and told her that I had to go. We talked on the phone the next day; she explained that she'd had the implants done during a bout of depression, and considered that "one of the worst decisions of my life." She planned to have them removed at some point.

A week later she started working with my ex-shrink. We exchanged a few phone calls thereafter, but never saw each other again. I counted myself well out of it; she had problems on a scale I surely couldn't have handled. My greatest regret is that I never got to kiss the breasts she was given. I'm sure they were lovely, and I'd gladly have told her so.

To be continued . . .