I was watching an obscure film noir entry called The Man Inside the other night. Up until recently, The Man Inside was one of the few Anita Ekberg movies I hadn't seen. Gazing upon her fabulous curves, stunning beauty and tight wardrobe, I reflected upon how the Tit Culture has changed these past fifty years.

I have to preface what I say here because, frankly, I am not impressed by Breast Enhancement imagery or themes, and while I'll admit that a gal like Tiffany Towers or Sarenna Lee can look tasty in a tight outfit, there isn't an enhanced model in any age that can rival a woman who's naturally blessed, once the clothes come off. Period. Don't really care how far her bosom extends into the next zip code if it's man made.

I noticed a poll in the BEA Forum on "Best model of the millenium" or other, and after reading the reader responses, elected not to participate. Unless you've been around long enough to realize that all boobies aren't man made, to be aware of women whose names aren't made up by abuting various synonymous for "breasts" with various synonyms for adjectives like "enormous", then how can you really contribute anything but a list of personal favorites?

I'm a breast guy, OK. Make no mistake about it. But, sex symbols were....a lot *SEXIER*... back when some things were left for the imagination, back when taste wasn't a four-letter word. Like some of you, I have favorite sex symbols from all eras--I really began collecting buxotics during the 1980's, so that era holds a particular fondness for me. And honestly, I can't think of another woman I think is more beautiful than Chloe Vevrier, a product of the 1990's. Yet, is there really any doubt that the greatest period in history for we admirers of the pneumatic female form was from the late 1950's to the early 1970's?

Ask film buffs among the boob fancier crowd and they'll mention with particular fervor The Girl (Joy Harmon) from Cool Hand Luke. They'll mention Jayne Mansfield clutching milk bottles to her breasts in The Girl Can't Help It, and Ekberg's dress nearly falling off in La Dolce Vita. They'll mention Marilyn Monroe, and Mamie Van Doren. June Wilkinson. Raquel Welch. Bombshells. Legends.

In the 1950's and 1960's, folks weren't smacked in the face with sex, so it meant something when, God forbid, cleavage was spotted in a movie. Before actresses could make names for themselves by dropping their tops, before nudity was permitted and accepted in mainstream films, buxom women were cast as the very personification of sex--it was electric when Marilyn Monroe wiggled, or Jayne jiggled, or Anita proudly thrust out her bosom.

"Cheesecake" is a term that's thrown about, generally, in reference to risque pinup-type pictures of starlets and other sexy women. Perhaps, given the heavy-handedness of Hollywood's censors during the 1950's and 1960's, it's no coincidence that the defining cheesecake pose is The Profile. Simply, and bluntly put, The Profile is a side-on angle of a big-busted woman, head turned toward the camera.

The question is, why did this pose evolve into the stuff of legend?

Hollywood censors usually made bosomy actresses cover up their "offensive" cleavage, as if it were some sort of portal to debauchery, lust, avarice, greed, dopey, bashful or one of those other seven deadly sins. From this ludicrous notion sprang the development of the bullet bra, which Mamie Van Doren once described as giving boys the impression that girls had breasts shaped like pyramids. Since technically it was exposed skin that bothered the Hayes Commission, which ruled Hollywood with an iron fist during the 1950's, the bullet bra was a perfect solution. It allowed actresses "to become bigger across the room". Padded bras and falsies gave similar effect. It soon became an almost surreal competition to see which rising starlet was actually biggest.

References were made to the phenomenon in such films as Kiss Them For Me, when Jayne Mansfield comes bust to bust with a potential rival who states, "thirty-eight". "Forty", retorts Mansfield, obviously not referring to her age. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Tony Randall's girlfriend, played by Betsy Drake, sports a pair of falsies when she notices Randall fawning over Jayne. Ekberg, in La Dolce Vita, is asked by reporters why she is so successful, and in response, thrusts out her chest, takes a deep breath, and says, "Beacause they discovered I've got great talent!" A favorite scene of mine from Call Me Bwana finds a Russian officer telling Ekberg she was selected for a mission because "I know of know other woman in the world who is...so well..EQUIPPED...for this mission", as he leers at her breasts stretching a sweater to the bursting point.

Stated simply, filmmakers got around the ban on nudity by incorporating lots of gratuitous side shots of stacked actresses in their films. Which brings me back to The Man Inside for a moment. I counted no fewer than a half dozen different scenes and outfits where the bounteous Ekberg and her prodigious profile are on display, with various priceless reactions from the male cast members.

There was an innocence about it all, too. Newspapers routinely published cheesecake photos of pretty, frequently busty, starlets together with their measurements! In our "politically correct" world of 1999, I cannot fathom that happening again in my lifetime. It seemed as though the 1950's and 1960's was an era when women really enjoyed being women, having curves.

Of course, film wasn't the only medium that spawned the Tit Culture and its magnificent images. Men's magazines like Night & Day, Fling, Adam, Modern Man and others introduced grateful readers to the likes of stripteasers and models such as Virginia Bell, Georgia Holden, Paula Page, Rosina Revell, Shane Lorrie and others whose breast size made them "unsuitable" for film but worshipped by an emerging fringe group--breast men. In the 1960's and into the 1970's, a "golden age" of big-breasted models found their way to the pages of the greatest men's mags of the day, women like Joan Brinkman, Janey Reynolds, Lisa Matthews, Michelle Angelo, Uschi Digart, Suzanne Pritchard, Joyce Gibson, Arlene Bell, Lane Weldon, and Roberta Pedon.

These were the days when Russ Meyer, Keith Bernard and Ron Vogel were the leading photographers, and their styles represented the finest the genre has ever seen, for my money. It wasn't long, though, before open-legged shots would make their way into the leading men's magazines, ruining, or at least spoiling, the innocence of it all, and bringing to an end the Golden Age of the Tit Culture.

Now, of course, it's a business. Models almost HAVE to be artificially enhanced--substantially enhanced--to compete in a market of plasticized, pumped up Barbie Dolls. I met Busty Dusty once, and she's a real sweetie, but I doubt that she ever told her surgeon to make her look like Little Annie Fannie because she thought she'd like having breasts that weighed 10 pounds apiece.

Getting back to the "millenium poll" issue again, I suppose it's all in what you like.