"I can always make a pretty butt even prettier."

Says the buttock-augmenting plastic surgeon.

Last year 2,361 Americans had buttock augmentation surgery, almost four times as many as in 2002, the first year that the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery kept statistics on the procedure. The operation typically costs about $20,000....

Some women over 50 get the surgery to bulk up deflating derrières, while younger patients say they want larger buttocks to complement prominent busts. "I always got compliments for my front but never for my back," said Natalie Del Rio, 18, a high school student in Miami who had the procedure last month with Dr. Mendieta. "Now my mom says I look like a Coca-Cola bottle."

Presumably, the mother put up the money for all of this. What kind of a culture does this girl live in that she fretted that no one was talking about her ass?

Go to the link to read about the elaborate procedure that involves relocating two pounds of your own fat and that requires you to wear a "surgical girdle" and to avoid sitting down for weeks. All of this is supposed to make you more sexually attractive, but you have to be extremely pleasure-denying to go through with it. Well, what's the point of sex without irony?

And then there's the whole question of what the ideal ass is:

Two Mexican plastic surgeons, Dr. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra and Dr. Jorge Quezada, examined 132 patients and more than 1,000 photos and concluded that a beautiful bottom has four features: slight hollows on each side, a curved fold where the buttocks meet the thighs, a V-shape crease that looks like cleavage at the top and two dimples in the lower back. Dr. [Constantino] Mendieta also examined hundreds of photos but came to a different conclusion: that the overall shape of the buttocks is most important. He proposed that female buttocks come in four basic configurations: square, round, V-shape and A-shape.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous, the doctor who collects $20,000 for injecting a small bucket of fat into your ass had damned well better have done a lot of hard thinking about what shape he's after. And you'd better think it through carefully before going through the ordeal.