Rooting for Steve-O’s Boob Job

I’ve been thinking a lot about an old episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, a televised sideshow from the early aughts that featured all sorts of unusual oddities, like a pool-playing dog and a man who covered himself in a full-body blanket of bees. This particular episode, which aired in 2001, featured a high-stakes gambler and magician named Brian Zembic who, in 1996, got breast implants as part of a $100,000 bet with a friend, the only stipulation of which being that he keep them in for a full calendar year. He collected his earnings but then opted not to remove them. As recently as last year, he still had the implants.

My hazy, long-forgotten preteen memories of Zembic, who also appeared on Inside Edition and The Man Show around the same time, came rushing back this summer after I heard about a different man who was planning to get a boob job. In July, Steve-O announced that he would undergo breast augmentation as part of an upcoming stunt. I found the news to be shocking at first, but less surprising the more I thought about it; the masochistic Jackass star has built an entire career off of hurtling himself into what most consider to be taboo, from stapling his ballsack to his leg during a televised interview to vomiting on himself while strapped inside “the fart mask,” a device whose mechanics I’d rather not unpack here. I’d found the prospect fascinating and even joked with friends that “Steve-O getting breast implants” might be the most interesting thing to happen to gender in who knows how many years.

Since 2022, Steve-O has been quite open about wanting to get breast implants, broaching the idea in a series of podcast interviews, first with Dr. Terry Dubrow, the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and star of Botched and The Swan, and then with Doctor Mike, a physician and popular YouTuber. While speaking with Doctor Mike, Steve-O acknowledged the political statement inherent to the stunt, noting that there’s “a healthy dose of ‘my body, my choice’ [to it], which I believe in.” But curiosity was what drove him most of all, as well as a bit of Promethean thrill-seeking. “As a heterosexual male who identifies as male, does just going to get a boob job all of a sudden mean I can’t post pictures on Instagram with my shirt off?” he asked, adding that it’s also about “confronting middle age — the deterioration of my body in particular. With the boobs, I was horrified to see in the mirror that I am officially developing man titties and have, already, that distinct under boob. [I’m] lashing out at the god that allowed that to happen.” If he’s going to have breasts anyway, he concluded, he’s “going to have big ol’ titties.”

Two years later, Steve-O finally decided to put his plan into action. In an interview with the hosts of the X5 Podcast released in July, he revealed that he’d booked his surgery date with an unnamed, world-class surgeon and that he planned to remove the implants after two or three months. A clip from the episode went viral on TikTok and spurred media coverage from E! and Entertainment Weekly. After watching the interview clip during one of my daily “For You” page scrolls, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, partially because I didn’t understand why he’d settled on an under-the-muscle augmentation. As a woman who underwent over-the-muscle a little over five years ago, I can personally confirm that recovery from the latter is not only faster but far less painful, something I’d think would be preferable for Steve-O if he’s only going to keep them in for a short time. (Then again, this is a man who once covered himself in jet fuel and lit himself on fire. The pain might be the point.) For the most part, though, I was obsessed with the stunt’s implication that in an era of intense hostility toward gender nonconformity, the most shocking thing that you could do — that one of our foremost thrill seekers could think to do — would be to render your sex more illegible. That a man with breasts remains as taboo now as it was at the time of Zembic’s bet, despite being far more common than the binary would have us believe.

Last year alone, more than 23,000 breast reductions were performed on male patients to treat gynecomastia, a term that translates to “female breasts.” (The presence of such tissue has been deemed so aberrant as to warrant a medical diagnosis.) Procedures of this nature are popular among cis men and boys, accounting for nearly one-fifth of all cosmetic surgeries performed on male patients in 2023. So, too, are they popular among their transmasculine counterparts: An extensive, though admittedly dated, survey conducted by the National Center for Trans Equality in 2015 found that more than one-third of trans men had undergone some form of top surgery and that the vast majority of the remaining two-thirds hoped to do so as well; a more recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association similarly found that breast and chest surgeries were the most common kinds of gender-affirming procedures undergone by trans patients of any gender. Steve-O’s procedure, on the other hand, reflected none of these trends. That incongruence, I thought, was exciting. Perhaps it signaled some kind of chaotically body-modified future to come, less bound by gendered expectations than our present. Or maybe, and more likely, I found it so exciting because of how it rebelled against where American society is heading, at least in the immediate future — a wrench in the gears of whatever cursed machine keeps pumping out the Vances and tradwives.

Learning the details of the actual stunt itself, however, undercut my excitement. In a recent episode of his podcast, Wild Ride, Steve-O detailed how he might put his new rack to use: He’d cover his face and bare his breasts and then, after attracting the attention of some eager onlookers, reveal his true identity, either by uncovering his face or by saying something bro-y with a deep voice. It would essentially be one big gotcha, like, “Made you get a boner for a dude,” a bait and switch that traffics in the same transmisogyny found in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; Dude, Where’s My Car?; and other popular comedies from a generation past. The punch line to this humor ridicules trans women as a failed simulacrum of womanhood while also painting us as deceptive and therefore deserving of the violence that many of us endure from male partners, who may simply claim we tricked them and get away scot-free. (According to the Movement Advancement Project, the “trans panic” legal defense remains a permissible excuse for assault and murder in 30 states.)

My enthusiasm for the stunt began to fade. And right on time, so did its likelihood. The plan started to unravel in July, two months after the initial announcement, when Steve-O’s anesthesiologist pulled out of the procedure only ten hours before it was scheduled to take place. According to Steve-O, the doctor didn’t want to be tied to such a sensationalized spectacle. “That kind of set off a chain reaction where [other members of the medical team] didn’t want to be associated with it anymore, and they were having trouble finding another surgery center to make it happen,” Steve-O told Consequence in September, the same interview in which he confirmed that he would no longer pursue a breast augmentation. Even after the string of cancellations, he told the outlet he had intended to still go through with the procedure. That was until a fateful conversation with a trans woman fan of his opened his eyes to the stunt’s potential impact. They “described how they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom at their place of work,” he recounted, along with other risks they face on a daily basis. “Ultimately, it would be an exercise in celebrating violence against trans people. At least, it would be interpreted that way by some, and when it was put to me that way, I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I missed the mark on that one.’” He concluded the interview by saying that he’d called off the stunt. Steve-O, one of our greatest living practitioners of the concept of bodily autonomy, known for hurling his body toward all sorts of inadvisable extremes, had finally met his match. I was as shocked to hear the news as I was relieved.

Not to be like, “Here’s how Steve-O can still get a boob job without it being transphobic,” but I wonder how else this stunt-that-never-was could have transpired. He made the right decision — I’m not debating that — but I keep going back to how long he’s been talking about wanting to get his breasts done. Could framing the procedure as a stunt have made it slightly more acceptable, less taboo, for him to actually go through with it? Were the implants just a means of achieving provocation, or was that provocation his way of justifying the surgery — a surgery that men, broadly speaking, do not get? I don’t know that his thwarted breast augmentation would have amounted to any great victory, as much as I enjoyed his direct flirtation with “my body, my choice” politics, but I don’t think it needed to be. I don’t even know that it needed to be a full-blown stunt at all.

Take Zembic, for instance, who, despite the occasional media interview every half-decade or so, seems to feel as contentedly ambivalent about mainstream attention as he does about his 38C chest. “They’ll fall apart, sooner or later, or they might last,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in March of last year. “At my age, I don’t care. I got my kid. I do what I want to do. I’ve got my few friends. I used to do magic, stuff to impress the world. Now it means the world to me if I impress one or two friends.” As of that interview’s publication, he still hadn’t removed his implants. Perhaps it’s because of the $10,000 he continues to receive annually for every year that he doesn’t take them out, but I don’t think that money can explain away things entirely. As for what that reason might be, I don’t know, and frankly, I hope I never find out. His engagement with plastic surgery is a mystery to me, neither fitting into any clear-cut narrative around aesthetic preference or gender affirmation, nor aligning with what industry trends would tell us men want when it comes to their chests. It’s illegible to outsiders and totally incongruent with anyone’s narrative but his own, whatever that might be. And in the era of everyone trying to be the main character, compulsively posting every thought that runs through their head, this lack of clarity might just be the most shocking part of all of it — or, at least, it’s more shocking and far more subversive than simply trying to trick people into thinking some dude is a lady.