I love irony, and I love Stephen Colbert — he’s the son I never had. But sometimes, irony is too subtle; people don’t catch it and end up taking what they see and hear at face value, maybe even as an endorsement.

I think this is the case with a recent segment on the Colbert Report about myfreeimplants.com. That terrible website allows women to create profiles of themselves and communicate with men willing to “help them with their self-esteem” by “donating” a certain amount of money per communication to her implant fund, and apparently the more sexy pictures a woman uses, the more likely she will reach her goal.

The Colbert Report segment features the young man who founded myfreeimplants.com, his friends, and a few of the women who financed their implants through the site. To my mind, these young people — who evidently spend a lot of time in bars and subscribe to the idea that every woman needs a good pair of breasts to be socially successful and valuable — appear laughably thoughtless and superficial. Unfortunately, in an MTV and Maxim world, they are representative of how many many young people think these days, among whom the Colbert Report is very popular. Now, I know that Stephen Colbert is highly intelligent, and while it’s not likely that he’s done his research on the dangers of implants, I know in my gut that he personally doesn’t think very highly of them. But does his audience?

I wish, I wish — oh, how I wish! — the show had done just a little research and thrown in a closing zinger about painful, missile-hard breasts and/or how plastic surgeons are getting rich from re-operations!

Thank you, Feminist Peace Network, for writing about it or I would have missed it, and for calling for people to protest to Comedy Central. I urge all our friends to do so, here.