Breasts Read online

  When she wore the A-cup bra, she was asked to dance thirteen times. When she wore the B cup, she was asked nineteen times. And when her breasts grew to a size C? Forty-four dance cards.

  In a similar experiment, Miss Elasto-chest tried hitchhiking by the side of the road, also in Brittany, at the height of summer and during the day. In her A-cup incarnation, fifteen men stopped; in her B cup, twenty men; and in her C cup, twenty-four men stopped. When the passing motorists were women, approximately the same number stopped for each cup size. Another study showed that waitresses with larger breasts get bigger tips.

  Steven Platek, an evolutionary neuroscientist from Georgia Gwinnett College, showed college men pictures of breasts while he scanned their brains in an MRI machine. Not so surprisingly, he found the breast images triggered the “reward centers” in the volunteers’ brains. “Most of the images capture the attention of the male so much so that it will distract his mental and cognitive processes in ways that could be dysfunctional in other capacities,” Platek told me. The Urban Dictionary refers to this state as booblivious.

  Okay, so men are distracted by breasts. All of this sounds familiar to us in Western cultures, but there are problems with making sweeping statements about evolution based on studies about male behavior in pubs. For one thing, I am still hung up on the nubility hypothesis, which might as well be called the sag hypothesis. But speaking from personal experience, I can report my breasts actually got bigger and fuller after pregnancy. I really can’t say they are sagging, not yet anyway. I am well past the age of what anthropologists call “peak reproductive value.” Does a man really need breasts to tell him a woman is getting on in years? Aren’t there more obvious signs that don’t require awkward social glances? And as anyone who’s been to a public shower or springtime college campus can tell you, there is an enormous, and I mean enormous, variety of breast sizes and shapes out there. I’m talking 300 to 500 percent differences in volume, and these are in women of roughly the same age. What other body part is so variable, I ask? If breasts were such important communicators, wouldn’t they be more on the same page?

  Further complicating the picture, there is also great variety in men’s tastes. Barnaby conceded that male preferences aren’t as universal as he’d hoped. He expected all men to prefer breasts of a similar size—namely, big. But that doesn’t always happen. In his earlier data from the eye-tracker, which he published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the same number of men preferred medium breasts to large breasts, and some men were most enthusiastic about small breasts. And these were all straight, white men from New Zealand. Other studies have shown that Azande and Ganda tribesmen prefer long and pendulous breasts, whereas the Manus and Maasai prefer more rounded ones. One study found that Western men prefer curvier women during a recession, perhaps for their suggestion of comfort and ample calories. In his own study, Barnaby found that men simply liked staring at all breasts, regardless of size or how attractive the image was rated.

  If breasts serve as such a great signal of a woman’s fitness, so should the areola, posits Barnaby. Younger women who have never had children have lighter areolas, so Barnaby expected men to prefer lighter pigmentation when they rated images in another study. He was surprised to learn that many men like darker, postpregnancy areolar pigment. Similarly, data on preferences for areolar size were all over the map. And while most men seem to like breasts, in many places breasts are merely pedestrian. Not every culture has a Hooters. The nape of the neck is unbearably sexy in Japan. Bootylicious is where it’s at in parts of western Africa and South America. When my son was little, he used to mortify me by going around the house singing a Sir Mix-a-Lot song from the Shrek soundtrack: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.”

  Barnaby knows about these inconsistencies, and they cause him some academic heartburn. But while he acknowledged the data are far from conclusive, he still thinks they hold up. “The amount of visual attention and the amount of evidence that men are attracted to breasts would lead you to think something is going on in evolutionary terms with mate choice and breast morphology.”

  BARNABY IS JUST THE LATEST IN A LONG LINE OF SCIENTISTS WHO have been thinking about how the breasts evolved in step with the male gaze for at least half a century, ever since Desmond Morris published his famous and influential book, The Naked Ape, in 1967. (Morris, a British zoologist, is also known for choreographing the gestures and grunts of the actors in Quest for Fire.) In The Naked Ape, he attempted to explain to a popular audience why humans act the way they do. Describing a prehistoric life very much like the suburban dead-zone of the mid-twentieth century, Morris wrote how out of the Pleistocene emerged “Man the Hunter,” unique among primates, who came home after a hard day of stalking beasts and needed his hearth-bound woman to show him a stimulating set of knockers. Without them, he’d have little inclination to stick around and provision the family. (Never mind that hunter-gatherer women procured most of the daily food for their families; that research came later and Morris still has not adjusted his breast-origin hypothesis.)

  Since Mrs. Mighty Hunter had to be constantly sexy for this scenario to work, she needed a big front-and-center sexual organ different from what all other primates who did not walk upright on two legs had. Those primates signal sexual readiness, their estrus, with swollen buttocks or labia. “Can we,” asked Morris, “if we look at the frontal regions of the females of our species, see any structures that might possibly be mimics of the ancient display of hemispherical buttocks and red labia? The answer stands out as clearly as the female bosom itself. The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia.”

  I may never again think of lipstick the same way.

  Today, The Naked Ape reads like an embarrassing manifesto of male dominance, presented at exactly the same time the women’s lib movement was heating up. Just as Linnaeus appeared to be pushing a political agenda in naming us Mammalia (nudging women to act more maternal during the Enlightenment), perhaps Morris was too. On the other hand, maybe Linnaeus and Morris and the whole lot of them were really just breast men.

  Clearly, many anthropologists love breasts. In textbook illustrations and museum dioramas, they always seem to depict the latest evolutionary “missing links” with breasts, despite zero fossil evidence for this. Ardi? Lucy? Breasts and more breasts. Even Mrs. Bigfoot is often drawn with a comely pair. We all know men like Morris; there are lots and lots of them. But there are also some leg men out there, like my husband, God bless him. In any case, the science of sexual attraction has been marked by fierce debate and bald accusations of cultural bias that continue to this day.

  Try telling some feminist anthropologists that breasts exist because of men, and you might get whacked in the head by a rubber Australopithecus pelvis. Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer, wrote an entire, rather delicious book refuting Morris and his ilk, called The Descent of Woman. In it, she thoroughly debunked the notion that the needs of the male drove every clever anatomical adaptation in human ancestors, including breasts. “I find the whole yarn pretty incredible,” she wrote. “Desmond Morris, pondering on the shape of a woman’s breasts, instantly deduces that they evolved because her mate became a Mighty Hunter, and defends this preposterous proposition with the greatest ingenuity. There’s something about the Tarzan figure which has them all mesmerized.”

  Frances Mascia-Lees, a Rutgers University anthropologist, told me she thinks the scholarship over the past fifty years on breasts and attraction has been a colossal waste of time. “When you talk about the old guys, the same arguments are still being made. They will not die under any circumstance. But when it comes to finding a mate and having children, breast size does not matter, even though many advertisers and plastic surgeons might love us all to think so,” she said.

  She pointed to a number of holes in the breasts-as-sex-signals theory of origin. If big, firm breasts tell a man that a
woman is fertile and ready for sex, then why would her breasts be biggest and firmest when she’s already pregnant or lactating? Why is there such huge variation in human breast size and shape, and why are so many women with tiny breasts spectacularly successful at nursing, childbirth, and child-rearing?

  Although I hate to admit it, I couldn’t help wondering if Mascia-Lees herself has tiny breasts and if that had influenced her contrarian worldview. So I asked her, and it turns out she has the opposite problem. She’s a 36DD. When she entered graduate school in 1981, her department consisted of fifteen men and one woman. The American obsession with breasts was annoyingly evident. “Having big breasts meant you were highly sexualized by men,” she said. “It was a prickly issue for me trying to be taken seriously as an intellectual.” At the time, the Mighty Hunter theory was everywhere. He drove the evolution of the bigger brain, speech, social behavior, bipedalism, the use of tools, and so on. It rankled. It got her thinking. In a sweet-vengeance counter-scenario, Mascia-Lees and others instead argue that it’s just as likely the female drove these developments, through lactation and the unique demands of the human infant. Just suppose for a moment, gentlemen of the academy, that breasts evolved because she needed them, not because her club-wielding cave man did.

  Mascia-Lees argues that breasts evolved through natural selection, not sexual selection. It seems perfectly reasonable, if not more reasonable, to suppose there was something about having breasts that increased the fitness of the woman and her offspring in what Darwin plaintively calls the “struggle for existence.” Male interest, if it even exists universally, was secondary. She posits that breasts helped increase a woman’s fat reserves, even if just by a few percentage points. In the poor or unpredictable environment of our early evolution (such as the open plains with their greatly fluctuating temperatures), those extra fat depots could have made the difference in being able to sustain pregnancy and lactation. Humans need to store more fat than other primates because they don’t have fur to keep them warm. On top of that, pregnant humans need to mobilize more fat to keep pace with their pudgy babies, whose big brains need specialized stores of long-chain fatty acids. Consequently, women’s bodies are designed in such a way that they don’t even ovulate unless a body-fat threshold has been crossed. On average, reproductive-age women store twice the fat that men do.

  But why store fat in the breasts and not, say, the elbow? Mascia-Lees has a good explanation for this. Fat and cholesterol make estrogen. Mammary glands are filled with estrogen-sensitive cells. We have more estrogen than other primates simply because we’re relatively fatter. Here’s the sequence: we needed to be fatter at puberty and beyond to produce human infants; our fat made estrogen, and estrogen made our breasts grow because the tissues there are so attuned to it.

  In Mascia-Lees’s account, breasts are merely “by-products of fat deposition.” She admitted her theory is not nearly as testable, or as sexy, as that of the Morris crowd. But that’s the point. “I’ve tried to show that my assumptions are more firmly grounded,” she said, “and not just the same cultural assumptions we have now projected back into evolutionary history.”

  Maybe because I’ve never had the sort of chest that men stare at, I’m more willing to consider alternative theories of origin. And there are lots. One thing making it tricky is that, unlike the opposable thumb, breasts leave no fossil record. There’s no way of knowing exactly when the well-endowed rack appeared in human evolution. Was it before bipedalism or after? Before we lost our fur? Pretty much all of the theories accounting for breasts, Mascia-Lees’s and the Dixsons’ included, are best categorized as SWAG, scientific wild-ass guesses.

  SINCE BREASTS ARE CATCHMENTS OF OUR COLLECTIVE AND individual fantasies, it makes sense that not even scientists are immune from their charms. When we consider the mysterious origin of this fine fleshy organ, breasts become easy metaphors for whatever we desire, from buttocks to political hegemony. One desert zoologist sees in breasts the camel’s hump, an adaptation that allows us to survive in arid climates through fluid and fat storage. To feminists, the breast story is a parable of self-determination.

  There are plenty of other entertaining, if far-fetched breastorigin stories. Wrote Henri de Mondeville, the surgeon to King Philippe le Bel of France in the early fourteenth century, “The reasons why the breasts of women are on the chest, whereas other animals more often have them elsewhere, are of three kinds. First, the chest is a noble notable and chaste place and thus they can be decently shown. Secondly, warmed by the heart, they return their warmth to it so that this organ strengthens itself. The third reason applies only to big breasts which, by covering the chest, warm, cover, and strengthen the stomach.”

  In 1840, one physician speculated that fatty breasts warm the milk and “enable women of the lower class to bear the very severe blows which they often receive in their drunken pugilistic contests.” He’d perhaps been reading a few too many Gothic novels.

  More recently, an Israeli researcher posited that fatty breasts are needed to help the upright female maintain her balance. Otherwise, her fatty bottom would tip her backward. My sister-in-law says this is certainly the reason in her case.

  Elaine Morgan, the Welsh critic, has buttressed her own breast theories with some astute anatomical observations. She notes that when our ancestors lost their fur, babies faced some new challenges. Other tiny primates cling to their mother’s fur from a very early age. Mom is free to swing from the trees and dig up ants, even while junior breast-feeds. No such luck for humans. We have to hold our little urchins, and the best place for that is the crook of our arm. Even then, though, the nipple still needs to come down a bit to baby. The pendulous breast came to the rescue. Then, once the human baby’s hands were free from clutching, they could gesture. An important form of expression evolved and helped make us who we are.

  The whole enterprise is greatly assisted by a flexible, unmoored nipple. As Morgan puts it, the brilliantly shaped human breast “ensures that the nipple is no longer anchored tightly to the ribs, as they are in monkeys. The skin of the breast around the nipple becomes more loosely fitting to make it more manoeuvrable, leaving space beneath the looser skin to be occupied by glandular tissue and fat. Adult males find the resulting species-specific contours sexually stimulating, but the instigator and first beneficiary of the change was the baby.”

  I can wholly affirm that it would be very awkward to breastfeed without a nice moveable feast of a nipple. British anthropologist Gillian Bentley of the University of Durham was nursing her own child when another anatomical light bulb went off: it was our skull shape that drove the ontogeny of rounded breasts. One of the major distinguishing features between us and other primates, indeed between us and most mammals, is our lack of anything resembling a snout. There could be a couple of reasons for this. One is that we have different jaw and teeth structures, the better for eating a varied diet, including cooked meats, which means we don’t need huge mandibles to rip apart raw flesh. Another is that we have humongous brains and, at birth, relatively large heads, five times the size of what you’d expect in a primate our size. But in order for newborns to get through our unusually narrow bipedal hips, their faces need to be flat, said Bentley. Flat faces and flat chests don’t work well together. Think of kissing a mirror; if the baby’s face had to smoosh against a flat chest, it wouldn’t be able to breathe through its nose. (Now here you might be clever and ask, as I did, Why didn’t evolution instead come up with a different place for the nose, say, near the ear? In fact, why are all mammal noses between the eyes and mouth? The answer has to do with our primitive, born-from-fish infrastructure, a template we’re not free to mess with. No doubt it was easier for our genes to tinker with the breast instead.) Thanks to round breasts, we can be smarter.

  I started reading more about heads and necks, and I learned about a unique human feature called basicranial flexion. That’s how we bend where our neck meets our head, and it is different in us than in anyone else. Human babies,
let’s not forget, cannot hold their heads up. We may be the only mammal that can’t do this. We have unusually big heads, and we also have necks, the better for growing a laryngeal cavity so that we can speak. A newborn must be held in order to breast-feed (because we have no fur for him to grab), and his head must be supported, or else his delicate larynx tube, also called a neck, would break. All the more reason why it might be helpful to have a nipple that can come down to the baby. It’s a theory, but I like it: thanks to pendulous breasts, we can speak.

  Other primates also have fleshy breasts while nursing, but without the permanent fat pad they’re not quite as enlarged or as round. What’s appealing about these woman-centered theories for the breast is that they make some attempt to understand how the organ actually works. The boobs-for-men theories do not.

  This is what flummoxes Dan Sellen. He’s an anthropologist specializing in nutrition and ecology at the University of Toronto. “Most anthropologists don’t study the breast. They have no idea what it does,” he told me. “There’s a whole industry of folks looking at mate choice, and sure, breasts attract males, but that’s different from saying their primary function is to attract mates.” Furthermore, he says, “it seems really odd that of all the mammals who have mammary glands, we’d be the only one where the appendage is sexually selected. That would be adding a new function to the breast that’s absent from every other mammal.”