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Breasts. Love ‘em.

Always have. Don’t know why.

Most guys would leave it at that. We assume breasts are linked to sexual attraction, reproduction and light beer sales. Beyond that, who cares? Just keep ‘em coming.

But think about it – breasts are really just sacs of fat. (I know, you might not want to think about this. But they don’t call me Whiskers for nothing.) The bigger they are, the more breasts impede women from running, jumping and otherwise escaping from lions. When they get old, breasts sag. And though they’re erogenous zones for the woman, they play no fundamental role in sex.

So why do boobs possess such potent magic over us men that we literally – scientifically – can’t keep our eyes off of them?

FYI: Plenty of men are immune to this siren song and instead prefer butts, legs and a litany of other female body parts. This article is not for them. Nor is it for homosexual men, I’d wager. And while homosexual women might find this interesting, I have to apologize that this particular post has no answers for them. Maybe next time!  

Hey, I’m Up Here

In a study using cameras and mirrors to track eye movements, researchers in New Zealand found that 80% of men’s “first fixations” were on the breasts and midriff when presented with images of women. And even after that first peep was taken, men consistently returned to stare at a woman’s breasts more than any other body part. (Less than 20% first looked at a woman’s face.)

This is not an excuse for creeping. It just highlights how breasts become black holes for men’s attention. It also explains why we lose track of the plot when Sofia Vergara’s Modern Family character “Gloria” enters the scene. (No offense to the very hot Julie Bowen, but Vergara’s cleavage seems to possess a sort of gravitational force.) But why? Remember, breasts are simply skin and fat and milk ducts. Which makes cleavage simply skin, fat, milk ducts and shadow.

One common explanation of the bosom’s sovereignty was that bigger breasts were indicators of higher levels of estrogen and better odds of reproduction. Despite all the modern reasons we have sex, let’s remember it’s primarily to advance our genes, propagate the species and blah blah blah. Thus a big-breasted woman is most likely to give a man offspring, thereby fulfilling his biological purpose. (Of course, most guys I know are doing everything they can to fulfill their biological cravings without actually fulfilling their biological purpose, but that’s another article.)

But there’s a catch. Not a single other mammal has swollen breasts outside of pregnancy. Not elephants, not raccoons, not grizzly bears nor snoring dormice. Not even chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives. (What about a cow’s utters, you say. They’re only like that when they’re lactating.) What’s more, breast size is not an accurate indicator of milk production – sending us back to the drawing board.

Bringing in the Big Guns – Desmond Morris

Want to see the human race in a different light? Try the zoologist’s point of view provided in Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. Morris tackles monogamy, clothes, swimming, meat-eating – how spanking a child mimics sexual subservience and power structure in primates, why most acts of aggression within other species end before murder and how modern human weapons make violence self-perpetuating. It’ll rock your world.

Coming back to the topic of breasts – see how you ache after a single paragraph of absence? – Morris posits our affinity has everything to do with the Missionary Position. And maybe monogamy.

To sum it up, most other mammals (and primates) do it doggy-style. In other words, the male mounts the female from behind. That means sexual signals are displayed so a male can detect them from the rear. The classic example of this is the colorful and positively painful-looking swelling of the female baboon’s rump.

Now consider that across cultures, humans primarily do it face-to-face. This allows each party to look into the eyes of the other, use their mouths to kiss, neck and nuzzle, their hands to caress. And Morris associates this with the pair bond, “Face-to-face sex is personalized sex.” I.e., better sex gives the male motivation not to stray and keep providing and the female a reason to only reproduce with this particular male. (Witness the transition from one male lording over a harem of females to the family model.)

Of course, humans are creative creatures and we’ve concocted volumes of new ways to put a penis in a vagina – and whole lot of other things. Sexual variation, Morris suggests, simply reinforces the pair bond: “The more the better, in fact, because this will increase the complexity of the sexual act, increase sexual novelty, and prevent sexual boredom between members of a long-mated pair.”

That’s right, you just got an anthropologist’s permission to get freaky. 

Let’s Talk Ta Ta’s

At some point in our evolutionary history, hominids transitioned from doggy-style to face-to-face, presumably to reinforce the pair bond. (Missionary and the other face-to-face positions also mean more clitoral stimulation for the lady, yet another reason for her to stick around.) But let’s not forget we weren’t always bipedal. Like baboons, we were once deeply responsive to doggy-style signals like swollen buttocks and flushed-red labia. So if we were to be persuaded to shift to missionary, some of those indicators would have to start pointing in a different direction. Or showing up somewhere else entirely.

“The answer stands out as clearly as the female bosom itself,” says Morris, presumably in a creepy British voice. “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.”

Translation? Human males tend to prefer large breasts and supple lips because they took over the job of swollen buttocks and engorged vaginal lips, which we are less likely to see now that we walk upright and flirt – then fornicate – face-to-face.

Side note: maybe knowledge of this association will do something to kill the trend of pouty lips on Facebook?

Just the Tip

So that’s one answer. It’s a good one, a widely accepted one, but there’s really no way to definitively explain why men like the ta ta’s. But fear not, intrepid internet traveler, that doesn’t mean we won’t try. (Triple negative translation: I will not forsake this all-too-important quest.)

Next time, we’ll talk about Frank Marlowe’s “Nubility Hypothesis,” honesty, pedophilia, little cones and the origin of the word “boobs.”

Oh, and if you want to learn more about the transition from that Bloodhound Gang song to “personalized sex,” you might want to rent Quest For Fire - it’s Ron Perlman at his finest.

 

Question submitted by Joe Dirt