When and How Did We Become Obsessed With Breasts? The Answer Will Surprise You
It’s far from a hot take, but men love boobs.
To a straight guy, the sexual appeal of the female breast feels like a biological urge as strong as the need to eat or sleep. But is it? The reason why a few pounds of fatty tissue attached to the front of the female body are so bewitching has confounded anthropologists and biologists since Adam and Eve first realized they were naked and covered up in shame.
Do men love boobs because of ancient hardwiring deep in the limbic system or have centuries of taboos and the excitement of the illicit sexualized them? It’s time to find out.
Firstly, it helps to know exactly what a breast is. Lactation has been around since the Triassic period, when some animals started secreting a proto-lacteal fluid to keep eggs moist. Scientists think it gradually evolved into a nutrient-rich milk, which reduced the dependence of a large yolk in the prehistoric egg and became a new way for mothers to pass nutrients and immune antibodies to the developing fetus that’s a defining characteristic of most mammals.
And if we ignore humans for a minute, that’s all a breast is – a milk delivery system with no sexual function or associations. But some time between five and 13 million years ago, when we last shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzee, something else changed. The breasts of human females swelled with the onset of sexual maturity, remaining prominent not just throughout her reproductive cycle but her life, persisting even beyond sexual fertility (menopause) altogether.
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We’ve all seen the teats of pets or monkeys in wildlife documentaries grow large and pendulous when the creature’s in season or nursing, but outside estrus, breast tissue shrinks and all but disappears, seeming to confirm that breasts in other animals aren’t sexually appealing in themselves, they’re just a feature that accompanies the flood of sexual receptivity pheromones that drive nearby males wild.
What changed is the human breast became a sexual signaling device. The human body is covered with them, from shaggy beards that reveal rugged, mature masculinity to full, red female lips.
Zoologist Desmond Morris’ work in the 60s promoted a theory that breasts evolved to become permanent and lips evolved to become redder and more noticeable as a way of reminding potential mates of the welcoming swell of female buttocks and the tantalizing vulva between them, sights we used to enjoy when we mated on all fours but stopped seeing when our bipedal ancestors started mating face to face.
Morris’ ideas are still disputed, but they certainly confirm the importance of secondary sex characteristics – traits that signal maturity, fertility or receptivity to mating but which play no functional part in making babies.
A Cultural Shift
Today, humans change more (and faster) through cultural rather than biological evolution, and centuries of social mores have shaped us as much as innate drives. “Breasts are sexualized not simply because they’re socially taboo, but because they sit at the intersection of biology, attraction, and culture,” says Amy Color, founder of The Intimacy Game Plan.
And despite how sexually permissive society seems today, those taboos persist. Back in 2004, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl halftime show got so much media attention you’d think she’d professed a love for Al Qaeda rather than accidentally flash the crowd. Free the Nipple protesters were arrested for indecent exposure outside a Bernie Sanders campaign rally as recently as 2016.
Clearly, the patriarchy is as horrified as it is fascinated, equating breasts inextricably with sex and sexuality to the extent even the original/intended purpose is frowned upon in polite society. “In America, breasts became so sexualized that breastfeeding has become very sexualized as well, so much so that breastfeeding in public is often extremely controversial,” says clinical psychologist and sex/intimacy coach Dr Lori Beth Bisbey.
In fact, the pervasive cultural narrative that breasts are sexual objects has been going on so long we might actually mistake it for a biological imperative. Canadian science journalist Patchen Barss’ 2011 book The Erotic Engine argues communication technologies from cave paintings to social media have been partly driven by the eroticization of bodies.
Look no further than the Venus of Willendorf, the stone figure discovered in Austria in 1908 that dates back to 28,000 BCE. The cartoonishly oversized booty and boobs of the unnamed 11cm tall lady spoke volumes about life in a time of extreme scarcity. Heavy, fatty boobs probably meant she was uncommonly well fed (and thus a better reproductive bet).
And if straight guys have been fantasizing about eye popping racks since caveman days, that’s a long time for the sexualization of the female breast to become the cultural rather than the biological norm.
But there’s a caveat. The obsession with sexualizing breasts isn’t universal. The US body politic is a hotbed of conflicting signals, home to both the pornographic film industry and conservative religious movements with strict tenets about modesty and celibacy.
By contrast, a lot of Nordic countries are far more relaxed in their attitudes to sex and nudity, and (crucially) nudity is more often depicted in non-sexual terms. TV and advertising from Sweden, Denmark, etc. contain casual depictions of nudity you’d never see on American TV.
What’s more, a study from 2012 in The Archives of Sexual Behavior said Argentinean men actually prefer female bottoms to breasts. It might adhere to a stereotype about Latina women, but it suggests such preferences are set in part by cultural norms – if you grow up with guys all around you loving booties (reinforced by the advertising and media you’re exposed to), you will too.
But here’s the kicker. Human beings are so successful as a species partly because of how adaptable we are. New patterns of behavior became second nature fast if they gave us a survival advantage, and so the cultural can actually become the biological.
“Living in a modern world where we’re exposed to the sexualization of breasts isn’t just cultural, it’s neurological,” says Dr Doug Weiss, a licensed psychologist and Executive Director of the Heart to Heart Counseling Center. “When we masturbate to an image or fantasy the brain rewards that image with the highest chemical reward your body can produce. Breasts are usually a significant part of this masturbation reward cycle, and after thousands of reinforcement behaviors, you’ve hijacked your sexual template to give breasts a favorable neurological response.”
Diff’rent Strokes
All that might apply to you if you’re the average straight dude in the modern industrialized West. But you’re not all there is in maledom.
The authoritative 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behavior talks about how breasts were considered sexually important in only 13 out of 191 societies, making a point to mention how absent breast taboos are in subsistence societies where women are usually topless in day to day life. The authors also found that only 13 cultures used breast stimulation during sex – and not even the same 13 mentioned above.
In the 1995 book Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler talked about how friends in tribes she’d studied in Mali, West Africa, reacted to the idea of breast stimulation as foreplay to sex with anything from bemusement to horror.
Varied responses to practices even apply to behaviors you’d think are universal. Who, for instance, doesn’t love a deeply steamy French kiss? In his 2016 book Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior, Dr. Justin Garcia, current executive director of the Kinsey Institute, the pioneering sexual research center that goes back to the work of Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, writes,
‘…let’s first consider the role of kissing. Kissing occurs in some societies but was traditionally absent in East Asian culture, for example; Asians’ responses to first encounters of Europeans kissing varied from bewilderment to disgust.’
And in an even weirder phenomenon, there’s a claim the love of boobs isn’t only regional but political. Back around 2018 a movement started online claiming the preference for breasts versus butts was a right-wing trait.
It was a meme rather than credible scientific research, but it was nevertheless driven by a cultural trend. The sexual appeal of butts took off in the late 90s and early 2000s thanks partly to fetishization in rap music and urban black culture, so if you were a straight young guy who wanted to be cool, you had to be a butt man because it automatically put you at odds with your square/conservative parents, with breasts relegated to being their favorite sexual appendage, thus becoming a red state emblem.
A stretch? Maybe, but we can’t deny sexualizing female body parts goes through fads and is therefore strongly cultural in nature.
Every Body
But biology won’t be dislodged from the love of breasts completely. Despite the myriad differences in size, sensitivity, nipple position and much more, every human female breast on Earth has the same machinery and function. There’s no correlation between the variables listed above and the volume of milk production, how easy a time you’ll have breastfeeding, how likely you are to get breast cancer, etc.
There’s also no correlation between those variables and sensitivity to sexual stimulus. “Many women have more sensitivity at different times in their cycles, like sensitive and painful breasts during their periods,” says Bisbey. “Some report a heightened sexual response at different times in their cycle, or times where they absolutely don’t want their breasts touched because they’re too sensitive. It also changes from all sorts of things including pregnancy, menopause, illness or age.”
But common threads remain. A flat chest tells a potential suitor a mate is too young to conceive or (in proto-human times, at least) doesn’t have the body fat/health to bear offspring. Breasts impacted by gravity and age might tell him she’s past her reproductive prime.
And with that, we’re back to the question of why women’s boobs remain throughout their lives (changes from hormones and gravity notwithstanding).
Here’s one theory. Human beings have the longest period of infant development in the animal kingdom. When other baby animals are already out learning to hunt ours can’t even walk. Nature had to give two parents a compelling reason to stay together beyond just a quickie in the bushes to raise their kids to independence.
That’s leading us into territory about why the pair bond itself evolved (more below), but a more mundane reason might be that if the bosom her man loves so much disappeared when she wasn’t ovulating or nursing, he might look elsewhere.
In fact, other studies have confirmed that regardless of a woman’s size, sexual appreciation for her figure by straight males adheres to quite strict proportions around breast-waist-hip ratios.
Even then, men don’t get all the fun – boobs are sometimes sexual for their owners as well. Pioneering sex researchers Masters & Johnson found breast volume increases and areola are engorged during sexual arousal, and in 2004 a study found the owners of bigger boobs had increased levels of a hormone that might raise fertility, lending weight to the idea nature tricks men into loving bigger breasts because their owners have a higher chance of conceiving.
Then there are the three sensory maps in the female brain that light up during masturbation – one for the vagina, one for the cervix and one for the clitoris. When the nipples are stimulated, all three areas activate.
My Chemical Romance
But just like we’re buffeted by the four winds of biological and cultural evolution, we’re also enslaved to neurochemicals that react to and dictate moods, and one of the biggest when it comes to anything sexual is the bonding hormone oxytocin. Production of oxytocin in the hypothalamus peaks during childbirth, lactation, sexual arousal and orgasm, so it plays a big role in making ladies feel in love with both their baby and their mate.
When her nipples are stimulated during breastfeeding, a surge of oxytocin focuses attention and deepens the affection toward her baby. But after what we learned above – that nipple stimulation activates the brain maps for clitoral or vaginal stimulation – a lover sexually kissing or touching her breast triggers a similar surge, likewise focusing attention on him.
How did this translate to a straight male fixation on breasts? Maybe guys who learned to please her sexually by stimulating her breasts and prompting the emotional bonding from the resulting oxytocin edged less attentive lovers out of the gene pool over the eons.
Emory University professor of psychiatry Larry Young thinks nature simply coopted the neural architecture designed to strengthen the mother-infant breastfeeding bond and applied it to sexual partners to strengthen their bond too, which makes it a hop, step and jump to men loving boobs as much as babies do.
But the link exists in a woman’s brain-breast circuitry too, with some women reporting intense pleasure, sexual arousal and even orgasm from breastfeeding, and some women being able to orgasm from sexual breast stimulation from a partner alone.
All of which means the breast appears uniquely attuned to pleasure and bonding, with hormonal states priming it for intimacy between lovers and babies alike in different contexts. As Dr. Weiss puts it: “Even without cultural sexualization breasts would have deep neurological and psychological meanings and attachments.”
Even more in favor of breast-worship-as-biology is the fact that the sexual response to breast stimulation isn’t the sole domain of women – or even humans. Several other species including the bonobo (our other close evolutionary cousin along with the chimp) have been observed stimulating their own nipples while masturbating, and a Journal of Sexual Medicine study from 2006 discovered 51.7 percent of men in the UK were aroused by nipple stimulation.
All of which points to one conclusion. The reason why (and how) breasts became sexual objects to begin with might be lost to history. But when asking whether they endure as icons of sex today because of biology, neurochemistry, culture, media and a dozen other raging eddies the human race swims in, the answer seems to be “all of them.”
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