What's the deal with America's breast fixation?

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http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/03302006/health/95195.htm

What's the deal with America's breast fixation?

By Faye Flam

fflam@...

Complete Health Index

We are the only buxom mammal. Others don’t have boobs,

per se. Most have mammary glands that swell when

they’re lactating. What sits or hangs or juts out from

the human female chest is mostly fat - not just

ordinary fat but fat packed with evolutionary mystery

and cultural baggage.

Why do men love certain types of breasts? Are women

drawn to breasts as well? If not, why is so much

cleavage displayed by women’s magazines?

To answer those questions we must go back in time -

before ’s Secret, before even the

breast-shaping influences of Hugh Hefner and Helen

Gurley Brown.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, perhaps in our

homo erectus ancestors, a coordinated burst of

evolution took place that transformed the female body

and redirected the male sex drive toward that new

body.

The details remain sketchy, but evolution can give us

a plausible account, says Bobbi Lowe, a biologist at

the University of Michigan. At some point it all goes

back to fertility. Women who could pack on fat

reserves were more fertile and men who chose them had

more offspring. Men with a taste for fat reserves and

their fat-loving genes proliferated. Faced with this,

women who could create obvious, showy pockets of fat

also left more offspring because they attracted more

devotion from males. They began to put fat on the

buttocks, hips and the breasts.

The process behind all this is called sexual

selection, a concept discovered by Darwin and detailed

in his " Descent of Man. " It explains the tail of the

peacock and other sexual ornaments. If enticing enough

such ornaments can evolve even when they detract from

a creature’s ability to get food or escape predators.

But why do women pay attention to breasts? Because

breasts have been subject to the tyranny of fashion

for centuries. Your powers of attraction and class

status depend on the lacing of your corset, the wiring

in your bra or the skill of your surgeon.

Stanford women’s studies professor Marilyn Yalom lays

this all out in " The History of the Breast. "

The earliest stone-age sculptures depict women with

obvious, matronly breasts. Antiquity worshipped

breasts as symbols of motherhood. In the early

middle-ages they became eroticized but men preferred

them small. The ideal female form had rounded womanly

hips and perky pubescent breasts.

Women in the upper classes often gave their babies

over to " wet nurses, " a practice driven in part by the

desire to keep their breasts looking pert and

fashionably petite, says Yalom.

Henry VIII, according to one account, rejected his

fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, because he didn’t like

her looks, in particular, her breasts. They were large

and a little pendulous and made it too hard for him to

perform his kingly duty.

The 1920s saw the rise of the flat chest in the

flapper girls - an androgynous look that Yalom says

coincided with an unprecedented expansion of women’s

rights. In the 1950s bras turned breasts into

torpedoes. In the 1970s breasts started to go free

from bras as well as strict aesthetic standards. But

then came the technology of breast implants and the

new ideal - skinny with melon-sized breasts and

exposed cleavage.

One of the big issues that may face breasts in the

21st century is the prospect of declassifying them as

private parts. It might create a healthier attitude,

says Yalom, especially in the United States, where we

manage to display grotesque fake cleavage on news

stands while our own former U.S. Attorney General

Ashcroft covered two nude female statues that decorate

the Justice Department.

There’s still hope for us. Breasts could go the way of

feminine legs. Leg nudity is now acceptable. " Will the

liberated breast of the 21st central also demand and

acquire the right of public nudity? " There’s only one

way to find out. Do we dare?

Faye Flam is a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

She can be reached by e-mail at fflam@....