Permitted fruit: Are boobs hot because we hide them?
Results just in from the scientists that travelled from Poland to Papua to find out
On an isolated beach in West Papua, Indonesia, a group of Polish researchers and local collaborators set up a lab (read: tent) to find out about people’s thoughts on tits.
What they found sheds new light on a popular proposition within the nature-vs-culture debate: specifically, “the idea that covering [breasts] up makes them interesting when they weren't that interesting before,” says lead researcher Michal Mikolaj Stefanczyk of the University of Wroclaw: “that this covering-up leads to sexualization.”
Why Papua? Well, in this particular group of Indigenous Dani people, it used to be normal for women to go topless. But that’s changed over the last couple of decades as Western influence creeps in, to the point where today almost all women cover their breasts.
The researchers surveyed older and younger men in the community to see if the younger men found naked breasts more arousing. Instead, both groups were equally and unequivocally turned on by boobs—both looking at them, and playing with them during sex. “It was like, you couldn’t score higher,” said Michal.
***
Does this research, then, suggest that the missionaries were right: that boobs are just too exciting to be out there for everyday observation?
“We have to be careful not to get into the naturalistic fallacy here,” says Michal—that is, the idea that something is good or correct simply because it’s natural. If liking boobs does turn out to be more evolutionarily than culturally driven, “that doesn’t mean that we should just acknowledge it as fact and do nothing about it,” he says.
Rather, acknowledging boobs’ cross-cultural pulling power could be an important starting point for more interesting and transformative conversations. “If we blame culture, that leaves many in a difficult spot, because it seems like they should be able to stop feeling aroused by breasts, and they can’t,” says Michal. “And that can trigger some defensive responses against the cause of just being decent to women.”
This points us somewhere more profound. Try as humanity certainly has, we’ve never managed to strip sexuality from our bodies and gazes and spaces. It’s an impossible task. What if, instead, we were able to quietly acknowledge those currents—maybe just to ourselves—without expectation, or awkwardness, or sleaziness, or shame?
**
If you’ve ever had boobs, you’ll know that working out what to put on them is a complex and context-specific decision—and one that’s tied intimately with danger and power. Mine grew late but large, and at first I celebrated them. I put them in purple push-up bras and tiny little kids’ tops with the necks cut off, and went to Christian punk music festivals to seduce youth-group leaders (the harder the level, the bigger the prize).
I took them with me to university in the city and began to understand more about the mercurial nature of sexual power—that dizzying, rickety shortcut to status that can invert and tumble in a moment. I got cautious on dance floors and strategic about necklines.
I went travelling in South America and got scared and irritated and really into baggy t-shirts. Once, pushing back—well, maybe also because I had a crush on the artist!—I got my naked torso painted for a Chilean festival parade: a green line from my forehead to my navel; concentric circles magnifying my curves. I felt provocative and proud until I lost my painted crew in the crowd. Then, it was like one of those naked-at-school nightmares. I pulled my skirt up under my armpits and dropped my gaze to the ground.
***
There’s another leap that some might be tempted to make from this research: if it’s ‘natural’ to love boobs, then that must be the point of them, since all other apes have much smaller tits that only stick out when they’re ovulating or lactating.
Zoologist Desmond Morris had some classic reckons about why, in his 1969 book The Naked Ape: “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.”
So, boobs are there to remind us about bums? As cute an idea as this is, more recent research suggests that we—or more specifically, the men that historically dominated evolutionary biology—might be getting things the wrong way around by portraying these appendages as primarily for others’ attraction and enjoyment.
Breasts, others argue, evolved first for functionality—perhaps to maximise milk storage or facilitate feeding whilst standing upright (I can confirm it’s very useful to be able to manoeuvre a nipple into a front-packed baby’s mouth in the supermarket queue)—and then became sexy by association. As with a lot in this field, the true origin of our appendages is very hard to confirm—and maybe, in the end, it doesn’t really matter as much as what we do about it.
***
A friend of mine recently got breast implants. Where she lives, implants are so ordinary that it’s hard to find clothes to fit non-augmented breasts. When I hug her now, our bodies fit together differently.
Breast size and shape preferences seem to be pretty cultural. There’s some evidence that extra-big knockers are particularly popular in places where there’s lots of malnutrition—they signal that the person can eat enough to maintain them. (Not something that tends to apply in the places where implants are most popular).
The Papuan research participants weren’t particularly picky about the size and shape of the boobs in their lives. The researchers asked them about how much the appearance of someone’s breasts affected their overall attractiveness. “And in this case, we found almost a ‘floor’ effect: they rated it as not very important,” said Michal.
“It seems that breasts are fun and enjoyed, but not as the most fundamental part of an attractiveness assessment: they were like: ‘However they look, we just want to play with them’.”
***
Honestly, this study has left me with more questions than answers. The scientists only spoke with straight-identified men, which is understandable given the cultural context, but makes me curious about what the stats would be like if they’d included other genders. Another study, excellently titled ‘My Eyes are Up Here: The Nature of the Objectifying Gaze Toward Women’, used eye-tracking tech to conclude that women look at boobs just as much as men.
Those researchers chalked it up to ‘checking out the competition’, but I’m unconvinced that covers it. It feels like a very straight read of a much more layered phenomenon, where other things like queer longing, gender envy, and appreciation or ambivalence about whatever’s on our own chests might well also come into play. For me, it comes up chiefly as a kind of semi-erotic curiosity: what must those big ones feel like? What would it be like to go running with nothing jiggling there at all?
I bet there’s some nostalgia in there, too. For many of us, a breast is the first human thing that we find and know. We can latch with astounding force and precision while our parents’ faces are just a blurry and abstract background. Long weaned, my kids still love “the milkies” (which they’ve since inexplicably named Boy and Brella). But there I go again—another human extrapolating, inventing answers I like to things I cannot know.
I can say, for one thing, that my own relationship with my boobs is different these days. As my milk dried up they shrank, and for the first time in two decades I can comfortably go bra-less. Some days I miss their old power, but I’m relieved that they get to retire from the spotlight, and from their domestic responsibilities. No longer a decoration or a food source, they feel fully and finally my own.