Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraíso11
For better or worse, the human female’s naughty bits don’t swell up to five times their normal size and turn bright red to signal her sexual availability. But is there anatomical evidence suggesting that women evolved to be highly sexual? No question. It turns out that every bit as much as a man’s body, the woman’s body (and preconscious behavior) is replete with indications of millennia of promiscuity and sperm competition.
Considering its almost total lack of muscle tissue, the female breast wields amazing power. Curvaceous women have leveraged this power to manipulate even the most accomplished, disciplined men for as long as anyone’s been around to notice. Empires have fallen, wills have been revised, millions of magazines and calendars sold, Super Bowl audiences scandalized … all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, after all, small bags of fat.
One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness?
First, let’s dispense with any purely utilitarian interpretations. While the mammary glands contained in women’s breasts exist for the feeding of infants, the fatty tissue that confers the magical curve of the human breast—the swell, sway, and jiggle—has nothing to do with milk production. Given the clear physiological costs of having pendulous breasts (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren’t meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain these cumbersome appendages?
Theories range from the belief that breasts serve as signaling devices announcing fertility and fat deposits sufficient to withstand the rigors of pregnancy and breastfeeding12 to “genital echo theory”: females developed pendulous breasts around the time hominids began walking upright in order to provoke the excitation males formerly felt when gazing at the fatty deposits on the buttocks.13 Theorists supporting genital echo theory have noted that swellings like those of chimpanzees and bonobos would interfere with locomotion in a bipedal primate, so when our distant ancestors began walking upright, they reason that some of the female’s fertility signaling moved from the rear office, as it were, to the front showroom. In a bit of historical ping-pong, the dictates of fashion have moved the swelling back and forth over the centuries with high heels, Victorian bustles, and other derrière enhancements.
The visual similarity between these two bits of female anatomy has been facilitated by the recent popularity of low-cut jeans that teasingly reveal the nether cleavage. “The butt crack is the new cleavage,” writes journalist Janelle Brown, “reclaimed to peek seductively from the pants of supermodels and commoners alike…. It’s naughty and slightly tawdry,” she continues, “but with the soft round charm of a perfect pair of breasts.”14 If your moon is waning, you can always don a “butt bra” from Bubbles Bodywear, which promises to create the effect that’s been turning male heads since before men existed. Like the Victorian bustle, the butt bra mimics the full curves of the ovulating chimp or bonobo. Speaking of waning moons, it’s worth noting that unless her breasts are artificially enhanced, as a woman’s fertility fades with age, so do her breasts—further supporting the claim that they evolved to signal fertility.
Female bonobo. Photo: www.friendsofbonobos.org
Victorian bustle. Photo: Strawbridge & Clothier’s Quarterly
(Winter 1885–86)
Human females aren’t the only primates with fertility signals on their chests. The Gelada baboon is another vertically oriented primate with sexual swellings on the females’ chests. As we’d expect, the Gelada’s swellings come and go with the females’ sexual receptivity. As the human female is potentially always sexually receptive, her breasts are more or less always swollen, from sexual maturity on.15
The Butt Bra. Photo: Sweet and Vicious LLC Company slogan: “Take Your Gluteus to the Maximus!”
But not all female primates have genital swellings that visually announce their ovulatory status. Meredith Small reports that only fifty-four of the seventy-eight species surveyed “experience easily seen morphological changes during cycles,” and that half of these showed “only slight pinkness.” Once again, our two closest primate cousins stand out from the pack in terms of their decidedly indiscreet sexuality, being the only primates with such extravagant, brightly colored sexual swellings. The female chimp’s red-light district comes and goes, reflecting the waxing and waning of her fertility, but as Small confirms, the bonobo’s “swellings never change much, so that bonobo females always give a signal of fertility—much as humans do.”16
Although many theories claim the human female has “hidden ovulation,” it’s not really hidden at all, if you know how and where to look. Martie Haselton and her colleagues found that men shown photographs of the same thirty women—some taken around ovulation and others not—were quite good at judging when the women were “trying to look more attractive,” which in turn corresponded to the women’s menstrual status. These authors found that women tend to dress more fetchingly when they are more likely to be fertile. “Moreover,” writes Haselton, “the closer women were to ovulation when photographed in the fertile window, the more frequently their fertile photograph was chosen.”17
Other researchers have found that men preferred women’s bodily smells near ovulation and that women tend to behave more provocatively in various ways when they’re likely to be fertile (they wear more jewelry and perfume, go out more, are more likely to hook up for casual sexual encounters, and are less likely to use condoms with new lovers).