Breast

The breast is one of two prominences located on the upper ventral region of the torso of primates.

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Quotes

Dissatisfied with their breasts, women in the United States have spent millions of dollars on creams, lotions, devices, and techniques for breast enlargement in the last few decades. [...] Despite the health risks the procedure poses and its considerable expense.
- Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?: Why Women Have Breasts (December 05, 2002), New York University.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by such statistics: after all, men seem to have an overwhelming attraction to breasts. Isn’t a woman’s wish for an enhanced bust line just a natural response to a primal desire to attract a mate? Many contemporary thinkers would suggest that this is the case. They invoke the notion of sexual selection in their arguments, arguing that some time long, long ago in the human evolutionary past, some males became erotically aroused by females with visibly enlarged breasts, choosing them more often as sex partners than their “flat-chested” sisters, thus maintaining this trait in human populations. Some writers even argue that men’s attraction to breasts was a key to the survival of early humans. Given the putative significance of breasts to the human species, is it any wonder that women in the twenty-first century spend millions of dollars, and take medical risks, to enhance theirs?
- Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?: Why Women Have Breasts (December 05, 2002), New York University.

Although sexual selection arguments are extremely popular, there is another, more plausible explanation for why enlarged breasts evolved. As I will argue, females with visible breast enlargement would have been better able to support themselves and their infants in the environment in which our early human ancestors lived. Indeed, I suggest that the more robust notion of natural selection is the key to understanding why women have breasts, not the problematic idea of sexual selection.
- Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?: Why Women Have Breasts (December 05, 2002), New York University.

Whatever the exact selective advantage of fat, it is clear that the evolution of permanent breast enlargement in human females need not be explained through their erotic appeal to men. What my colleagues and I hoped to show by presenting our explanation is that a reasonable argument based on natural selection could be developed. Our model is not as “sexy” as the explanations that see breasts exclusively as erotic attractors of men. But it avoids relying on such poorly substantiated concepts as differential parental investment, female dependency, and sexual selection, ideas that may reinforce twenty-first century notions about women and gender roles but have little, if no, empirical evidence to support them. The idea that female breasts are little more than objects of sexual attraction for men is a popular one in many European societies, and certainly in the United States, among not only producers and audiences of slick programs on “The Learning Channel,” but also quite obviously among many scientists. But, it seems, they may be indulging more in sexual fantasy than scientific fact.
- Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?: Why Women Have Breasts (December 05, 2002), New York University.

Her quince-shaped breasts her wondrous charms declare.
- Leonidas of Tarentum. Anth. Pal. xvi. 182.
  Translated by C. Whibley, Selections from the Greek Anthology (1895), p. 119.

Mammelles, quoy! toutes retraictes;
Telles les hanches que les tettes.
The breasts all shrivelled up and gone;
The haunches like the paps withdrawn;
- François Villon, «Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière»,
  Translated by John Payne

Her brest like to a bowle of creame vncrudded,
Her paps lyke lyllies budded,
- Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion (1595)

Her paps are like fair apples in the prime,
As round as orient pearls, as soft as down;
They never vail their fair through winter’s frown,
But from their sweets Love sucks his summertime.
- Robert Greene, Menaphon (1589)

Her paps are centres of delight,
Her breasts are orbs of heavenly frame,
Where Nature moulds the dew of light
To feed perfection with the same:
- Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590)

I need not tell thee of the lily white, ...
Nor of thy paps where Love himself doth dwell,
Which like two hills of violets appear.
- William Smith, Chloris (1596), no. 47

Then unconfined each did tipple
Wine from the bunch, milk from the nipple;
Paps tractable as udders were.
- Richard Lovelace "Love made in the first Age. To Chloris",
  Posthume Poems (1659)

In the nine heavens are eight Paradises;
Where is the ninth one? In the human breast.
Only the blessed dwell in th' Paradises,
But blessedness dwells in the human breast.
- William R. Alger, "The Ninth Paradise", Poetry of the Orient (1865), p. 223

Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour
The bad affright, afflict the best!
- Thomas Gray, Hymn to Adversity, St. 1 (1742)