Considering their almost total lack of muscle tissue, female breasts are amazingly powerful. 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 hastily revised, magazines, posters and calendars sold, billions spent on surgical implants and lifts, Super Bowl audiences scandalized ... all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, at the end of the day, small sacks of fat cells.
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 sagging. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 365,000 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2021, making it one of the nation's most commonly performed surgical procedures.
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 pendulousness of the human breast has nothing to do with milk production. Given the physiological costs of having breasts that hang from the body (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren't meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain such cumbersome appendages?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.