Peter A. Hempel
Boobs are sex signals. It would seem unnecessary to say something as obvious as this, particularly in a culture where boobs are an essential part of advertising, of movies from rom-coms to thrillers, and where tabloids rejoice in shots of celebrity cleavages, side-boobs, nip-slips, and under-boobs.
But the idea that these obvious additions to the female figure might be important for anything other than providing nutrition for helpless infants is now denounced by some as the latest form of sexual slander on the part of those who would wish us into an asexual Eden that does not exist (and I hope never will).
First, let us agree that breast size bears no functional correlation to the ability of a woman to nurse an infant. The fact that human female breasts stand out the way they commonly do, and that human males seem fixated upon them, seems to suggest there is something else going on.
To illustrate, let us compare ourselves to one of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzee. Unlike humans, chimpanzees typically walk hunched forward using their hands as well as their feet to get from one place to another. Do female chimps have spectacular boobs? Not even a Jersey Shore guy would be found visiting the chimp habitat at the zoo and proclaiming, “Wow, check out the rack on that one.”
What’s the difference? When female chimps walk around, their breasts are decidedly not prominent. When they want to attract male attention (specifically when they go into heat –the only time when female chimps[1] care about sex), their posterior area, which is made even more prominent by their hunched-over walking position, swells up and turns bright red, becoming her advertising billboard to all the males in the troop.
When humans began to walk upright, female breasts became much more visible when they walked, and in many other activities. Evolution is designed to look for new kinds of competitive advantages, and female breasts presented a perfect opportunity. While the posteriors of the human female do not swell up and turn bright red during ovulation (and indeed hidden ovulation is a key component of human pair bonding), female breasts offered a new canvas for sexual signaling. The fact that female nipples are an erogenous zone and tend to get hard and stand up during sexual arousal, makes the female breasts even more of a sexual signal, particularly since that condition cannot simply be faked.
A guy I worked with many years ago had spent a summer cycling around Europe. One country he visited was Denmark. Denmark is cold and dreary much of the year, so when spring and summer finally arrive, people are eager to take advantage of it. In this case, many women would go out to a local park over lunch hour and go topless while they ate to make the most of the warm sunny day. Of course, my friend, being an American, was rather struck by this. He wondered if he was simply overreacting because he was from such a backward culture. He stopped in a shop to get something, and he asked the old man behind the counter about this. The old man smiled happily and said, “You never get used to it.”
Obviously, culture plays a major role in how breasts are viewed. On the French Riviera, toplessness is routine for women (although I suspect men still pay attention). There was a period in pre-revolutionary French culture when wealthy aristocratic women led the “free the nipple” charge, and wore elaborate gowns that specifically exposed their breasts.
In conservative cultures, not only breasts, but practically all body parts are suspect and are to be covered (in Victorian times the mere sight of the female ankle would cause men to lose their shit). The answer? Long dresses, long sleeves, even wigs – in Muslim culture, they take this to a logical extreme and cover women up entirely in a black grocery bag while the husband marches happily alongside in his short-sleeve shirt and shorts.
Regardless of efforts to tame the beast – which is a driving force behind both repressive Puritanism and, somewhat ironically, those leading the “Free the Nipple” movement who think somehow that they can restore breasts to some kind of neutrality – desperate to ignore the biological fact that mammals reproduce sexually, and sexual competition is a constant. And in our culture, along with pretty much any culture I’m aware of, breasts are a prominent part of that competition. Teenage girls are begging their moms to spring for breast implants so they can compete – often marking the first plastic surgery they will indulge in over the course of a sexually competitive lifespan.
In the words of Kaley Cuoco, star of Big Bang Theory, “Years ago, I had my boobs done — best thing I ever did. As much as you want to love your inner self … I’m sorry, you also want to look good.”
(If there were a similar surgical fix for penis size, males would be pounding on the doors of plastic surgeons as well. Sadly, the best males can do is to go to the gym and work out and hope that six-pack abs will reluctantly emerge.)
Of course, trends can change the terms of the competition. During the flapper era, big breasts were not in fashion, and some women would do their best to flatten their chests to fit in with the svelte profile of the day.
Is any of this to say that female breasts are not for nursing? Of course not. Despite strenuous corporate efforts to persuade American women to switch to bottle-feeding and industrial baby formula, many women still prefer old-fashioned, and much healthier, breast-feeding (I’m sure infants prefer it as well). But evolution, in its divine wisdom, knows there is no reason to waste a resource that can do double duty. Add to that the fact that the female nipple has abundant nerve endings that enhance the satisfaction of nursing and the joy of sex, and you’ve got a win-win all around.
* * *
Continuing downward on our journey, we arrive at another hotly contested zone – pubic hair (most commonly, female pubic hair).
Presumably, one of the basic functions of pubic hair was to keep things warm, particularly in cold climates. But, as with breasts, once humans began to stand upright, the female pubic region became more consistently visible, and pubic hair understandably entered the sexual signaling arena, particularly given that pubic hair generally begins to grow in during adolescence, i.e. the beginning of fertility.
Like breasts, pubic hair has long interacted with culture. In the somewhat more distant past, some women would shave their pubic hair to reduce the risk of lice. Since men of the day were used to pubic hair, these women would then purchase a Merkin – a pubic wig – to be worn during working hours.
In more recent times, hopefully, the prevalence of pubic lice would have diminished, leaving women free to remain au naturel. Again, this could vary considerably by region and culture. In some parts of the Middle East, for example, body hair was regarded as unsightly, and both men and women would attempt to remove it.
In our culture, until the 20th century or so, body hair was simply there, so to speak. Then, corporations looking for new insecurities to exploit, realized that they could persuade women that leg hair and armpit hair were unsightly, and that they could provide the necessary products to help women avoid the shame of wanton hair growth. (Consider, if you will, that fishnet stockings were first devised as a way to let men see the hair on women’s legs instead of flattening the hair down the way conventional stockings would.)
These corporate advertising campaigns were incredibly successful in the US (less so in Europe). Still, the profits from selling razor blades and depilatories for legs and armpits encouraged corporate marketers to continue looking for new fields to conquer. Cue the drum roll: female pubic hair. At first, shaved female pubes were associated with porn and porn actresses. But the idea began to gain momentum (as porn trends so often do) and young women began to adopt “the full Brazilian” as a new way to compete in the dating marketplace. Naturally, corporations introduced new lines of multi-blade razors and electric razors specifically designed for hedge trimming (according to the imagery of one ad I saw).
After a while, however, even as shaving and waxing became more and more popular, voices began to emerge in protest. Some argued that the whole idea was perverted, that it was designed to make grown women look like prepubescent girls. Some pointed to razor burn, rashes, ingrown hairs, and irritation associated with saving – not to mention the considerable discomfort associated with having pubic hair yanked off by a waxed stick. Carmen Diaz, for one, who had apparently adopted the hairless fashion at some point, became a prominent and vocal advocate for a return to the natural look. (I have no idea whether she has adopted a similar stance on armpit and leg shaving.)
Some opponents of extended shaving argued that women’s pubic hair provided a useful buffer against the vicious pounding administered by their lust-crazed male partners. Given that the amount and thickness of pubic hair varies a great deal from individual to individual and from one ethnic group to another, this is one of the less compelling arguments, although why would that stop it from being used?
Interestingly, men are surprisingly divided on this issue. While presumably many men still appreciate all-out female grooming, there are others who are quite adamant that pubic hair helps hold in female musk and is an essential part of the total sexual experience. As one enthusiast explained:
"Why does everyone think a woman should have a bare pussy? Little girls are bare, women have hair. A nice bush is beautiful, much more so than a bare pussy. And pussy hair holds feminine odor much better and longer."
On my part, I remain studiously agnostic on this issue.
Male pubic grooming has not been as much of an issue in popular or tabloid culture, although corporate America, not to be caught napping in the face of a potential opportunity, has begun to come out with men’s grooming products for “down there.” (While it’s easy enough to understand the idea of dispatching hair from the general pubic area, I have wondered when I encounter such ads what happens when one wants to remove the hair from more potentially sensitive areas hanging below.)
Again, as in so many areas, porn has been a leader. Male porn stars saw “grooming” down there as a way to make their appendages look larger when not hidden behind a massive curtain. (In the semi-recent movie, “A Bad Moms Christmas,” one of the moms meets her romantic interest when he [a fireman moonlighting as a male dancer] shows up at the waxing parlor where she works and she gives him a full wax job [including butt hair]. Does this count as “mainstreaming” of the full down under?)
I am not sure whether the “man-scaping” trend has caught on among males in the same way it did with females, but I have certainly heard and seen a wave of advertising for shaving products for men specifically designed for “sensitive” areas.
The other question I have is whether women have any preference for groomed males, or whether they share the preference of some males for the natural look.
Cultural trends and corporate greed will doubtless continue to do battle over our nether regions until global warming and societal collapse renders the question moot.
* * *
Moving on from the distaff side to the spear side, let us look (as briefly as possible, I hope) at another issue that has wandered into the cultural crossfire. Obviously, I am referring to circumcision, which, until relatively recently, was regarded as standard operating procedure for newborn males in this country, and which is now predictably under siege.
In response to this change of opinion, there are now doctors who claim they can restore the foreskin somehow. I’m not at all sure how this works, but I suppose desperate straits call for desperate measures.
While different cultures have different kinds of rules regarding the penis, some of which make our sanitized procedure look like a Sunday picnic, circumcision as we know it is associated largely with Jewish culture, where it is an essential part of a highly masochistic covenant with God. At some point, however, circumcision began to be adopted more generally in US hospitals. Some people claim this was simply another example of hospitals looking for an additional stream of income, and others point to horror stories of infant males having to be raised as female as the result of a botched circumcision.
The primary justification on the part of proponents is that it is more sanitary, that a circumcised penis is much easier to keep clean.
There wasn’t much of a ruckus raised about this when I was growing up. The overwhelming majority of males were circumcised and nobody thought much about it. Now, however, a new generation of politically correct (“woke”?) activists have come out swinging against the practice, often referring to it as “genital mutilation.”
There are a variety of arguments connected with this attack. Essentially, the core is that “natural is good.” One claim is that removal of the foreskin desensitizes the penis since the foreskin normally covers the area with the most sensitive nerve endings located under the head of the penis, and the constant rubbing of the “hot button” area against clothing makes Johnson a dull boy. Indeed, the foreskin itself also has nerve endings, although the circumcised penis is clearly able to get sufficient stimulation despite these apparent strikes against it. In fact, it might be argued that reducing sensitivity could be beneficial in allowing males to last longer during intercourse. (Perhaps this is a feminist issue in disguise?)
Very few males can speak from experience to both sides of this scenario, making reasoned comparisons extremely difficult.
(We might contrast male circumcision with “female circumcision” as practiced in Muslim parts of Africa, and perhaps elsewhere. Traditionally, female circumcision [sometimes performed without anesthesia by a village woman armed with a rusty razor] is designed specifically to remove the clitoritis to reduce unwholesome female desire and eliminate the woman’s pleasure in sex. Most assuredly, Jewish circumcision, which is carried out by rabbis, is careful not to deliberately reduce male pleasure. After all, it’s a male-dominated society, and males are in charge of the whole thing.)
As far as cleanliness is concerned, the anti-circumcision side argues that it’s perfectly easy to pull back the foreskin and keep things clean. Given the inconsistency among males regarding personal hygiene habits in general, this may be a somewhat idealistic vision, but at least it is a possibility. Nonetheless, the foreskin does provide a warm and highly hospitable region for the incubation and care of various bacteria and viruses that is absent in circumcised males.
Culturally, the prevalence of circumcised males in American society has tended to normalize the circumcised penis, and leave the uncircumcised penis with all its extra flaps and folds as the strange outlier. In one of Amy Schumer’s early comedy routines, she went on at some length about the first time she encountered an uncircumcised penis and had no idea what to do with it. Similarly, I have read articles claiming that circumcised males are more likely to be the recipients of oral sex from female partners than uncircumcised males (presumably in a culture where both are available).
While anti-circumcision advocates look for every argument to show how brutal and terrible circumcision is, it might be useful to consider the situation in Africa. The African continent has endured by far the highest rate of AIDS of any area I’m aware of, and much of the transmission there (unlike the US) has been through heterosexual sex, often involving males who work in cities and have sex with prostitutes there, and then return home and have unprotected sex with their wives. At this point, there’s still no vaccine against AIDS, although with medication, people can live with it as a chronic condition. (I’ve seen ads for some “prep” medications to help prevent AIDS, but they always insist that people continue to practice safe sex, which to me pretty much defeats the whole reason to bother taking it in the first place.)
Public health researchers discovered that the very best single medical tool against the transmission of AIDS is male circumcision. Once this became known, males in Africa were lining up at health clinics to get circumcised. They are not doing it for aesthetic reasons; they don’t want to die, and they don’t want their wives to die.
To me, this reality would seem to trump political correctness as an approach to an unnecessary controversy that should be looked at as a medical question rather than just another opportunity for virtue signaling.
* * *
I have long described myself as a Timothy Leary conservative – looking to the clear light of reason rather than succumbing to ideology. Sex has always been a bit of a sticky wicket in human affairs. It would be nice if people would try to look at reality instead of leaping to the barricades to impose their views on others.
While political partisanship seems to divide along predictable lines, sexual partisanship seems to make for strange bedfellows, with the puritanical right and the puritanical left united in fury against what evolution hath wrought and what other people would simply like to be left alone to enjoy.
©2024
[1] Chimp behavior is not to be confused with the totally different behavior of their own cousins, the bonobos, who have sex on a pretty constant basis with pretty much anyone, male, female, or child. Sex for them has been described as "the bonobo handshake."