See Cecil’s column
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_146.html
noting that the valentine’s heart looks like a woman’s buttocks.
Also, note the arrow piercing the heart. Ya can’t forget the male in the icon!
Can’t believe I’ve staved off the temptation to register till now, and all because of Desmond Morris. Well done, Cece – you get us all in the end.
Anyway. Not only did you fail to answer the very interesting question, you also had to fall back on that dreadful charlatan Morris. I was so annoyed that I spent a whole ten minutes googling ‘desmond morris’ and ‘debunk’ and in the end only came up with a number of google group posts which, at least, seemed to take Morris with a soupcon more of salt than you did:
For shame Cecil. The man’s zoologist books about cats and such like might be more or less sane – being based on the highly scientific method of taking home a load of animals and examining them – but his social biological tomes, The Naked Ape and suchlike, are mostly based on highly dodgy, mostly debunked theories based on his ‘observations’ of tribes in developing countries (which he uses, chauvinistically, as examples of how ‘civilised man’ was back in the dawn of time) and coloured with his mad obsession for manly men in the very prime of manliness and women with nice pert arses. Witness your very own quote. Heavens, is this the SD or not? Do we even apply basic reasoning to anything we cite any more?!
“the shape of the naked female buttocks”??!?? Whose, exactly? Not mine, at any rate. Only maybe Monica Bellucci’s and the ones haunting the imagination of poor, arse-obsessed Morris.
“as a symbol of love”?
For arse-obsessed types, maybe.
“this makes much more sense for the human species”
For arse-obsessed male types, maybe.
“so much the focus of male sexual attention”
Personally, I prefer tits. And I’m a woman. Ah, never mind. Try better next time Cece, or I may have to think again about the whole money thing, and then you’ll be sorry.
Being a connoisseur of female charms, I can assure you that the rounded form of the valentine heart can be beautifully illustrated in real life.
If you have yet to realize what the lower portion (not the arrow) of the valentine heart represents, I will not be the one to tell you.
rwjefferson
Am I the only person that has noticed that a profile view of a person’s mouth resembles a Valentine heart more than his/her butt?
I always wondered if that’s really where the heart shape comes from. It never occurred to me it could be anything else.
Look at anyone from a profile view, especially someone with full lips. It’s uncanny.
The heart symbol is obviously based on the three-chambered amphibian heart. Two lobes, sharp bottom, and a deep cleft: http://www.biologycorner.com/bio2/notes34-amph.html
A few years ago while playing cards, I found myself looking at the hearts and thinking (along rwjefferson’s lines), that if you reduced a female body to simply the (important) sexual parts on the front, you’d have the same basic shape. Have no idea where the butt idea comes from, though.
My 11-year old son asked me this question just the other day. I think I’ll skip the women’s butt cheek analogy. 
If you are 'splaining to an 11-year old, you can fall back on the folkoric image of Cupid’s bow, with the string drawn back. The idea of Cupid’s bow having a dip at the handle has deep enough roots that the little dip at the middle of the human upper lip is named after Cupid’s bow.
As regards the valentine heart looking like a (female) bum–and presumably attractive enough to make it into the world of symbology–science may have inadvertantly solved this mystery. You be da judge. From the respected magazine “American Scientific:”
Monkeys Will Pay To See Racy Pictures
Researchers have found that male monkeys will pay for the privilege of viewing troop leaders and the hindquarters of female monkeys. In an experiment, Robert Deaner of Duke University Medical Center and colleagues let rhesus macaques choose between draughts of fruit juice and the chance to glimpse a range of pictures. The monkeys accepted smaller sips of juice to see facial shots of dominant males but held out for extra juice to see pictures of subordinate males. The subjects were willing to sacrifice the most juice to see the rear ends of female monkeys, information which would help them judge sexual receptiveness. They refused to sacrifice any juice to view socially neutral images. This new research, published in the journal Current Biology, demonstrates how valuable social information can be for primates.
Scientific American
In an old Dave Barry column, he had asked this very question, and found through consulting an anatomist, that there IS a portion of the human body that resembles the “classic heart shape.”
The male prostate.
That gets my vote.
Dijon W – yes, interesting, that occurred to me last night. Never mind a bumful leidy bending over gracefully, when a hearty young lad does the same you will espy, if you’re lucky, a strikingly recognisable shape. But I’m kind of clutching at straws here. (cough)
My point was that it’s nice to speculate, but not with any seriosity, on whether the heart-shape came from any one source. I prefer to see ye old medieval (or pre-medieval) types who came up with the sign as the equivalent to logo designers today. Hence they would approach the heart design with the same kind of logic (assuming that the design was always meant to be a heart, and the meaning wasn’t applied later), asking themselves: does it look a bit like a heart? Does it look quite pretty though? Can we apply plenty of fun alchemical cabbalistic interpretations to the funny poofy things at the top, and the spiky bit at the bottom? Is it quite easy to draw and fill in? Does it look a bit too much like the Apple logo?
And I’ve only just noticed I was ranting at an ancient column of Cecil’s, so no wonder it was bonkers.
Think abstract art. Our “second brain” is programmed to respond to certain shapes, even if we don’t understand why. The valentine combines two shapes that draw our attention.
r~