I’m not sure what your definition of breast is. Every mammal has breasts, complete with nipples, to feed their young.
Many animals have 6 or 8 of them, depending on their litter size.
If you mean that they don’t stick out, have you ever seen a cow? I think most mammal breasts stick out when full with milk, at the very least.
In humans, I guess this is some visual indication at the base animal level, that a woman is ready to mate and bear children?
Remember that American was settled by the Pilgrims who thought of the British as being too licentious and lewd.
Yes, we Americans do have a little bit of a hangup about that thing that married people do when they want to have children.
Remember for years that American TV shows had to follow The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. They even had a seal that said The Seal of Good Practice on the credits of their shows.
The enforcers of this code prohibited the use of the word pregnant.If a woman was pregnant and wanted to tell her husband, she could only hint about it, and you assumed through her excitement and her husbands excitement that they were going to have a baby. Either that, or they just won the lottery. Wait, there were no lotteries back then. She would have to have been pregnant. The code also required that the bedrooms of married couples have two single beds that were arms length apart which made it hard to understand how the woman got to the point where she was excited about something but couldn’t say what it was.
For whatever reason, breasts have become a sexual symbol in the U.S. and we prudish Americans insist that women cover it up. However, least you think the Europeans as open minded, I have never, ever met a more breast obsessed culture than the French. Sure, women may bare it all on TV, but the French men don’t sit there and say to themselves “Oh it’s just another young woman running around topless. I think I shall change the channel and see what’s going on in the soccer match.”
The French are masters at many things and oogling is one of them.
In these discussions, US prudishness reliably gets mentioned. But I wonder if norms for public exposure are really much stricter here.
It seems clear that standards for beach attire are more relaxed in some countries. But in the other 99.8% of territory, how normal is female toplessness?
In how many European cities is it routine to see breasts fully exposed? Is this common in India? China? South America?
I’m tempted to conclude that the limits of what’s acceptable in the US are not stricter than apply to 95+% of the world’s population. And they are probably a good deal looser than in many countries (e.g. pretty much all Islamic ones).
Well, it’s clear that norms for public exposure are really much stricter now than they were in the 50’s (based on print advertising), let alone the 70’s (which I can remember)
Anyway, I spent two years in PNG, 69/70. I was to young to pay much attention, but I do know that older women didn’t have any wardrobe to ‘malfunction’ in this area.
So you’re saying that breasts were routinely fully exposed in the 1950s? In the US?
Really?
You’ve managed to go from “less strict” to “routinely exposed”. If your intention was satirical, count me as wooshed.
When I was still a teen, my father got a job teaching law school during the summer in Paris. It was an all expense paid family vacation. We were given a very nice apartment in the 16th arrondissement in Paris.
The apartment was beautiful, but we immediately noticed there was a telescope sitting in the living room by the window. Being innocent Americans, we had no idea why there would be a telescope there. Maybe the owner liked star gazing.
The next morning, we quickly realized it was not the stars the owner was gazing at. Across the way, down the street was a young completely unclothed woman leaning out her window and smoking a cigarette. (And there was a lot to lean out too if you get my drift.)
We immediately realized that the telescope was aimed at this particular window. We assumed that this young woman did her little show every day, and that the owner made sure not to miss a single episode.
I imagined him with his morning routine of having his breakfast of a croissant and cafe au lait and his copy of Le Mounde, enjoying the start of another wonderful morning taking in the views of Paris afforded to him by this big picture windows.
I say we assume this was a daily show because as a bunch of prudish Americans we didn’t really look in order to verify our theory. Even I, a teenage boy raging with hormones, was too embarrassed to gawk, especially through a telescope.
I concluded that the French were definitely more uninhibited than we Americans. The lady had no inhibitions of exposing her naked body for all the neighbors to see, and the owner of the apartment had no inhibitions of using the telescope to get a closer look.
I was shocked, ashamed, and a bit jealous.
I’m going to make the assumption that you are Australian and if that’s wrong please correct me. So it’s remotely possible that this could be true for Australia.
I need some amazing level of backup for this, though. The 50’s were a prudish period throughout the world AFAIK and I’ve done a lot of research into advertising. The standards for print advertising in the U.S. were incredibly strict. The Maidenform bra ads were a huge scandal, the Janet Jackson of their day. Even so, the women were completely swaddled in clothing from the waist down so that the bras could not be accused of being salacious. Any ad for underwear that depicted more skin had to be with drawings, not live models.
There was a brief period in the 1970s when standards were loosened slightly, enough so that men’s magazines - and women’s fashion magazines - could show covers with nipples. The advertising reflected that, and underwear ads could show women wearing nothing but panties, although nipples were still fobidden. That wasn’t general of all advertising. Looking through a 1970s American Playboy is a reminder that general consumer advertising didn’t want to offend anyone.
I’m boggled that anyone can say that today’s advertising isn’t freer and looser than at any time in the past. Today’s everything is freer and looser than in the past. I remember the 1970s, too. I admit I thought that the trend would continue and that the occasional display of public toplessness would become standard and unremarkable. It obviously didn’t. Public nipplage is the only thing that didn’t, though. All of popular culture is more sexually explicit. Check out examples like the print ads for American Apparel. Nudity in advertising in European countries is even more advanced.
You can’t go by your memory. You need to check out the actual pages of past magazines and newspapers to see how huge the difference is.
Thank you. That’s about where I was ready to go on this.
You’ve managed to go from “much stricter” to “more strict” - without evidence.
Like Exapno M., I’m most surprised at a claim that the 1950s had looser standards than today. Presumably you have some basis for feeling so.
I just googled “1950 adverts”. What I say was page after page of, by today’s standards, very innocent pictures. Some were, I guess, considered a little racy at the time, but certainly not these days.
Let’s say you spot someone a good distance away but not too far, maybe 70m or so.
Male or female? Clothing? Both wearing pants and a long sleeve shirt? Hair length? Modest length, could be a guy with long hair. Beard? No, but could be a guy who shaves or just can’t grow a beard. Etc.
Breasts? Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner (probably). Especially in earlier times when obesity was less common.
The single, most obvious trait that tells you someone is a female from modest distance are breasts. Therefore breasts=sexual trait and therefore are magically linked to sex.
Of course, we could have gone the other way and just not care whether that other person is male or female, but our DNA (both male and female) has a certain interest in such matters that are out of our control. Stupid DNA.
The flip side of this is the “wrongness” of being an adult female with small breasts. And that leads to a whole other compartment of stupid human stuff.
A whole lot of crap would be a lot better if people just didn’t care about this so much.
In Darwin’s theory of Sexual Selection, signs of good health were attractive and had to be hard to cheat on. The peacock’s tail is an excellent example. To grow a big attractive tail, a peacock had to be well fed, had a large range, had a low parasite load, etc. Even better, if he could still outrun predators with such a large tail, he must be a great catch. Peahens selected mates with the biggest tails. In fact, the ability to survive with such a tail is probably the limiting factor to the size.
A woman’s hips were a sign of good health. A woman who was well fed and healthy developed nice large curvy hips. It meant she could give birth to children with big heads without dying in the process.
I suspect that features that accentuated a woman’s curve was a way to cheat. Large breasts and a round bottom accentuated the curves and could make the hips look bigger than they actually are. However, these cheats also ended up being a sign of good health too. You needed a lot of excess fat to be able to display such a curvy body.
Prehistoric Venus statues may give us an idea what our ancient ancestors found attractive. Again, note the large hips and breasts. Also note the well, large pretty much everything else. Apparently, when you lived during the ice age, something soft and warm was an important attribute to most men.
I remember how, in the 50s and 60s, bra ads on TV had to display the product either on a dummy (generally armless and headless, and torso-only, at that, unless they were joint bra-girdle ads) or on an invisible woman, done with the rough period equivalent of green-screen. (I remember reading about some early ads showing bras on live models, but they were, it seems, quickly dropped; we got our first television in 1953, and I can’t remember any.)
I am in AUS, but I don’t have any AUS historical data. I was basing my opinion on the old (American) magazines that my parents had, and the old stuff I saw in the central library.
I’ve seen an Entertainment/Hollywood magazine cover with visible areola, and I’ve seen travel advertisments with sheer fabric, which I don’t think would be accepted in AUS or the USA today for that type of magazine. I don’t argue that standards aren’t freer and looser now, but if so it seems to be balanced by much tighter editorial limits. It’s interesting to note how much tighter National Geographic editorial policy has become over the same period.
In AUS, what you characterise as “a brief period in the 1970s” lasted into the mid 80’s. Also, what is now refered to as 'the sexulization of children in advertising" in AUS, was just cute kids on TV programs like “Young Talent Time” in AUS in the 70’s.
Quick thought if women went topless then girls would want to go topless, if girls go topless and did so in public would it be child pornography to photograph them?
Sexual selection isn’t necessarily limited to features that are a proxy for good health. Anything at all can end up being slightly sexually selected just by random drift, and once you’ve got a slight sexual selection, there’s a positive feedback effect that can drive it to absurd levels.
By way of example, suppose that a peacock’s tail had no effect or correlation whatsoever with fitness, aside from the sexual selection. Peacocks would still have very ornate tails, and peahens would still be attracted to them. Why? Well, suppose we had a mutant pervert peahen who, instead of liking big tails like an ordinary peahen, instead liked small tails. She goes and finds the smallest-tailed cock she can (who’s probably happy for the attention), and has chicks with him. But now, those of her chicks who are male are probably also going to have smaller-than-average tails, and so (since most peahens aren’t weird perverts) they’re going to have a hard time attracting mates. And so our weird pervert peahen is going to have significantly fewer grandchicks than her normal peers.
Is it pornography to photograph the topless women?
The answer to both questions depends entirely on context. To be pornography, the image has to have a sexual element to it. Mere nudity is not sufficient to classify something as porn.
The only way age enters into the question is in determining if the pornography is illegal or not.
Powers &8^]
The lawyers and legal scholars among us may correct me, but AFAIK, the *de facto *definition of pornography is whatever the judge ejudicating your case deems it to be. As such, what are innocent family photos in one setting may be child pornography in another.
If it gives the judge a stiffie, it’s pornography.
If it gives the judge nausea, it’s obscenity.