Some of the theories in this thread are a bit outdated, and IMHO, sexist – the woman’s breasts resemble buttocks so the MAN will want to mate with her. The woman remains sexually receptive so the MAN will be rewarded with sex, etc.
What about the woman?
Not only do these speculations deny the possibility that women desire and initiate sex just as often as men do, but they enforce dumb gender stereotypes that were popular in Morris’s time – men only want sex in a relationship so women must “entice” them to remain faithful, women take care of domestic affairs while men must go out and “bring home the bacon,” and so on. While there may be a grain of truth to these caricatures, how do we know they aren’t produced by culture rather than genetic programming?
I’ll have to agree with you there. Our culture puts way too much emphasis on boobs. I suspect it’s because we keep 'em covered all the time, so they’ve become taboo, and therefore an object of fetish. They’re nice to look at, but they get boring after awhile.
On the other hand, I’ll never tire of looking at a beautiful face.
Because, for the bulk of psychological study, this IS true. As it is true in all species where the female must bring up the young.
It is evolutionarily advantageous for a male to procreate as many different women as many different times as possible in order to “hedge his bets” if you may. Since the relative effort of child raising is lower than a female, he can afford to procreate. Wheras for a female, the relative costs are FAR higher so they are MUCH more selective of thier mates and work harder to hold onto them. One of the ways of keeping a man faithful and not going off is to reward him with sex.
It is a pretty well established psychological fact that females are universally more picky about their mates EXCEPT in the case of seahorses where the female fertilises the eggs and deposits them in the males egg sac where he takes care of them, in this case, the male is MORE picky than the female.
The OP is " Why do men find breasts attractive?" It is not “Why do women find x in men attractive?” Therefore that question is not being answered.
This sentence in particular:
is utter rubbish. To discuss a part of a subject is not to deny that other parts exist.
Just because we are discussing an isolated aspect of male sexuality does not mean anyone here (least of all me) thinks that females do not have sexuality, or that the particular aspect of male sexuality being discussed is the only aspect of human sexuality worth discussing.
Honestly, your sort of post is what gives feminism an undeserved bad name.
Its really very simple; they are different from our own and therfore somewhat mysterious and therfore arouse curiosity and so on. Similarly, the vagina or whatever the PC term for “down there” is these days is a different from the male gear as it can possibly be. \Please don’t send me a bunch of stuff about how the clitoris is really a tiny penis; its a clitoris.
We like it because it is different form our own equipment and we can play/explore/ and in general have a very good time with them.
I had to revive this thread because of new information I’ve come across. As I’ve mentioned, I subscribe to the idea that the human female breasts are erogenous because they echo the rump, and that rounded soft parts in general (shoulders, even knees – see Desmond Morris’ books) are erotically stimulating. There’s been a lot of resistance to this by some feminist theorizers (who apparently see this as male fantasy) and by others (see above), although others of us find it compelling, and have even come up with the same idea independently (again, see above).
In the course of researching some anthropology, I came across the book Primate Ethology. There are some very interesting descriptions of and pictures of primate sexual displays, and these are illuminating. What struck me most forcibly is the picture of a female gelada. She has a pattern of pink skin with an odd and characteristic pattern and type of fur surrounding it on her rump and genitals. You see almost exactly the same pattern on her chest. In this case, the objective observer would be forced to conclude that the one is the echo of the other (the male lacks the distinctive fur in both places). What’s interesting is that this is a completely different set of signals than in the human – neither the buttocks nor the chest are rounded and protuberant. But they do resemble each other. If we can have the chest as a rump-echo in the gelada, why not in humans. Nor is this the only case of chest as an echo of the rmp. It’s simply the most striking, because it lackls the similarity to the human appearance, and because there’s such a good picture of it in the book.
Primate Ethology, BTW, is edited by Desmond Morris, although it dates from after his hypothesis.
