This week in evolutionary psychology fun and games (and via Marginal Revolution), I engage in the most shameless piece of dumpster-diving yet. A commenter on last week’s post picked me up for a tendency to pluck out the most ridiculous things I can find and present them as representative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, rather in the manner of those irritating “Crazzzeeeee Postmodernists!” articles that you used to find in the National Review during the 1980s (or on “Butterflies and Wheels” now). I suspect that commenter is unlikely to be impressed with the latest find, because it comes from that world-renowned centre of evolutionary genetics research, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. On that age old question of “Do Sexy Waitresses Get More Tips?”.
Attention conservation notice / Irritation advance warning: If you think I’m going to get through this without making at least a few puerile jokes and maybe more, you’re probably wrong.
The author of the piece has balls like Adam “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of” Ant[1], by the way – he clearly has no fear that a 31-page research project on sexy waitresses, presumably to be published in a journal read by hotel managers, might come across divorced from context as a bit odd. He’s also refreshingly free of hang-ups about using the words “sexy” and “sexiness” in a scientific paper (also “firm and perky”, which I suspect that at least one peer reviewer will ask him to quantify), which I’d like to see more of in the evolutionary psychology literature. And there’s an actually quite charming passage on page 11 where he gets to grips with the fact that a few of his survey respondents were clearly taking the mickey (although either I have grossly misunderstood the aim of the survey, or he’s misused the word “scatological”).
Having said this, though, the actual study is not by any means a bad piece of research. There are some reasons to worry about the responses which are discussed sensibly, there are all the problems intrinsic to a self-selected internet poll as the raw dataset, but the analysis of the data looks to me to be rather better than workmanlike. A lot of these trade schools do turn out perfectly decent practical statisticians, and Michael Lynn is one. I am pretty convinced that the data shows what it shows – it shows that some of the predictions made are borne out by the data and some aren’t, and the author is commendably honest about reporting the positive and negative results. Perhaps surprisingly, the old waist-hip ratio doesn’t show up as significant, and the amount of tips is just linear in breast size (with only a small interaction effect with BMI), rather than following the usual prediction of an “optimum” size. Apparently a matronly bosom that you can rest a pint glass upon is indeed what patrons of the hospitality industry want to see and Ronnie Barker was not misleading us.
This is one of the commonplaces of pop-evolutionary-psychology, about which I have written in the past – that men like big breasts. Which they do; I doubt that the Cochrane Foundation will be getting round to this any time soon, but if they do, then I’m guessing that the metastudy on this issue will reject the null with high degree of confidence.
The thing is, that the pop-evolutionary explanation of why men like big breasts[2] – that they’re better for feeding children – is very definitely false. They’re not. They’re also not correlated with fertility or anything else. The human female nulliparous breast is a bit of a puzzle to the biologists.
Hey, is anyone interested in my evolutionary psychology theory of it?
I knew you would. Basically, although the theory “big breasts are better for feeding children” is completely false, it is, nevertheless, widely believed to be the case. Since it is widely believed today and I doubt we have actually got stupider over the last 10,000 years, I think it was probably also widely believed in Pleistocene Africa. Why do people believe this (effectively, why was it a surprise when modern medicine proved otherwise?).
Well, basically because it looks very commonsensical. Large gourds contain more water. Distended udders (on cows) are bigger because they’re full of milk. Bigger jugs … oh for fuck’s sake, please, we’re never going to get anywhere if I descend into Carry On territory. But in general, the volume of liquid within a container varies as the external size of that container. If you didn’t know that human breasts weren’t containers (which we didn’t, not until well into historical time; I seem to remember that Aristotle has some wildly eccentric things to say about the physiology of lactation), then you’d be very likely to assume that the variation in breast size of human women was explained by variation in the volume of milk production, and that therefore big-breasted women would be better mates.
In other words, the observable preference for larger breasts is explainable not as an instinct (or one of Steven Pinker’s “modules”), but as the result of a more or less rational calculation, based on a mistaken premise (that large breasts indicate more efficient milk production) which is itself grounded on a usually reliable rule (larger containers have more liquid inside them). I’m prepared to believe that the general rule about containers is potentially an evolved module, being part of the toolkit for operating in three-dimensional space, so in this sense I think the large-breasts thing is an exaptation – a not directly adaptive consequence of an adaptation. Steven Jay Gould believed that more or less all of the socially interesting bits of psychology were exaptations in this sense, and I came up with the big breasts thing as a way of showing how some of these alleged “cultural universals” don’t really indicate that the underlying process is instinctive or modular at all. I love Just So Stories, me.
Anyway, thank you, you’ve been a great audience, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal and don’t forget to tip your waitresses.
[1] As a friend pointed out to me, the lyrics of “Prince Charming” take on a rather ironic, bittersweet quality when you reflect that it was, essentially, ridicule which ended Adam Ant’s career.
[2] This is by no means the only theory in the EP literature, you’ll be pleased to learn. The paper itself appears to be broadly agnostic in its discussion on pages 14-15, but clearly does endorse some theory or other of breast size as an indicator of fecundity[3], . By the way, hey look what happened to my original link!
[3] And given the sense in which the author’s used “scatological”, I am not 100% confident about the precision of the use of “fecundity”.
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John Emerson 11.16.07 at 12:32 pm
And so horny guys who didn’t care whether they would have children or not, or who didn’t want children, would rationally (though erroneously as to the facts) go for flat-chested women, the poor bastards. But flat chested women are just as fertile as busty women! Some women just are flat in order to dupe child-hating types into fertilizing them. Ya can’t win.
Empirically, in traditional China men seemed especially obsessed with lithe, slender women, though I have no data about bust sizes preferred. But then, in much of the world (pacific Islands, Africa, Middle East, even Renaissance Europe) guys like women much plumper and heftier than the current US taste. Further research is required.
magistra 11.16.07 at 12:49 pm
I do feel that all those who write on evolutionary psychology should be required to include a statement of the number of their children (legitimate and illegitimate) in their article. Because after all, how we can take seriously on the topic someone who clearly hasn’t been maximising their number of offspring? Anyone might start to think that people aren’t just driven by their genes.
sharon 11.16.07 at 1:11 pm
Can this also be used to explain why men get so obsessed about the size of their penises?
dsquared 11.16.07 at 1:19 pm
Oh excellent point! Almost certainly, yes.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 1:29 pm
There’s an extensive literature about the penis sizes and shapes of animals of all kinds. The most interesting recent discovery is the Argentine duck penis.
This is a bizarre area of eveolutionary science, and in the case of the Argentine duck, the penis itself is so strange that the theory explaining it might legitimately be strange also. Incredulity is usually but not always your friend.
Are you and I as weird as Argentine duck penises? Speaking for myself, no — penis-wise at least. On the other hand, a lot of actual human sexual behavior I’ve heard about (present company excepted) seems more or less as improbably as the duck’s penis, so that weird explanations might be best.
Crystal 11.16.07 at 1:50 pm
So much pop ev-psych gives the impression it was lifted straight from The Onion. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if “Busty Waitresses Get Bigger Tips!” was an Onion headline at one time or another.
Of course, the idea that human women somehow “evolved” to have bigger breasts assumes that all cultures are as breast-obsessed as the modern West. Which isn’t true. I have a book called Mirror, Mirror, authored by Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, which notes that the broadest cultural preference for what men like in women is big, sturdy hips. Which makes a lot more sense, “childbearing hips” and all that.
s.e. 11.16.07 at 2:03 pm
“This is one of the commonplaces of pop-evolutionary-psychology, about which I have written in the past – that men like big breasts. Which they do..”
My understanding in our culture at least is that it’s class based. The high the economic statues the less emphasis on knockers as such.
“Can this also be used to explain why men get so obsessed about the size of their penises?”
I’ve known a few women who’ve shared that obsession.
s.e. 11.16.07 at 2:06 pm
Think Russ Meyer.
Ralph Hitchens 11.16.07 at 2:42 pm
We had a saying in the military (also based, presumably, on empirical research) that “small ones work.” Not that this negated the reflexive preference for large ones to any extent.
ajay 11.16.07 at 2:47 pm
Or for a less entertaining but more likely explanation: people are attracted to physical signs of sexual maturity. So: breasts and hips in women, height, large jaw, upper body muscle development etc in men. No point wasting time and resources courting someone who isn’t physically able to reproduce, after all. The preference for huge is just an unintended side-effect; analogously, birds prefer to feed giant fake chicks with giant fake beak gapes, rather than real chicks. This is just a side-effect of the bit of programming that says “feed the thing that looks most gape-like”.
~~~~ 11.16.07 at 2:55 pm
A much better evolutionary explanation for the male preference for big breasts would be the handicap principle. (“If she can survive in the field with these enormous cumbersome protruberances, the rest of her body must be really fit…”)
SamChevre 11.16.07 at 3:01 pm
I think you are msising the obvious explanation.
Because you are answering the wrong question. (This is TYPICAL of ev psych, btw.)
The question isn’t “why do men like big breasts”; it’s “why do men still like big breasts.”
Breast size was probably a good indicator of fertility and milk supply in a world where sufficient food was a continual, pressing issue. As was any other sign of lots of bodyfat.
dsquared 11.16.07 at 3:03 pm
We had a saying in the military (also based, presumably, on empirical research) that “small ones work.â€
Billy Connolly’s autobiography has an episode in it where he was taking an Army medical and the sergeant remarked that Connolly had a small cock. He replied “I thought we were meant to fight them, not fuck them”.
Michael Mouse 11.16.07 at 3:03 pm
Or for a less entertaining but more likely explanation: people are attracted to physical signs of sexual maturity.
Of course! Which is why there’s such a cultural premium placed on female body hair. Er … well …
dsquared 11.16.07 at 3:09 pm
12: Nikolas Lloyds discusses this in the link in my second footnote, but I don’t really see to what conclusion.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 3:26 pm
is the ‘exaptation’ in question merely a cognitive rule of thumb that ‘larger container-ish thingies contain larger contents’?
cause if so, then we may have explained why men, on seeing larger than average breasts, are inclined to draw the inference ‘those must contain larger than average quantities of milk!’
but we still would have done nothing to explain why that train of thought would lead to sexual attraction, much less obsession, much less the utter gonzo insanity surrounding breasts that hilzoy recently pointed us too.
men’s attitudes towards breasts just don’t look to be inferentially mediated. there’s some fairly deep hard-wiring in there, and the hard-wiring is not limited to an inference ticket from “large container” to “large contents”.
i realize that your ‘just so’ story was only meant to explain the persistence of the false belief that larger breasts indicate better infant nutrition. but even if it succeeds, it still has a lot of work to explain phenomena like attraction to large breasts, or greater tipping of their possessors.
really it’s more like a good explanation of why a bad explanation still gets repeated so often, i.e. why people keep saying “better for feeding children” when it’s false. but it does nothing to explain what that bad explanation is trying to explain, i.e. the original obsession with breasts.
in conversation, the late bernard williams once said, “i know why i like breasts. what i don’t know is why i like breasts *so much*.”
that sounds about right to me. lots of ‘just so’ stories get you a sensitivity to adiposity. what’s harder is getting an explanation of the mania, as evidenced by e.g. differential tipping.
smalltalker 11.16.07 at 3:29 pm
Oh, I thought the theory now was that breast cleavage resembled ass cleavage, and our doggy-style (er?) ape forebears were well into that as a signal to come and get it.
Never mind. I’m sure another one will be along in a minute.
Mrs Tilton 11.16.07 at 3:39 pm
I hope you understand, Daniel, that Ann Althouse is likely to scold you quite sternly for festooning Crooked Timber with breasts.
dsquared 11.16.07 at 3:41 pm
That was the entire purpose of my having made the post.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 3:49 pm
17–
but i thought she only freaked out at the presence of breasts on bloggers (e.g. jessica v.), not blogs.
only dsquared can tell us if this means he’s safe.
Matt Austern 11.16.07 at 3:54 pm
The real problem with the exaptation theory is that people aren’t actually very good at judging the volume of objects. Show people two containers of different shape and ask them to say which can hold more liquid, and you’ll get lots of wrong answers. It sure doesn’t look to me like something we’ve evolved an innate ability for.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 3:56 pm
I actually have a datum on this (n=1).
I used to know a Pacific Islander from a place (Micronesia) where adult women normally went topless, but were careful to cover their legs about the knee. To him at home, pretty breasts were like a pretty face, nice but not intrinsically exciting. But he came to the US and started hanging out with Americans, and learned the American fetishism, and as a result, when he went back home he had a problem when his topless mother-in-law walked into the room.
That’s what the fabled “grass skirts” were all about. In the same way, when a bunch of guys from this place surprised a bunch of bikinied women from there at a pool, they went back into the water to hide their legs and wouldn’t come out until after the guys left. (Bikinis are French, not Pacidic Islander.)
First person story told to me by a guy I knew quite well, though I didn’t witness the event.
Anyway, the social-constructionist explanation works for me.
fardels bear 11.16.07 at 4:00 pm
I second Magistera’s call up there at #2. It would be an interesting comparison with the eugenicists of the early part of the 20th century. Nearly every eugenicist of note, like Madison Grant, left no children behind.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 4:09 pm
“(Bikinis are French, not Pacidic Islander.)”
spelling error: “pacidic” s/b “hasidic”.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 4:14 pm
23: You scurvy spelling-police hastard!
abb1 11.16.07 at 4:15 pm
The equivalent of quality control, perhaps. A woman with large breasts probably has already given a birth once, she’s been tested.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 4:16 pm
25: Nah, the “perky” criterion rules that explanation out.
abb1 11.16.07 at 4:23 pm
‘Perky’ is a contemporary fad; I don’t think Rubens’ women have perky breasts. Though I could be wrong.
lemuel pitkin 11.16.07 at 4:37 pm
Shorter evolutionary psychology: Why are my own prejudices/preferences unalterably shared by everyone everywhere?
McRib Sandwich 11.16.07 at 4:48 pm
I actually disagree with the claim that “men like large breasts” even over and above the standard “tastes of course differ” issue. I think men are attracted to large breasts in public – like on a barmaid – because they’re prominently displayed sexual characteristics. They entice the eye. This is entirely separate from men want their wives and girlfriends to be large breasted.
Jonathan 11.16.07 at 4:50 pm
#
I’ve known a few women who’ve shared that obsession.
Posted by s.e. · November 16th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
#
Think Russ Meyer.
Russ Meyer was a woman?
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 4:50 pm
27–
true. a rubens breast could smother a hippopotamus.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 5:09 pm
OT: I’ve been a defender of Wikipedia, but here’s an example of what happens when Wiki goes bad.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 5:12 pm
Clement Marot, the French poet whose psalm translations became standard French Calvinist hymns, and who was driven from France because of his Protestant views, also wrote several poems about cute breasts. The French are different, I guess.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 5:14 pm
i suspect he preferred prelapsarian breasts.
Laleh 11.16.07 at 5:22 pm
“The equivalent of quality control, perhaps. A woman with large breasts probably has already given a birth once, she’s been tested.”
Abb1 hasn’t been around childbearing women, I guess! :)
Breasts often shrink after the breastfeeding period is over; sometimes to a smaller size even than they were pre-pregnancy.
abb1 11.16.07 at 5:25 pm
OK, what about this, then: simply the association with a nursing woman. Big breasts-> nursing woman-> procreation-> good thing.
Timothy Burke 11.16.07 at 5:27 pm
Huge red asses on male mandrills don’t shit better and I’m guessing they probably don’t make for a cushier, more comfortable way to sit on the ground. So why do they have big red asses? Because they’re a sexual and gender signal, a communicative amplifier. And as such, there’s a reason for them to get more ornate and larger up to the point that their size or vivid coloration becomes too great a burden on the organism.
What’s striking to me about bad evolutionary psychology is that its practioners have such a relentlessly simplified view of what makes something adaptive–that to be adaptive, a particular bodily or behavioral feature has to have a utility that is “real”, that what we want or do has to make good adaptive sense in some absolute way. They want this because then the apparatus of evolutionary psychology is a perfect way to ward off having to know anything about history and culture in any kind of subjective or nuanced sense.
If, for example, big breasts are just mandrill’s asses: an anatomy which can communicate sexually, and when it does communicate sexually, can have a tendency to become more baroque or exaggerated because that’s one thing that can happen to anything that carries information–its signal gets amplified through volume–well, the problem is that this can change in the way that any communicative or cultural practice changes. The message carried by breasts can be variable. If it’s about humans “really” picking up on “real” utility, then no worries! If you run across a culture that doesn’t seem to make a big deal about breast size, it’s just because you haven’t studied them enough yet, or maybe it’s because they’re an accidentally preserved group of maladaptive freaks who were heading for the evolutionary junk pile until we left the EEA for good. If you run across a cultural era where dominant male assessments of female attractiveness seem to be more about Twiggy and less about Pamela Anderson, it’s just because you don’t have any good studies for that time done by good e.p. researchers of the self-rated responses of 18-22 year old college students looking at breasts and fertility.
aaron_m 11.16.07 at 5:31 pm
The BBC told me that breasts symbolized a round “rump,” and that this is supposed to be a sexual signal. I guess large breasts flowing over a low cut neckline = more of this signal.
I saw it on TV, isn’t it true?
Matt Weiner 11.16.07 at 5:36 pm
Bikinis are French, not Pacidic Islander.
Isn’t the name an H-bomb joke? As in, there’s no more of the bathing suit than there was left of Bikini atoll after they tested the H-bomb on it? I’m not going to look this up but I believe there’s a Gang of Four song that alludes to this.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 5:37 pm
Possibly. In Chinese the ball-point pen was at one time, and maybe still is, called the “atomic pen” (yuanzi-bi.)
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 5:42 pm
38–
yes, h-bomb joke. but i doubt the details you offer (i.e. comparison of what’s left).
i would etymologize by analogy with ‘dynamite’ ‘bombshell’, or (recent) ‘da bomb’.
many bikini islanders have never seen bikini, atoll.
CJColucci 11.16.07 at 5:48 pm
Maybe big breasts are a “neutral” adaptation, associated with the big hips that really do have reproductive significance?
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 5:55 pm
40–
look, twit, the swimsuit debuted in 1946. the first h-bomb was tested in 1952.
yes, it was named after a bomb-test at bikini, and yes, it was an allusion to the sensation it would cause. but an a-bomb, not an h-bomb.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 5:55 pm
Yeah, but the American fetish is slender women with large breasts.
I think that it’s a diagnostic kink of the American id, though it’s being exported via TV, movies, etc.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 5:56 pm
The h-bomb-kini is only seen in the kinkiest porn.
Matt Weiner 11.16.07 at 6:08 pm
42–Sorry! I blame the Gang of Four. And my specific derivation appears to be made up.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 6:10 pm
43–
dunno, john–there’s an ancient indian aesthetic that combines large breasts with wasp waists. think khajuraho.
and the venus de milo is not too far off contemporary ‘fetish’ standards, though perhaps broader-hipped.
otherwise, sure, american id bad.
dsquared 11.16.07 at 6:12 pm
Lots of people talk about the Wilendorf Venus as being evidence that prehistoric cultures used to have an aesthetic preference for wide hips and fat waists, but a quick glance on google reveals to me that lots and lots of people are selling “handcrafted” replicas of it, so I think it’s more likely that the primitives in Wilendorf just made a statute that shape because it’s a really easy shape to do.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 6:12 pm
45–
no apologies necessary. follow the numbers and you’ll see i only twitted myself.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 6:17 pm
47–
combined with the fact that it’s just possible that the artefact was not primarily intended to be sexually arousing?
i mean, shocking thought and all, given that it portrays a woman, and so what else would it portray, except a sex-object?
(what we shall never understand about that distant, lost, culture, was why they thought the pinnacle of sexual attractiveness was a woman with shoulder-length hair, hardly any breasts at all, and nails through her hands and feet!)
Matt Weiner 11.16.07 at 6:29 pm
48– no offense taken, I was apologizing for leading you into the self-twitting trap.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 6:35 pm
Definitely the South Asian ideal is busty, leading to the question “Why so little South Asian porn?”. My main point is just that before you explain facts, you should know what they are. The feminine ideal is variable (Not mentioned: supposedly Mayans thin that crosseyed women are irrestistable, and supposedly the Inuit ideal is virtually no nose.
aaron_m 11.16.07 at 7:11 pm
#51 “The feminine ideal is variable”
Sure but isn’t the point that
1) We have good reason to think that at least some aspects of the way we look has to do with sexual signaling a la evolution. So at least some of what we think is sexually attractive is not explained by social construction and context.
2) We know that processes of evolution do sometimes select for certain kinds of signal exaggeration.
2)Boobs are too big for their function, even when they are smaller. Two thirds of the breast tissue is unnecessary for feeding and there is no feeding benefit to going around with swollen boobs all the time (i.e. as opposed to when you are actually using them for feeding). Most other animals with are flat or much flatter when not feeding.
3) All over the world women’s boobs are swollen in this way (i.e. larger than they need to be). So maybe this is an exaggerated sex signal that we have an evolutionary tendency for liking.
Of course culture creates and exaggerates what is sexually interesting. But how can this fact be used so simply to throw the evolutionary theory into doubt? It could just as well be, following the logic of social construction, that the cultural exaggeration is in conflict with the evolutionary signaling and overpowers it.
lemuel pitkin 11.16.07 at 7:28 pm
We know that processes of evolution do sometimes select for certain kinds of signal exaggeration
Sure. We also know that evolution is complicated, that traits are invariably linked (genetically, developmentally, functionally) to seemingly unrelated traits in non-obvious ways, that without careful empirical study there’s no way to know if a given trait really improves reproductive success or how it does so, and that the “traits” coded for by genes don’t correspond very closely with the “traits” we identify through casual observation. As far as things like breasts go, we have no idea what the genetically relevant “traits” even are.
Why are many cave-dwelling fish blind? There are lots of plausible theories about metabolic savings or genetic drift, but they’re all wrong. The real answer is, a particular gene expressed along the fish’s midline promotes jaw and tastebud development and suppresses eye development. Learning that meant identifying specific proteins produced by specific genes in specific regions of the animal and observing their effect on development. In the absence of similar empirical evidence — and we’re a long, long way from having it — speculation on the evolutionary basis of various human traits or behaviors is no more scientific than astrology.
John Emerson 11.16.07 at 7:33 pm
Aaron M., before people talk about universals they should at least be fully aware of the range of variation. They seldom seem to bother. I’m especially thinking of the pop versions, of course.
I am not doubting the theory of evolution.
kid bitzer 11.16.07 at 7:35 pm
“how can this fact be used so simply to throw the evolutionary theory into doubt?”
i have no doubt that *some* evolutionary theory or another is right; large breasts evolved, at a species-wide level, either directly or indirectly or via exaptation or spandrelization or or or. sure. agreed.
as to any of the *particular* theories on the table today? there i think doubt is in order, esp. when the theory involves appeals to sexual attraction. e.g. this bollocks about homo sapiens liking breasts because some predecessor species liked bums, as in 37. then you have to say that mandrills like colored bums because it reminds them of the lizard-tails they used to lust after in their pre-mammalian stage.
i find 36 and parts of your 52 generally plausible, as just so stories go. but emerson’s point stands: explanation has to come after you get the facts straight, and if what’s being explained are putative facts about attraction, then we need to get those straight.
(and, no, not in the ‘as opposed to gay’ sense.)
drlemur 11.16.07 at 7:40 pm
I ought to know where to go look up the data for real, but as a 40yo who sees a lot of 40yo mom’s on the soccer sidelines these days, I have noticed a potentially relevant phenomenon.
Once middle age has had some time to work, most women seem to have one of two basic bodyshapes: thin with relatively small breasts, or generally big everywhere (not necessarily really big, just with some tissue deposition through the legs, rear, abdomen and breasts).
The shape that appears in the cultural ideal — thin waist, large breasts — seems to be very age-related. Some hollywood types can maintain this, but you really never see it on the soccer sidelines. You do see this combination a fair amount on college campuses, but it’s my strong impression that these are young women who are probably going to be a bit bigger all over by the time they are 40.
FWIW, it’s my strong opinion that men find that many variations of “big all over” bodytype more attractive than the cultural ideal would have you believe. Soccer moms are frequently very attractive and there’s a reason why MILF is a such a well-known term.
My point is that breast size has probably alwasy been an effective health indicator, just like voluptuousness in general. The de-correlation of breast size to total weight is probably limited to a certain period of life (which is otherwise a decent indicator of a young, healthy person who’d likely be a suitable mate).
All that said, I do find it compelling that both breasts and penises are far larger than needed to fulfill their ostensible jobs. This seems to say something really important about being human and possible cultural influences on body evolution. But I don’t know exactly what.
aaron_m 11.16.07 at 8:02 pm
“We also know that evolution is complicated, that traits are invariably linked (genetically, developmentally, functionally) to seemingly unrelated traits in non-obvious ways”
Agreed
“speculation on the evolutionary basis of various human traits or behaviors is no more scientific than astrology.”
Hmmm, not sure what you are suggesting.
I was not trying to defend lazy speculation. All I was saying is that I can understand why one would want to test such an evolutionary theory of breasts. I do think one could make progress here. Not everything should be lumped into lazy speculation. That is not a defense of any theories here.
Henry (not the famous one) 11.16.07 at 8:24 pm
Irish joke: Why did the barmaid sham pain?
Because the stout porter bit her.
No, it has nothing to do with any of the previous posts.
Lemmy Caution 11.16.07 at 8:29 pm
The paper showed that waitresses in their 30s get the best tips. Suck it, Derbyshire.
r. clayton 11.16.07 at 8:47 pm
Yes, at least until you’re seven years old.
marta 11.16.07 at 9:32 pm
Cornell University School of Hotel Administration
Hey, the research in “Mindless Eating” seemed a hell of a lot more principled and well-designed than most of what I read coming out of medical research.
W. Kiernan 11.16.07 at 11:40 pm
“Volume of mother’s milk” my ass. For crying out loud, what teenage boy here in the Western world has any consciousness at all of mother’s milk? and what teenage boy isn’t wholly fascinated with girls’s breasts? It’s nothing more nor less than the visible and tangible differentness; they got ’em, we don’t. As far as size goes, the bigger the girl’s breasts are, the more vividly visible the difference.
What this discussion reminds me of is the endless psychological blather, a thousand and one silly airy theories, about how and why American right-wingers are possessed by such deranged, hysterical hatred for Bill Clinton. What was the first big policy move the Clinton Administration did? They raised taxes on millionaires! What further explanation of right-wing anti-Clinton rabies is required?
Morejello 11.17.07 at 12:16 am
My wife is a waitress, and is fairly well endowed. After discussing a similar line of thought some time back, she did an experiment. On 3 different days, just before she took a check out to a table that was all or primarily men (IE, not a family or group of women), she would tweak her nipples a little so that they were just a little erect (and more to the point, slightly visible). Her anecdotal evidence suggested that she got higher tips from men by doing that, although there obviously wasn’t enough of a data set to estblish a baseline or draw any statistical conclusions.
As bizzare as it sounds, we still laugh about it.
vincent 11.17.07 at 12:51 am
@22: ” To him at home, pretty breasts were like a pretty face, nice but not intrinsically exciting.”
Are we really all that focused on breasts, anyway? Surely we’re more focused on faces? For me at least faces are intrinsicaly exciting. Not just ‘pretty’ faces, either. But faces are fascinating and, often, so so sexy.
Brett Bellmore 11.17.07 at 1:09 am
Ah, right, nothing else Clinton did, (Personally, the retaining an AG who burned people alive thing was a big deal for me.) pissed off right-wingers. It could only be the tax increase on millionaires…
IIRC, it’s been pretty well established that, after you control for ethnic group, the ratio of breast size to the rest of the body is actually a very good measure of fertility potential. Even though most of the breast is fat, the amount of that fat is pretty strongly regulated by estrogen levels and nutrition during puberty.
These signals may be amplified, but that doesn’t mean they’re not communicating real data.
Roy Belmont 11.17.07 at 1:09 am
“men like big breasts”
Tangential as it may be to mention, this is not an entirely true statement.
Men like big breasts on living feminine chests.
Big breasts by themselves are more or less disturbing.
Crystal 11.17.07 at 2:11 am
Yes, the South Asian aesthetic is for large breasts, accompanied by large hips (the Khajuraho sculptures show women with big breasts, wasp waists, wide hips and well-padded thighs). The modern American ideal of large breasts on a skinny, hipless body is really not shared by any other culture (including 1950’s America; Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor did have hips).
I’ve always wondered what the ev-psych crowd has to say about the fact that many cultures don’t allow people to choose their mates on the basis of sexual attraction; they have arranged marriages. Yes, it’s true that almost all foraging societies allow both men and women to divorce and remarry at will – many young women ditch the husbands that their parents have picked for them for some other guy, and no-one tries to stop them. Perhaps it’s also true that even in strict, arranged-marriage cultures, many young grooms (but not brides) have considerable latitude to initiate or refuse a marriage. But not always – no matter how high the rank. Even gay Edward II had to suck it up (or, rather, not suck Piers Gaveston) and marry a woman, one known as “The She-Wolf of France” at that. I doubt there was rampant sexual selection going on there, though the marriage did result in children.
John Emerson 11.17.07 at 2:21 am
Sophie Marceau as a She-Wolf? I don’t think so.
Shane 11.17.07 at 3:05 am
I thought the evolutionary psychology explanation for big breasts was that young-looking breasts are desired (correlated with more childbearing years remaining), and that big breasts make it easier to tell approximately how old a woman is.
I had always believed this to be the most accepted explanation among those who do research in evolutionary psychology.
aa 11.17.07 at 3:26 am
See also
nick 11.17.07 at 3:57 am
the contemporary white American ideal is unnatural, in the sense that the boyish body plus disproportionate tits matches no actual historical types of female body…..basically, though, it’s fat phobia plus titty love, right? I mean, from a cultural perspective, it’s not that hard to figure out….
goatchowder 11.17.07 at 5:58 am
Uh huh. What about the phenomemon of WOMEN finding big breasts attractive? And I mean straight women. I’d love to see a scientific study of that. My prediction: straight women find epic boobs attractive, as measured by thermal genital imaging and possibly even self-reporting.
http://motivationalimage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/epic_boobs.jpg
Come up with an evolutionary psychology Just So Story for that one, I dare ya.
Lynn Gazis-Sax 11.17.07 at 6:27 am
16, well, my Just So story about why men like female breasts so much is that it encourages them to spend sufficient time stimulating them to make sex more fun for the woman. After all, if I’m going to pick a Just So story, I’d like to pick one that favors men being good in bed :-).
34, maybe the French aren’t all that different, when you think of the career of John Donne.
69, well, you have to consider that cultures with arranged marriages do have a certain amount of adultery, so sexual attractiveness still has some value in maximizing your offspring, even if much attenuated relative to those cultures where you can choose your own spouse.
Frank 11.17.07 at 9:38 am
I find big breasted waitresses overfacing. I don’t know where to look i.e. my sexual response is inconvenient—especially if I am with my wife and daughters. If I tip extravagantly, after a display of cleavage, it is probably for the same reason that unsolicited performances of music always elicit my small change. I can brush away a single rose, or an “african carving”, when offered . What I can’t return, to their vendors, is: sexual display; musical performance–not unless I get my whistle out.
Bruce Webb 11.17.07 at 7:19 pm
I have never dared put this particular theory forward but since we are both talking containers and penises maybe it can work.
There is a persistent cultural meme that black men have larger cocks and asian men smaller with white guys coming (pun intended) in between. Well Masters and Johnson seemed to debunk that idea in their sexual survey as published in their 1966 study. When you actually measured erect cocks the differences became statistically meaningless. But heterosexual men by and large don’t measure themselves against other men by erect size, they don’t see it and mostly don’t want to see it. What they do know is the ratio between their own cock in flaccid stage and what it looks like erect and it is only natural to think that ratio is true for everyone. So when you are showering next to a guy whose flaccid member is inches longer than yours the logical assumption is that when pumped up it will be proportionally larger. This turns out on scientific examination to not be true, but then again in centuries past who was checking?
Because people who insist that black guys on average don’t have larger flaccid cocks have simply not been in the military or engaged in team sports. An amazing amount of history can be reinterpreted in terms of men not understanding the actual ratio of flaccid/erect across races and cultures.
PJ 11.17.07 at 7:20 pm
“IIRC, it’s been pretty well established that, after you control for ethnic group, the ratio of breast size to the rest of the body is actually a very good measure of fertility potential. Even though most of the breast is fat, the amount of that fat is pretty strongly regulated by estrogen levels and nutrition during puberty.”
I’ve heard this claimed a few times recently – probably derived from this – but, while my reproductive endocrinology is a little rusty, oestrogen is hardly the main determinant of female fertility (once it is in the normal range obviously). The above study refers to a paper finding mid-follicular levels of oestrogen correlate with cycles which lead to conception, but the above paper does not measure mid-follicular oestrogen and finds that luteal but not other oestrogen measures correlates (rather weakly, ~.2) with breast size. Unfortunately it gives no data on whether women with low levels of oestrogen are less fertile since it concentrates on cycles, not women (pooling the data together), and the data from the luteal phase is obviously uninterpretable in this context because of the hormonal effects of pregnancy.
Given the length of human gestation, the adverse effects of pregnancy and multiparity, and the relative ease with which women without fertility problems conceive I’d be surprised if the putative weak relationship between breast size and the effect of higher oestrogen levels on fertility was a significant determinant of female fertility versus say the significant effect of anovulation and problems with tubal patency.
George 11.17.07 at 8:01 pm
When is the companion study coming out?
The Determinants and Consequences of Male Unattractiveness and Sexual Aggression: Realistic Tests with Restaurant Waitresses
Anytime soon?
nu 11.17.07 at 9:22 pm
did i miss it or nobody mentionned the oedipian explanation ?
i mean what if men (and women) like breasts because until very recently, most of us spent the first years of our life sucking on them for food or something ?
John Emerson 11.17.07 at 11:54 pm
75: Donne was an Anglican though. Marot was, in theory, a Calvinist.
This was before the lines had hardened. Marot wasn’t completely happy in Geneva, and he didn’t stay long.
vivian 11.18.07 at 2:14 am
If men were so hardwired to love reproducing on such a large scale, then there would be no (evolutionary, just-so-story) need for orgasms to be so good. “Clearly” they were a factor determining how much sex – and children – men have. So handwavingly, men clearly prefer free orgasms – ones that don’t lead to children to feed and shelter. Now as noted above several times, nursing tends to increase the sag factor. So gravity-defying breasts can be a (weak) indicator of lack of fertility, so far at least. A woman well-past puberty who hasn’t had kids yet may look like a great reward-to-risk ratio for someone thinking with the helper-brain.
emjaybee 11.18.07 at 4:02 am
The “big breasts=lactation=fertility” idea is completely off–lactating women are *less* fertile. Extended breast feeding is actually a mildly effective form of birth control. So a lactating woman is not your best bet, reproductively speaking.
What about the idea that big breasts are not so much about sex as food–as an infant, you sought out a (to you) enormous breast in order to survive. Maybe the sight of a large breast triggers an infantile instinct.
Lynn Gazis-Sax 11.18.07 at 7:44 am
78, I suppose Masters and Johnson were looking at what would influence women’s choices, rather than what would influence men’s fears. Most of us women don’t have reason to examine the flaccid penis size of all that many men.
Frank 11.18.07 at 9:46 am
‘..a lactating woman is not your best bet, reproductively speaking.’
Many of the men who display exorbitant enthusiasm about big boobs, affect revulsion at the sight of a woman breastfeeding in public.
Danielle Day 11.19.07 at 6:01 pm
How long will it be before expressions such as “FWIW” (“for what it’s worth”), “IMHO” (“in my humble opinion”), and “MILF” (moms I’d like to play soccer with) enter the dictionaries as uncapitalized versions meaning exactly what the acronyms mean? WYSIWYG (“whizzy-wig”) has.
And, FWIW, I dispute the findings of Masters and Johnson. Mr. D. is on the large side– both coming and going. Women who maintain that they don’t enjoy this are (usually) just being nice.
Lynn Gazis-Sax 11.20.07 at 5:01 am
FWIW, I think women genuinely vary in how much they care about penis size, relative to other things (slow hand, easy touch, whatever). Some care a lot, some not much at all. But I doubt many of us sleep with a sufficient representative sample of men of all races that we’d have any way of knowing from personal experience who’s statistically better endowed. Let alone measure lots of men’s flaccid penises. Even when we engage in team sports :-).
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