During the 16th century, prostitutes would stand on the streets bare-chested as a form of advertisement (Domshy, 2003). He painted Agnes, the mistress of Charles the VII with a bare breast specifically designed to suggest her eroticism. The French painter Jean Fouquet paints one of the first erotic breasts in Western art. Such behavior doesn’t appear across shunga.īack here in the West, the erotic breast appears in a brief period during the 15th and 16th centuries. Only a few artists fixated on sexual scenes involve breast stimulation. When breasts appear, they appear in scenes where a woman breastfeeds an infant. Typically, shunga shows small breasts when they show up at all. Shunga are pornographic woodblock prints. From the point of view of the artists, breasts really didn’t seem to matter.” In shunga from the early Edo Period, men and women were depicted with largely similar chests. They were not a sexualized part of the body. “It appears that men of the Edo period considered breast to be a tool for child rearing. Yoshihiko Shirakawa, an expert on woodblock prints states (Kozuka, 2013): Artists rendered other body parts in loving detail, but they largely ignored breasts. If you look at Japanese woodblock prints from the Edo period, not a lot of attention is lavished on the breast. In Japanese culture, you also find a distinct lack of interest in the chest until the modern era. Breasts don’t look like a lady’s backside without being squished together by bras and corsets. What about breasts looking like a woman’s backside? This is a cultural projection of the West. For example, in some African and New Guinean cultures, women don’t cover their chest, and men show a lack of interest in the exposed bosoms. She cautions: “whenever evolutionary biologists suggest a universal reason for a behavior and emotion: how about the cultural differences?” (Wolchover, 2012). Anthropologist Fran Mascia-Lees takes on this view and Young’s oxytocin argument by pointing out how not all men are attracted to breasts. The idea that breasts were a way of competing for men makes little sense in light of cultural norms. Because of this, a fixation on the breast as the symbol for life is a reasonable explanation for its prolific appearance across cultures. The breast was the only means of nourishing an infant up until the 19th century. The presence of large-breasted statues and paintings doesn’t necessarily point to a fixation on the chest for sexual reasons. Men Aren’t Naturally Attracted to Breasts? These arguments offer convincing evidence that men learn to be attracted to breasts. While these explanations are accepted, some argue against breast attraction as a natural part of male sexuality. Sounds like science has the reason sewn up, doesn’t it? Not so fast. Women’s breasts, on average, are already very large by comparison to most primates. Eventually, the sexual selection benefits are outweighed by the costs. They take vital nutrients to create, and energy to carry around they make the female body biomechanically less efficient (again, all like the peacock’s tail). Now you might be asking yourself, if this is the case why don’t all women have large boobs? Because breasts are costly, according to many researchers. Men are said to prefer young women who haven’t had children, so traits associated with youth and virginity (in this case, never being pregnant) like a slender waist, wide hips, and large, firm breasts attract men. The chemical helps bond a lady to the man (Wolchover, 2012).īreasts show off fertility. Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, suggests men like breasts because stimulating a woman’s nipples releases oxytocin, the neurochemical responsible for strengthening affection. Breasts also mimic the shape of the backside which is a turn on for other apes (Miller, 2006). Basically, they work similar to how a male bird has colorful feathers. They are a form of competition to attract men with resources. It’s thought large breasts developed to keep men interested in women with children. Researchers see these artifacts across cultures (Chivers, 2012). Scientists see the presence of large-breasted statues and cave drawings from the earliest period of human history as evidence for men’s focus on the female chest. Modern theories on breast fixation center on the idea of resource competition and biology. Let’s first take a look at modern ideas of why men like breasts and then look into the traditional Japanese view. Modern men like breasts, but for most of human history, the breast was associated with life, particularly that of a child, instead of sexuality (Domshy, 2003). At first blush, this seems like a simple answer: guys. While I’ve already addressed breast symbolism in anime, I haven’t discussed why anime obsesses over breasts. Anime too has a special fixation on the breast. Modern American culture worships the breast. Boobs, headlights, breasts, jugs, chichi.
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