Late afternoon, the meeting drags while he drones and lunch congeals on a side table. Pen in hand, notepad in lap, body in chair tilted way back, I’m the very picture of rapt and thoughtful attention, or so I hope as I stare intently at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling, the sort with thousands of dots of different sizes, trying to find a constellation up there but the dots evade easy classification, blending together then moving this way and that as my head starts to spin.
I lean forward and move my pad to the table then look up to the window, thinking I need a refreshing gaze out at the horizon to recalibrate my eyes and stop the spinning. And that’s when I see them.
Or did I? In my current ocularly confused condition, I can’t be certain. Must check again. Surreptitiously. So as I turn my head toward the speaker I peer out of the corner of my eyes across the table for just a second, long enough to verify that yes, indeed, my eyes haven’t deceived me, I saw what I think I saw, and I get this burst of energy as the meeting suddenly gets a lot more interesting as I look down and count the second till I can sneak another peek without drawing attention to myself because oh my God! those are two of the finest breasts I have ever seen.
They’re perfectly proportioned, nicely round without being bulbous, not so big that they sag, or so pert that they point, they’re just big enough for two glorious handfuls, and I’m thinking, hey, I have two hands.
They are the Platonic form of Breasts and she displays them with the proper care, enveloping them in what appears to be one of those lacy bras that provide some support while still allowing the breasts to bounce about and find their place, thereby preserving their oval appearance and confirming that they are, indeed, all natural. Implants never drape like that.
She could’ve hidden them beneath a baggy sweater or a suit jacket, but thankfully she didn’t, opting for a tight white blouse that adheres to her curvature, straining outward to leave no doubt of what bulges beneath.
Another scan on the sly and I detect a hint of nipples protruding ever so slightly through the thin fabric encasing these wonders, nipples staring at me across the table, calling out to me, my face flushing as these Sirens try to lure this sailor onto the rocks. I try hard to look away, but I can’t resist their temptation, swinging my head around to the front of the table, drinking them in for two more precious seconds.
I don’t know the woman who owns these glorious globes. Now I wish I did, if only to give me an excuse to drop by her office and visit them. I know her only by reputation, and that reputation is excellent. She’s young, serious, a studious look about her, light make-up, nothing flashy, reminds of a girl I knew from Wellesley. The sort of person who gives no hint from the chin up what she has from the chin down. And that, of course, only enhances the allure, the thrill of discovering what lies beneath. Buried treasure where you least expect it.
I’m careful. I hope she doesn’t notice. I’ll never forget that time they caught that Group VP upstairs staring so hard at a chest that he didn’t even notice that its owner had noticed. That was his third strike so they packed him off to our most intense sensitivity awareness seminar, think of a Betty Ford for wayward gazers. Even worse, he was branded permanently with the dreaded scarlet L for “Lech.” Or was it “Leer”? Or “Lewd”? Or maybe “Lust” in his heart?
Can’t let that happen to me, so I studiously avoid them, staring at my notepad, trying to collect myself, then staring at that guy droning on at the head of the table, a cold shower of sorts, but it isn’t working. They just loom larger in my mind. Must. Think. Of. Something. Else.
Am I bad? I am married, after all, so I’d never actually act on my prurient thoughts, but maybe just by looking I’m committing mental adultery. I remember once I was sitting in a colleague’s office after he’d returned from his honeymoon, and as one of our female colleagues walked by he turned to me and confided that one of her body parts was one of the choicest he’d ever been privileged to see. “But didn’t you just get married?” “I got married, I didn’t go blind,” he said. Now that I’m married, I understand, and I only fault him for being crude and impolite enough to divulge his crude and impolite thoughts. I never discuss my crude and impolite thoughts. Except with you, of course, but just this one time. Never again.
It’s not as if I’m some sort of misogynistic pig who only values women for their attractive body parts. Believe it or not, I’m one of the good guys. I love women. I admire women. I respect women. I listen to women. I read women. I share ideas with women. I work with women. In fact, some of my best friends are women.
Okay, that last part didn’t sound right. What I mean is, women are important to me on so many levels, very few of them lurid. Sitting across from me right now is an intelligent human being, a dedicated member of our team, a hard worker, a high achiever who’s overcome all sorts of challenges to make it here today, and someone who, I am sure, is also empathetic, caring and giving, a valued member of her various familial and social groups. In short, a well-rounded human being who just happens to sport these incredibly well-rounded breasts.
Even when I do scope out a woman’s body, I am not so much interested in her discrete body parts as I am in whether they all blend together in a harmonious whole. This holistic approach tries to appreciate each woman on her own terms. So big breasts, small breasts, round breasts, perky breasts, I don’t really care, so long as they work well with the rest of her body. But in this case, I must make an exception. They’re just so perfect.
This is ridiculous. Just look at what I’ve been reduced to, a Pavlovian dog drooling over a set of mammary glands. William James was right, we’re creatures of instinct. Something about breasts just grabs me at a primordial level and won’t let go. Why is that? In other mammals, breasts aren’t even visible most of the time, popping out only when a female is lactating and then retracting when she’s through. If anything, the sight of protruding breasts is a turn off, telling all males that this female is already carrying someone else’s baby or nursing a newborn, conditions that tend to prevent or reduce her fertility.
Humans are different. From puberty on, our females always display their mammary glands whether or not they’re nursing. In other animals, this condition would prevent a female from mating. With us, it’s essential for mating. Why?
Do permanently visible breasts work better than retractable breasts? Not at all; a woman’s breast size has nothing to do with her milk production. When you’re looking at a breast, you’re looking at fat, exquisitely shaped fat, but fat nonetheless. If anything, the fat can get in the way of milk production and make it more difficult for the baby to latch on. In addition to being useless, permanently visible breasts are also potentially harmful, their bouncy design slowing women down, making it more difficult for them to outrun predators, and their high fat content sucking up an inordinate share of a woman's precious calories. So why visible breasts?
If women don’t need them, then it must be because men respond to them. But why do men salivate at the sight of breasts?
Is it our fond memories of nursing at our own mother’s breasts? Not only is that disgusting, it’s wrong. I don’t remember anything that far back and, even if I did, if suckling as an infant is all it takes to create a lifelong lust for breasts, why don’t women develop a similar lust for breasts? They suckled just as much as we did. And why do men raised on formula still seek out breasts? This explanation doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe breast fat is the key. Women need more body fat than men, and when they don’t have it, they don’t ovulate and they won’t lactate. A woman with visible breasts is more likely to be fat enough to reproduce. Or at least look that way. Maybe our male ancestors evolved a preference for rotundity that eventually overwhelmed their aversion to visible breasts. Or maybe most males didn’t prefer visible breasts, but the few that did were more likely to sire more children, their mates being fatter, on average, and after hundreds of thousands of years of superior fecundity their children would overwhelm the less fertile retracting breast people, populating the earth with girls who inherited their mothers’ visible breasts and boys who inherited their fathers’ preference for the visible breasts. Like me!
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Men like women with small waists because big waists say: "Baby (Already) On Board." So anything that makes a woman’s waist look smaller should increase her perceived fertility, which should increase her desirability, which in turn should increase her success at finding a mate and procreating. And what makes a woman’s waist look smaller? Large visible breasts, of course. This may also explain why women's butts tend to be so big. It’s all about that hourglass figure.
Speaking of butts, here’s another theory. We are the only primates who mate face-to-face. The others all do it doggy style (or primate style, I suppose). Men who preferred face-to-face sex were more likely to fall in love with their mates, as it’s not as easy to share kisses, meaningful looks and sweet nothings while facing your partner’s back. Men who love their women are more likely to provide for them, which means their women will be fatter and more fertile and make more kids. And their lovestruck men would work harder to raise these kids, investing significant time and effort in part to please their mate. And this would ensure that more of these love children survived and passed on their inherited preference for face-to-face sex, which after a few millennia would ensure that they crowded out the few remaining rear-entry stalwarts. What does this have to do with breasts? Well, in the old days when our primate ancestors always entered from the rear, what do you think those primate males lusted after? Butts. Not only is that the part of the female they associated most with mating, it’s also, in most primates, the area that swells and turns red when a female’s in heat. Primate males who respond to this fertility-driven butt stimuli are more likely to mate successfully, so even after newly bipedal humans evolved the ability to have face-to-face sex, most of the human males probably retained their ages-old primate-derived preference for round red swollen butts. What would convince them to ditch this preference and turn her over? What if their female developed permanently visible breasts, breasts with cleavage designed to look like a butt crack, breasts that were large and round and wiggly and swollen with red spots at the tip? Maybe this butt/breast similarity is what got them over their aversion to visible breasts, maybe it is what convinced them to give face-to-face a try, and maybe this is what enabled them to perform in that unfamiliar position with its stimulating simulation of the time-honored butt view bouncing about during the deed. Call this the Booty/Booby Theory, or the Cleavage/Crack Conversion, or just call it cracked, either way as I sit here salivating over mammary glands, my instinctive desires fired by a pair of useless bags of fat, I think it may take a strange theory to explain my strange behavior.
“What do you think of the proposal? Looks like you’re giving this a lot of thought.”
Every face is staring at me.
“Still thinking,” I say, as I look down and grab my pen and hold it over my pad and wait for them to say something I can write down and demonstrate my attentiveness when I recall the Revenge of the Nerds Theory. That might explain it.
It all starts with the dominant male model, a winner-take-all system in which the dominant male gets to mate with all the women. This is a good system for enhancing genetic fitness, breeding only the fittest males with all the females, weeding out the pencil-necked geeks. For this reason it is very common in the animal world, especially among primates who live in social groups, much like our own ancestors. Somewhere along the line we ditched the dominant male model in favor of our one-on-one breeding model. (Except in Saudi Arabia and Utah.) Why? I don’t know, but for whatever reason the one-on-one model must work better for humans, so over time it replaced the dominant male model. And this where the nerds come in. If you’re the dominant male, you can mate with anyone. Who will you choose? Only the most fertile women, of course. You reason that women with visible breasts are more likely to be pregnant, and thus poor candidates for further reproduction until their breasts retract, so you concentrate your energies on flat-chested women with retracted breasts. You lavish attention on these runway models, jealously guarding them from the advances of other males. But you can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t support every female, let alone every kid, so to keep it manageable you might neglect or cast aside the visibly breasted women. This gave the nerds their chance. Either because they had no alternative, or because, being nerds, they were better able to comprehend that visible breasts didn’t always mean infertility, the nerds swooped in and mated with the visibly-breasted women. And maybe the nerds, not having to divide their time and share their resources with a harem full of women and their children, were able to lavish time and attention on these visibly breasted women and their children, which produced more surviving children and, over time, bred a race filled with visibly breasted women and the nerds who love them. Like me!
They're leaving. I glance up, then towards the door, but the breasts are already gone. Deflated, I gather my things, get up and trudge back to my office, NSFW thoughts still bouncing about in my head.
For more fevered ramblings, see “Doll Parts” (March 21, 2005). For more reasoned ramblings, see N. Lloyd, “Why Women Have Breasts” (source of “desires fueled by useless bags of fat”) and E.M. Miller, “Breasts: Their Evolutionary Origins as a Deceptive Signal of Need for Provisioning and Temporary Infertility” (Aug. 1993).
The "Booty/Booby" theory was advanced, perhaps not for the first time, by Desmond Morris's "The Naked Ape," a book that everybody read when it came out and then later a book that everybody made fun of. The theory has always made sense to me, though.
Posted by: R J Keefe | May 05, 2006 at 06:39 AM
Honest, as are all of your essays. Many thanks.
It was fascinating to get a glimpse into the male mind. Personally, I love my breasts, in all the shapes they have taken on in my 48 years. It please me that they please men, and I don't think it is too far off to say that women (and men) like to be admired for a wide range of things, physical attributes included.
But I wonder, as a former performaing artists and now mother, and not as one who has ever had to negotiate a corporate environment, how women in the corporate world choose to dress. Would the uniform of a suit serve them better? I think were I to appear regularly with men in meetings, presentations and other corporate functions, a modest jacket might help me feel assured that I might keep the thoughts of my more testosterone-driven colleagues at a more professional level.
But is that possible? To divert attention from a woman's breasts to her mind by dressing uniformly? Or does it not really matter? And in the absence of specific visual stimuli (say a woman were clothed from head to toe ala the traditional burka,) would the sound of a woman's voice, the line of her neck, her smell, the question of what is not seen, cause similar digressions in some men simply as diversion from the dull task at hand? Would what is then not seen possibly provoke even greater fantasies?
ANd I guess the ultimate question is: Who is responsible for an individual's private fantasy? I guess the answer to that is obvious. The only one who really has control.
Posted by: RT | May 08, 2006 at 07:20 AM
"The sort of person who gives no hint from the chin up what she has from the chin down. "
A different and warmer way of wording for the clichesque "iceberg" analogy of describing a person.
Thank God for the presence of women in the stultifying ennui of meetings. Otherwise, fantasy may go in unpredictabel and unwanted directions...not that there's anything wrong with that.
Just wondering. This Wellesley-like lass? Wonder if her blog carries similar fantasies caused by the bore dumb of the mentioned meeting? A lot of stuff happening above the chin.
Posted by: DarkoV | May 09, 2006 at 06:39 AM
Well, if you're bad, we all are, I fear.
I had a friend who would say out loud (though only audible to us) "Congratulations, Madam" whenever he saw a woman with what he would inevitably describe as "tremendous breasts" passing in the street, sitting on the bus or wherever. I picked up the habit from him, and began saying it out loud to myself, even when I was on my own. I always I assumed I said it under my breath, until the day when a woman on the train looked up me at me with a quizzical smile and asked "For what ?"
I don't say it any more. But I still think it.
Posted by: waterhot | May 10, 2006 at 04:00 AM
As always, the French have the most desriptive and tasteful phrase. So, Mr. Waterhot, in lieu of the "Congratulations, Madam", you can mention to the woman in question (well, actually, in sight):
"Il y a du monde au balcon"
(There's a crowd on the balcony). She's sure to find you sophisticated...and accurate.
Posted by: DarkoV | May 10, 2006 at 05:31 AM
When I first read this post, I laughed and laughed – in a good way, of course. The male mind continues to confound and fascinate. It also made me think about my own … predicament, shall we say.
As a tall, slender, fashion-loving woman with a D-cup, the issue of “how to dress” is omnipresent. I steer clear of most trends that emphasize the poitrine, but every once in a while I succumb. It’s quite difficult to find suitable clothing, you know,
I always laugh (silently), however, when I realize that a male colleague is struggling to avert his eyes during a routine face-to-face conversation, especially if I’m wearing heels and the man is … somewhat shorter. I can usually extract a concession or an agreement when that happens.
“Congratulations, Madam.”
Posted by: Searchie | May 10, 2006 at 08:01 AM