7. CIRCULAR REASONINGS
THE STORY OF THE BREAST
NANCY BURLEY, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California in Irvine, plays Halloween with birds. She takes male zebra finches and she accessorizes them. A normal, pre-Burley finch is a beautiful animal, red of beak and orange of cheek, his chest a zebra print of stripes, his underwings polka-dotted in orange, and his eyes surrounded by vertical streaks of black and white, like the eyes of a mime artist. One thing the zebra finch does not have is a crest, as some species of birds do. So Burley will give a male a crest. She will attach a tall white cap of feathers to his head, turning him into Chef Bird-o-Dee. Or she'll give him a tall red Cat-in-the-Hat cap. His bird legs are normally a neutral shade of grayish beige, so she gives him flashy anklets of red, yellow, lavender, or powder blue. And by altering the visual pith of him, his finchness, Burley alters his life. As she has shown in a series of wonderful, amusing, important experiments, female zebra finches have decided opinions about the various accouterments. They love the tall white chef caps, and they will clamor to mate with a male so haberdashed. Zebra finches ordinarily couple up and abide by a system of shared parental care of nestlings, but if a female is paired with a white-hatted male, she gladly works overtime on child care and allows him to laze—though he doesn't laze but spends his free time philandering. Call the benighted wife the bird who mistakes a hat for a mate.
But put a male in a tall red cap, and the females turn up their beaks. No trophy he: you can have him, sister. If a red-capped male manages to obtain a mate, he ends up being so busy taking care of his offspring that he has no time for extramarital affairs, and there are no demands for his moonlighting services anyway.
The opposite holds true for leg bands. Dress a male in white ankle rings and he's of scant appeal. Put him in red and he's a lovebird.
Zebra finches have no good reason for being drawn to white toques and red socks. We cannot look at the results of Burley's costume experiments and say, Ah, yes, the females are using the white crest as an indicator that the male will be a good father, or that his genes are robust and therefore he's a great catch. A zebra finch with a white crest can hardly be said to bear superior finch genes when he's not supposed to have a crest in the first place. Instead, the unexpected findings offer evidence of the so-called sensory exploitation theory of mate choice. By this proposal, the white hat takes advantage of a neurophysiological process in the zebra finch's brain that serves some other, unknown purpose but that is easily coopted and aroused. The hat stimulates an extant neural pathway, and it lures the female, and the female does not know why, but she knows what she likes. We can understand that impulse, the enticement of an object we deem beautiful. "Human beings have an exquisite aesthetic sense that is its own justification," Burley says. "Our ability to appreciate impressionistic painting cannot be called functional. In my mind, that's what we're seeing with the zebra finches. The preferences are aesthetic, not functional. They don't correlate with anything practical."
Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that if a male finch someday were born with a mutation that gives him a touch of a white thatch, the mutation would spread rapidly through finchdom, possibly becoming accentuated over time, until a bird had the toque by nature that Burley loaned by contrivance. No doubt some researchers in that hypothetical future would assume that the finch's white cap had meaning and was an indicator of zebra finch mettle, and they'd speculate about the epistemology of the trait.
A woman's breasts, I argue, are like Burley's white crests. They're pretty, they're flamboyant, they're irresistible. But they are arbitrary, and they signify much less than we think. This is a contrarian view. Evolutionary theorists have proposed many explanations for the existence of the breast, usually according it a symbolic or functional value, as a signal to men of information they need to know about a potential mate. How can we not give the breast its evolutionary due when it is there in our faces, begging for narrative. "Few issues have been the focus for a wider range of speculation based on fewer facts than the evolutionary origin and physiological function of women's breasts," the biologist Caroline Pond has written. The stories about the breast sound real and persuasive, and they may all have a germ of validity, because we ascribe meaning wherever and however we choose; that is one of the perquisites of being human. As the actress Helen Mirren said in the movie O Lucky Man, "All religions are equally true."
Still, I will argue that breasts fundamentally are here by accident. They are sensory exploiters. They say little or nothing about a woman's inherent health, quality, or fecundity. They are accouterments. If we go looking for breasts and for ways to enhance and display our breasts, to make them stand out like unnatural, almost farcical Barbie-doll missile heads, then we are doing what breasts have always done, which is appeal to an irrational aesthetic sense that has no function but that begs to be amused. The ideal breasts are, and always have been, stylized breasts. A woman's breasts welcome illusion and the imaginative opportunities of clothing. They can be enhanced or muted, as a woman chooses, and their very substance suggests as much: they are soft and flexible, clay to play with. They are funny things, really, and we should learn to laugh at them, which may be easier to do if we first take them seriously.
The most obvious point to be made about the human breast is that it is unlike any other bosom in the primate order. The breasts of a female ape or monkey swell only when she is lactating, and the change is usually so modest that it can be hard to see beneath her body hair. Once the mother has weaned her offspring, her breasts flatten back. Only in humans do the breasts inflate at puberty, before the first pregnancy occurs or could even be sustained, and only in humans do they remain engorged throughout life. In fact, the swelling of the breasts in pregnant and lactating women occurs quite independently of pubertal breast development, and in a more uniform manner: a small-breasted woman's breasts grow about as much during pregnancy, in absolute terms, as a busty woman's breasts do, which is why the temporary expansion is comparatively more noticeable on a small-breasted woman. For all women, maternal augmentation results from the proliferation and distention of the cells of the ducts and lobules (the dairy equipment), increased blood flow, water retention, and the milk itself. Small-breasted women have the same amount of lactogenic tissue as large-breasted women do—about a teaspoonful per nonlactating breast—and when they lactate, they can make as much milk. Given the functional nature of lactation, it is under selective pressure to follow fairly standardized rules of behavior.
The growth of the aesthetic breast is another thing altogether. Here, it is development of the fatty and connective tissues of the breast that accounts for its mass. As tissues with few cellular responsibilities or functional restrictions, fat and its fibrous netting can follow the whim of fashion and the consequences of sensory exploitation. They can be enlarged, exaggerated, and accentuated without exacting a great cost to their possessors, at least up to a point. In Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater, the following exchange occurs between the eponymous dilettante of the sewer, Mickey Sabbath, and a small-breasted patient in a mental hospital:
"Tits. I understand tits. I have been studying tits since I was thirteen years old. I don't think there's any other organ or body part that evidences so much variation in size as women's tits."
"I know," replied Madeline, openly enjoying herself suddenly and beginning to laugh. "And why is that? Why did God allow this enormous variation in breast size? Isn't it amazing? There are women with breasts ten times the size of mine. Or even more. True?"
"That is true."
"People have big noses," she said. "I have a small nose. But are there people with noses ten times the size of mine? Four or five, max. I don't know why God did this to women....
"But I don't think size has to do with milk production," said Madeline. "No, that doesn't solve the problem of what this enormous variation is for."
As mad Madeline says, the aesthetic breast that is subject to such wid
e variation in scale is not the mammalian breast gland that ranks as an organ, a necessary piece of anatomy. On the contrary, the aesthetic breast is nonfunctional to the point of being counterfunctional, which is why it strikes us as so beautiful. We are not enticed by the practical. We understand the worthiness of the practical, but we rarely find it beautiful. The large, nonlactating female breast has so much intrinsic, irrational appeal that it almost sabotages itself. We love the hemispheric breast for itself, independent of, and often in spite of, its glandular role. We love it enough that we can be made squeamish by the sight of a breastfeeding woman. It is not the exposure of the breast in public that makes us uncomfortable, for we welcome an extraordinary degree of decolletage and want to walk toward it, to gaze at it. Nor is it the reminder of our animal nature, for we can eat many things in public and put pieces of food in a baby's mouth—or a bottle of breast milk, for that matter—without eliciting a viewer's discomfort at the patent display of bodily need. Instead, it is the convergence of the aesthetic and the functional that disturbs and irritates us. When we find the image of a breastfeeding mother lovely or appealing, we do so by negating the aesthetic breast in our minds and focusing on the bond between mother and infant, on the miraculous properties that we imagine human milk to have, or on thoughts of warmth, comfort, and love recalled from our childhood. The maternal breast soothes us and invites us to rest. The aesthetic breast arouses us, grabs us by the collar or the bodice, and so it is used on billboards and magazine covers and everywhere we turn. The two conceptual breasts appeal to distinct pathways. One is ancient and logical, the love of mama and mammary. (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written: "The Latin term for breasts, mammae, derives from the plaintive cry 'mama,' spontaneously uttered by young children from widely divergent linguistic groups and often conveying a single, urgent message, 'suckle me.'") The other pathway is much newer, specific to our species, and it is noisier and more gratuitous. Being strictly human, the aesthetic breast puts on airs and calls itself divine.
Because the display of the beckoning breast is aggressive and ubiquitous in the United States, we are said to be unusually, even pathologically, breast-obsessed. In other cultures, including parts of Africa and Asia, breasts are pedestrian. "From my research in China, it's very clear that the breast is much less sexualized there than it is in American culture," Emily Martin, the cultural historian and author of Flexible Bodies, said to me. "It's neither hidden nor revealed in any particular way in women's dress or undergarments. In many villages, women sit in the sun with their breasts exposed, and older women will be out washing clothes with their breasts exposed, and it's all completely irrelevant to erotic arousal." Yet if breast obsession varies in intensity from country to country and era to era, it nonetheless is impressively persistent, and it is not limited to men, or to strictly sexual tableaux. "Everybody loves breasts," Anne Hollander, the author of Seeing Through Clothes, told me. "Babies love them, men love them, women love them. The whole world knows that breasts are engines of pleasure. They're great treasures of the human race, and you can't get away from them." The first thing that women did in the fourteenth century, when they broke free of the shapeless drapery of the Christian era, was to flaunt their bosoms. Men shortened their outfits and exposed their legs, women lowered the neckline and tightened the bodice. They pushed their breasts together and up. They took the soft and floppy tissue of the breasts and molded it with corsets and whalebones into firm, projecting globes. "As a fashion gimmick, you can never go wrong with breasts," Hollander says. "They may be deemphasized for a short period, as they were in the sixteenth century, when tiny breasts and thick waists were in vogue, and during the flapper era of the 1920s. But breasts always come back, because we love them so much."
What we love is not the breast per se but the fantasy breast, the aesthetic breast of no practical value. At a recent exhibition of Cambodian sculpture spanning the sixth through fifteenth centuries, I noticed that most of the female deities depicted had breasts that might have been designed by modern plastic surgeons: large, round, and firm. Helen of Troy's breasts were said to be of such flawless, curved, suspended substance that goblets could be cast from their form, as Ezra Pound told us in Canto 120: "How to govern is from Kuan Tze/but the cup of white gold in Petera/ Helen's breast gave that." In the art of ancient India, Tibet, Crete, and elsewhere, the cups never runneth over, and women are shown with celestial breasts, zero-gravity planet breasts, the sorts of breasts I've almost never seen in years of using health-club locker rooms. On real women, I've seen breasts as varied as faces: breasts shaped like tubes, breasts shaped like tears, breasts that flop down, breasts that point up, breasts that are dominated by thick, dark nipples and areolae, breasts with nipples so small and pale they look airbrushed. We erroneously associate floppy breasts with older breasts, when in fact the drooping of the breast can happen at any age; some women's breasts are low-slung from the start. Thus the high, cantilevered style of the idealized breast must be considered more than just another expression of a taste for youth.
We don't know why there is such a wide variety of breast sizes, or what exactly controls the growth of the breast, particularly the fat tissue that gives the human breast its bulk. As mammary glands, human breasts follow the standard mammalian pattern. A mammary gland is a modified sweat gland, and milk is highly enriched sweat. Prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production, predates the evolution of mammals, originally serving to maintain salt and water balance in early vertebrates such as fish—in essence, allowing fish to sweat. In monotremes, the platypus and the spiny anteater, which are considered the most primitive of living mammals, the milk simply seeps from the gland onto the nippleless surface of the mother's skin, rather as sweat does, and is licked off by the young.
Breast tissue begins to develop early, by the fourth week of fetal life. It grows along two parallel milk ridges, ancient mammalian structures that extend from the armpits down to the groin. Males and females both have milk ridges, but only in females do they receive enough hormonal stimulation later in life to achieve complete breastiness. If we were rats or pigs, our twin milk strips would develop into a total of eight teats, to meet the demands of large litters. Mammals such as elephants, cows, goats, and primates, which give birth to only one or two offspring at a time, require only two mammary glands, and so the bulk of the milk strip regresses during fetal development. Among four-legged grazing animals, the teats that grow are located at the hindquarters, where the young can suckle beneath the protective awning of a mother's powerful hind legs and rib cage. In at least one primitive primate, the aye-aye, the twin teats also are situated at the rear end of the mother. But among monkeys, apes, and humans, who either hold their young or carry them clinging to their chests (the better to navigate arboreally), the nipples graced with milk are the uppermost two, closest to the armpits.
Our potential breasts do not entirely abandon us, though. The milk ridge reminds us of our lineage subcutaneously: breast tissue is distributed far more extensively than most of us realize, reaching from the collarbone down to the last two ribs and from the breastbone, in the middle of the chest, to the back of the armpit. In some people the milk ridge expresses itself graphically, as extra nipples or entire extra breasts. Recalling her years as a lingerie saleswoman, an essayist in the New York Times Magazine wrote about a customer looking for a bra that would fit her unusual figure. The woman bared her breasts to the essayist, Janifer Dumas. The woman was a modern-day Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who often is portrayed with multiple breasts. In this case, Artemis had three equal-sized breasts, the standard two on either side of her thorax and the third directly below the left one. Dumas found the perfect item, a "bralette," similar to a sports bra but with a more relaxed fit, no underwire, and a wide elastic band to hug the rib cage. "It occurred to me that this was also the type of bra I sold to women with recent mastectomies," Dumas wrote, "a piece of lingerie designed for comfort, and, as it turned out, able to accommodate more or less."
The aesthetic breast develops in advance of the glandular one. Early in adolescence, the brain begins secreting regular bursts of hormones that stimulate the ovaries. The ovaries in turn discharge estrogen, and estrogen encourages the body to lay down fat "depots" in the breast. That adipose tissue is suspended in a gelatinous matrix of connective fibers that extend from the muscle of the chest wall to the underside of the breast skin. Connective tissue can stretch and stretch, to accommodate as much fat as the body inserts between its fibers; the connective tissue's spring gives the breast its bounce. Estrogen is necessary to the aesthetic breast, but it is not sufficient; the hormone alone does not explain the wide variability in breast size. A woman with large breasts does not necessarily have higher estrogen levels than a small-breasted woman. Rather, the tissue of the breast is more or less responsive to estrogen, a sensitivity determined in part by genetic makeup. Among the sensitive, a very small amount of estrogen fosters an impressive bosom. Estrogen-sensitive women who take birth control pills may discover that they need bigger bras, while the estrogen-insensitive can swallow oral contraceptives by the foilful and find their breasts unmoved. Even some children are extremely sensitive to estrogen. Berton Roueche, the great medical writer, recounted the story of a six-year-old boy who began growing breasts. Eventually, the source of the hypertrophy was traced to his vitamin tablets. A single stamping machine had been used to punch out the vitamins and estrogen pills. "Think of the minute amount of estrogen the stamping machine passed on to the vitamin tablets," Roueche wrote. "And what a profound effect it had." The boy's breasts retreated on cessation of the vitamin tablets, and his parents could breathe again.
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