But there are pitfalls to this line of work. For one thing, it's not actually clear that breasts are universally adored.
In a 1951 study of 191 cultures, anthropologist Clellan Ford and ethologist Frank Beach reported that breasts were considered sexually important to men in 13 of those cultures. Of those, nine cultures preferred large breasts.
Two — the Azande and Ganda of Africa — found long, pendulous breasts most attractive. Another two — the Maasai of Africa and Manus of the South Pacific — liked breasts that were upright and "hemispherical," but not necessarily large. Thirteen cultures also reported breast simulation during sex, but only three of those overlapped with the societies where men reported finding breasts important for sexual attraction.
In a chapter in the book "Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives" (Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), cultural anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler describes telling friends in Mali about sexual foreplay involving breasts and getting responses ranging from "bemused to horrified."
"In any case, they regarded it as unnatural, perverted behavior, and found it difficult to believe that men would become sexually aroused by womens breast, or that women would find such activities pleasurable," Dettwyler wrote.
In the cultural view, men aren't so much biologically drawn to breasts as trained from an early age to find them erotic.
"Obviously, humans can learn to view breasts as sexually attractive. We can learn to prefer long, pendulous breasts, or upright, hemispherical breasts. We can learn to prefer large breasts," Dettwyler wrote. [The 7 Biggest Mysteries of the Human Body].
Even if there is some biological underpinning for an interest in bosoms, it might vary by culture. A 2011 study compared men's preferences for breast size, symmetry, and areola size and color in Papua News Guina, Samoa and New Zealand and found that men from Papua New Guinea preferred larger breasts than men from the other two islands. Because the men surveyed from Papua New Guinea hailed from more of a subsistence culture than the men in Samoa or New Zealand, the results support the idea that in places of scarcity, padded buntlines could signal a well-fed woman with reserves for pregnancy and child rearing, the researchers wrote. Areola size and color preferences were highly idiosyncratic between cultures.
<<Print>>