Sex at Dawn

little matter of etiquette attended to, the credo is stated once again.”

Sin Tetas, No Hay Parafso¹¹

For better or worse, the human female’s naughty bits don’t swell up to five times their normal size and turn bright red to signal her sexual availability. But is there anatomical evidence suggesting that women evolved to be highly sexual? No question. It turns out that every bit as much as a man’s body, the woman’s body (and preconscious behavior) is replete with indications of millennia of promiscuity and sperm competition.

Considering its almost total lack of muscle tissue, the female breast wields amazing power. Curvaceous women have leveraged this power to manipulate even the most accomplished, disciplined men for as long as anyone’s been around to notice. Empires have fallen, wills have been revised, millions of magazines and calendars sold, Super Bowl audiences scandalized . all in response to the mysterious force emanating from what are, after all, small bags of fat.

One of the oldest human images known, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, created about 25,000 years ago, features a bosom of Dolly Parton-esque dimensions. Two hundred fifty centuries later, the power of the exaggerated breast shows little sign of getting old. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, 347,254 breast augmentation procedures were performed in the United States in 2007, making it the nation’s most commonly performed surgical procedure. What gives the female breast such transcendent influence over heterosexual male consciousness?

First, let’s dispense with any purely utilitarian interpretations. While the mammary glands contained in women’s breasts exist for the feeding of infants, the fatty tissue that confers the magical curve of the human breast—the swell, sway, and jiggle—has nothing to do with milk production. Given the clear physiological costs of having pendulous breasts (back strain, loss of balance, difficulty running), if they aren’t meant to advertise milk for babies, why did human females evolve and retain these cumbersome appendages?