Cleavage

Breasts are everywhere. It’s impossible to look at a magazine, advertisement, television commercial, or movie without seeing a pair of breasts on display. The reason isn’t exactly a mystery: People, especially heterosexual men, enjoy looking at breasts.

But at the same time, women are also told to hide their breasts. Dress codes that permit men to wear revealing tops or no tops at all often prohibit women from showing cleavage. Breastfeeding mothers are told to cover up in restaurants for being inappropriate. Female nipples are banned on Instagram, while male nipples are allowed.

People get titillated by breasts and enjoy looking at them or masturbating to them, but they simultaneously scowl at the women whom these breasts belong to, deriding them as inappropriate or pathetic and telling them to put their breasts away. In this twisted love-hate relationship that society has with female breasts, women are told that their breasts are valued and attractive, but also shameful and best covered up. We may think we have progressed enormously from the time when women had to cover their ankles in public, but it seems that not much has changed after all.

The classic argument is that breasts are sexual, and that flaunting them about in public is just as inappropriate as a man swinging his penis around. Some on the Internet have even reasoned that breastfeeding in public is comparable to a man taking out his penis and “feeding” his wife or girlfriend in public. After all, breasts are in the same category as genitals and therefore subject to the same taboos. Children’s eyes should be covered in the presence of bare breasts, or even cleavage. Katy Perry was supposed to guest star on Sesame Street, but the clip never aired because parents didn’t want their children seeing her cleavage.

There is one glaring problem with this line of reasoning. Breasts are not sexual organs. They’re just secondary sex characteristics. These are features that appear during puberty that, unlike the sex organs, are not directly part of the reproductive system. Just like wide hips and pubic hair, full breasts signify sexual maturation for women. Men experience secondary sex characteristics too, such as facial hair, the Adam’s apple, and vocal deepening. But nobody would think to shame men for exposing their Adam’s apples.

But then again, nobody experiences sexual arousal from seeing someone’s Adam’s apple—or at least, very few people do. On the contrary, the argument goes, human males are evolutionarily wired to experience sexual arousal from seeing breasts. Therefore, breasts are indeed sexual, and should be covered up in public—especially at work, in school, or in front of children.

While it is true that in our society, more people are turned on by breasts than by Adam’s apples, that is not a biological trait but a cultural one. Western society is actually unique in its fetishization of breasts. In societies in parts of Africa and the South Pacific, women regularly walk around with their breasts uncovered and their men are utterly indifferent. It appears that, contrary to popular belief, men are not biologically wired to get excited from seeing breasts.

Can it really be that our sexualization of breasts is more cultural than biological? Take a look at China, a society that once treated feet the same way we treated breasts. In China, women used to bind their feet to abnormally small sizes for men’s sexual pleasure. Chinese men described the little feet as producing a “voluptuous feeling” and even admitted to having “evil thoughts” upon looking at a woman’s foot.

And yet, a Westerner would be hard-pressed to make an argument that, just because men are sexually excited by feet and receive sexual stimulation from foot play, feet are inherently sexual. So why would we argue that, for those same reasons, breasts are inherently sexual?

Nature did not intend for breasts to be sexual. Nature intended for breasts to provide nourishment for offspring. This seems obvious, but it somehow never comes up in these conversations about whether breasts are sexual or not. For people who regularly invoke the biological argument to defend their claim that breasts are inappropriate and sexual, opponents of public breastfeeding seem to have missed an introductory course on human biology.

This is exactly why the controversy over breasts is utterly preposterous. Parents argue that Katy Perry’s cleavage is inappropriate for young children to see, forgetting that breasts were evolutionarily designed to feed young children. People forget that breasts were not biologically intended to give men hard-ons; they were biologically intended to produce milk for babies.

And yet, we live in a society where breasts are conspicuously displayed in advertisements and movies for men to gawk at, but mothers are forced to feed their hungry babies secretly in bathroom stalls. We live in a society that believes that female breasts exist only for male pleasure.

There’s nothing wrong with getting sexual pleasure from seeing breasts, but there’s everything wrong with having a man’s erection get in the way of a mother trying to breastfeed her child, or a woman wearing a low-cut top, or a woman wearing no top at all.

Our breasts are not for your pleasure. We are not for your pleasure. It’s about time we treat women as individuals with needs and desires of their own, rather than just objects satisfying the needs and desires of men.

Nian Hu ’18, a Crimson editorial executive, lives in Mather House.