Big, Beautiful Breasts

Why do men like big, beautiful  breasts?   Plastic surgeon, Dr. Tim Neavin, may have an answer with the help of sociobiological theories.

Let’s step back in time. Long ago, before supermarkets, silicone breast implants, condoms,  and the Wonder Bra, sociobiologists like Marvin Harris believed that men probably viewed big breasts as a marker for fertility. What does this mean? Well, consider that our ancestors struggled to meet their daily needs of food and shelter much more than we do now.  Clubbing deer over the  head is a bit more exerting than sitting in a Hybrid in a In-N-Out  drive-in (pardon the LA analogy).

Gestating a child without folate and prenatal vitamins, and then raising a child without modern luxuries such as running water, pasteurized milk, diapers, and formula  meant that physical fitness equaled potential success for offspring to live. Women who were well nourished had a clear reproductive advantage over women who  were not well nourished.

Programmed Brains

Our cavemen weren’t equipped with body mass index measuring devices, but they WERE programmed to recognized certain markers. These markers serve to tell us what women are suitable to carry out 9 months of pregnancy and nourish their child. One marker for ample caloric storage, and hence, a capacity to nourish their sperm to fetus, and fetus to child, and child to another cave man (or cave woman) was big breasts.

Big breasts for hundreds of thousands of years were found almost exclusively in well nourished women.  Women starving, who would be unfit to fulfill 9 months of pregnancy and care for a newborn, were not only thin and frail, they were flat-chested.

Thus, from a Darwinian point of view, these women who possessed a baby-maker bulls eye on their chest were selected for sex. And voila, humans now are the only mammalian species to possess perennially large breasts!  With no other mammalian species do females have large breasts solely unless they pregnant.

All Big Breasts?

Now I know what you’re saying.  If big breasts are a marker for fitness and fat storage for, shouldn’t obesity be a similar marker and possess a similar power of attraction.  Obese people have a lot of calories to share, too.   The difference is that  obesity is not healthy.  It  is maladaptive for our race.  Now, thin women can have big breasts with breast augmentation, but you must realize that our primordial brain has not caught up with this new way of thinking.  Not even in Beverly Hills, where bigger is always better.   The big, beautiful breast obsession still exists in heterosexual men, and it is live and well in Los Angeles, California.

Dr. Tim Neavin

Dr. Tim Neavin is a board-certified plastic surgeon located in Beverly Hills, California.