Gym tells woman her breasts 'too large' for tank top

[chenille]

@kaibeezytentroy

Quite a lot of research disagrees with you. The basic theme is breast size and shape is a quick and reliable indicator of health, fecundity, etc., and that they would serve their other purposes just fine if they didn’t look so interesting to males.

You’re reading a lot into that. First, yes, that breasts were shaped from sexual selection is certainly a popular notion in evolutionary psychology. But a lot of that seems to have serious problems, both from being overly focused on WEIRD people and from having a hard time actually testing anything. The paper you quote is an extreme example; it names the hypothesis but doesn’t substantiate anything.

I mean, if you want to say most men will find breasts most attractive when they look healthy and age-appropriate for a mate, I don’t think it should be too controversial. You can say the same about most features, from hair to toes, in men and women. But while it might turn out that, say, discolored and stubby fingers are less attractive to most potential mates, that’s a far cry from saying fingers exist for their enjoyment and pleasure.

Saying that breasts are actually something more directly connected to sexual attraction, akin to peacock’s tails, is a much stronger claim and I don’t think one that can be taken as a given at all. I’m just going to quote what I wrote earlier on the subject:

@chenille

Breasts in human women are unusual for sometimes storing a lot of fat independent of lactation. That might be adaptive, and a function in sexual attraction is a possible explanation. But you could invent other causes; something related to cryptic estrus, an artifact of having children most of the time, some sort of spandrel, who knows.

And while this is a popular answer, I haven’t seen much to establish it. To start off with, like a lot of evolutionary psychology it seems to be based only on western stereotypes, as if “Married with Children” were our gold standard. Any claim about our evolution needs to look at humanity as a whole; do other cultures all treat breasts in such a sexual way? They definitely don’t all cover them.

Even if you don’t go abroad, though, there is a more serious problem. Male peacocks all have large tails, and you can see the size is a major factor in attracting mates. And there are lots of other animals like that, where flashy colors or pheromones are how reproductive value is assessed.

But people aren’t like that - women don’t all have large breasts. Some people never really store much fat there at all, and yet they find partners and raise families all the same. In fact, look at some most attractive or most desirable or whatever lists, and you’ll see women with smaller breasts aren’t even excluded as lingerie models and other professions based mainly on appearance.

So although there’s supposed to be sexual selection for larger breasts, there’s not even a clear reproductive handicap in not having them. The few studies that have been pointed out to me seem to find that there are different preferences for different people and in different circumstances, which is really what I’d expect. People are really variable.

To sum up: it could be an interesting hypothesis, but it seems to need a lot of work before it is anything else, and right now there isn’t enough to say sexualization of breasts is any different from sexualization of necks or legs or chest hair. Not to say it would justify imposing that judgment on everyone either way.

So much for the science. Still more important is the implicit statement you’re making about purpose, which is much more clear: someone else should not be treated as existing for other people, period. Your vas deferens has no evolutionary importance save to provide women with sperm, and yet it should not count as theirs. So it is with any aspect of a woman’s body, no matter what forces turn out to have shaped their genetics back in the Pleistocene.