Why the Hell Do Women Have Permanent Breasts — Here Is the Answer
Spoiler, it’s nothing to do with nursing infants
These big wobbly things on my chest that I have had since I was 12 — I was an early bloomer — and that now give me endless back problems. Why the hell do I have them? Why does any woman have a permanent set of breasts? Most people think that we have breasts to nurse infants.
That’s only half true. The purpose of breasts is to milk infants, but if you look at the animal kingdom, what you will see is that no other species have permanent breasts. Humans are outliers when it comes to permanent breasts. Even our fellow primates do not have permanent breasts. Apes have pop-up breasts.
When they have an infant, their chests fill up with milk giving them breasts. However, when they are done nursing the infant, their breasts disappear. All that is left is the stretched skin which gives female apes the flappy things that look like male moobs (the name given to a saggy male chest). It makes a lot of sense that this happens, my permanent set of breasts — along with all other women’s — are made up mainly of fat tissue. That fat tissue — or as we call it breast tissue — serves zero purposes when it comes to nursing an infant. We do not need it to provide milk.
Considering this, why do we have them? Do they somehow improve our survival chances? Nope. The opposite.
Permanent breasts are a hindrance to women’s survival chances — on many levels
Every woman’s ability to run is hindered by her breasts. Yes, we now have sports bras, which help to an extent, but our ancestors who evolved to have these wobbly things did not have sports bras, considering this, evolving to have permanent breasts would seem to be extremely self-defeating.
This becomes even more apparent when you consider that by adding milk to permanent breasts you end up with even bigger breasts. This puts even more strain on our backs and makes evading predators — should we need to — even harder, and at a time when we would most need to be able to evade them because we would have a child to protect.
A child that I should add that in our ancient past, we would permanently carry — we used to carry around our child every second of the day until they could stand and run on their own two feet. Considering this, the last thing we need is more weight to carry in the form of permanent breasts.
If you add the fact that breast cancer is the number one killer of women, and that breasts are the biggest reason for back issues in women and as such lead many thousands of women a year into having to have breast reductions just to be able to escape the pain, what the hell would we evolve to have these things for?
Literally, they increase our chances of death by substantially increasing our odds of getting cancer, they mess up our backs and hinder our ability to run from predators, they don’t benefit us when it comes to nursing children. What is going on, why would be about these things?
Nobody knows for certain why women evolved permanent breasts — there are theories
The most widely used explanation for why women evolved to have permanent breasts was proposed by Charles Darwin. It was later elaborated upon by zoologist Desmond Morris in his 1967 book, “The Naked Ape.” The idea stems from the fact that female primates alert males that they are of age and in heat through a swelling rear end which occurs during ovulation, something that the females of our ancestors would also have originally done.
However, when our ancestors learned to stand upright it became more difficult for the males to identify a swelling rear end in a female — mainly because when standing upright, the sexual organs are no longer as obvious to see. Because of this, males had no obvious way of knowing when a female was sexually mature — or at least they couldn’t use the old way as easily — as such breasts somehow became the way men learned to identify a sexually mature woman.
That would mean that we have permanent breasts solely as a tool to tell men we are women and to convey to them when it’s baby-making time i.e. to use as a tool to attract them when we are in heat. In a way, it could be argued that the same as a male peacock has its glorious tailfeathers to attract females, we have our permanent breasts to attract males.
This is one of those explanations where it would be easy to jump down the patriarchal BS line, along the lines of arguing that somehow this argument implies breasts are for men and all about men. When I was younger, I would have been one of those screaming this argument. “Breasts are for nursing babies,” I hear myself shouting. The trouble is, there is likely a hell of a lot of truth to the argument that we evolved them as a means of communicating to men when it’s time to make babies.
For example, an interesting fact, the female libido typically peaks while we are ovulating i.e. 12–14 days before our periods. During this period, our oestrogen and progesterone levels are at their highest. This stimulates the growth of breast tissue making them perter during this period. That means during our peak fertility window of each month, our breasts become perter. It’s likely the ancestral males realised this along with the many other things that our breats relay about our fertility.
But before I get to that, a more important question needs to be answered, how did we go from men looking at our boobless chests to see if it was baby-making time, to us to developing permanent breasts?
The likely process that led women to evolve breasts as a permanent feature
If you look at baby apes, the males and females do not look much different. However, as they grow older it becomes clear that the male chest and the female chest is different. Our ancestors would have been similar.
If you consider that once our ancestors learned to stand upright, genitals would be less apparent while chests would become more apparent, immediately the chest becomes a great way to identify a male versus a female.
To go with this, if you look at female apes, you’ll note that the chests of the ones who have just reached pregnancy age are always firmer and less saggy. That would mean if you’re a male, and you wish to mate with the most fertile female, you would select the one with the firmer chest. Actually, if you’re the alpha male you would probably choose to mate with both, but you’re going to mate with the one you think most fertile the most.
Anyway, so we have our ancient alpha male, and he sees three apes, he identifies two as female due to their chests. Of those two, one has a relatively firm chest, but the other’s chest is a little saggy. Based on his experiences, he would then identify that the one with the firmer chest must be younger and thus more fertile.
The females could be the same age but that won’t stop him from making that conclusion simply because more often than not, it will be accurate. Over time, this would lead the males to focus more and more on mating with females who have chests that are firm and more upright i.e. less saggy.
Inevitably, the more breast tissue a female has — at least when she is young — the higher the probability they will appear firm and upright. No doubt you can see where this is going. Males keep selecting the females with the most breast tissue to mate with, add in natural selection, and what you get is each generation of females having ever slightly more breast tissue than the last.
To go with this, the females would inevitably have started to realise that males were using their breasts to identify whether to mate with them or not, because of this, it is likely the females — when they were in heat — would have started using their breasts to attract and arouse the males. This would have made males focus even more on the breasts of females, further amplifying the power of natural selection.
If you imagine this process happening over several million years, it is not hard to see how we could have evolved to grow permanent breasts. Though none of this explains the nipple obsession. What gives?
Women’s nipples go erect during arousal — this could be linked to the male obsession with them
It’s well documented that women’s nipples become erect during sex — mine certainly do — I’ve seen it argued in some places that the male obsession over our nipples is because in our distant past the males learned to use erect nipples as a further sign a female was in heat i.e. ready to make babies.
There is some logic to this. For example, scientists believe that there are nerve cells that exist solely to instruct the muscles in our nipples to contract and become erect. Fascinatingly, these are linked to our sympathetic nervous system (the thing that controls involuntary responses like fight or flight).
So, our nipples become erect when our brains tell them to become erect, and we don’t get a say in the matter. One of the reasons our brain tells them to become erect is through the release of oxytocin. If we are getting aroused, we get hit with oxytocin. From here, it isn’t a big stretch to imagine that men may have evolved to identify a nipple-on as a further sign of arousal in us, giving them a reason to not just focus on our breasts, but our nipples as well.
It should be noted that our nipples become firm for other reasons as well, including the cold. Also, the fundamental reason our nipples turn firm is for nursing children. That would mean they became firm long before men started using them to see if we were horny.
But the fact that they become erect when we are aroused, and considering that when we evolved to stand on two feet, men would likely have identified this, through association, it is not a hard stretch to see how men could have evolved to start seeing nipples as something to obsess over i.e. to seek confirmation for whether it was baby making time.
Breasts also give off pheromones — this may play a part in the male love affair with nipples
Another reason why it is argued that men evolved to obsess over our nipples is because of pheromones. We have apocrine glands on our areolas — the dark skin that surrounds our nipples — and apocrine glands release pheromones.
Some argue that men initially became attracted to our nipples because they were attracted to their scent i.e. they wanted to drink in our pheromones. Personally, I think this is BS. We also release pheromones from many other parts of our body, including our armpits. I don’t see men obsessing over them. But I can’t fault the logic so who knows. Maybe one of the reasons men evolved to suckle on our nipples is because they once wanted to drink in our pheromones.
Speaking of suckling on nipples, no matter the age, science has shown that suckling on a woman’s nipples has a calming effect on both the person doing the suckling and the woman who is being suckled on. It also has a substantial bonding effect. Some argue that the male obsession with female nipples is born through our advancement to becoming more complex, and the desire of females to take advantage of this bonding effect.
Men may have evolved to like suckling on women’s nipples because women wanted to use the power of suckling on nipples to cement a bond i.e. to further try to get guys to stick around
Part of the male love affair for nipples could be the bonding effect suckling sparks
Suckling on nipples releases bonding chemicals in both parties, which means it strengthens the bond between a mother and a child, but also between an adult male and a female.
Inevitably, females want to strengthen bonds with males, especially our ancestral females, who as we evolved became ever more reliant upon males for their survival. Considering this, it is not a large stretch to go from women using the bonding effect of suckling on nipples to cement a bond not just with a child, but with an adult male.
That would mean it is possible that the male desire to suckle on our nipples may actually have been sparked by us.
That would still not explain where the initial obsession with our nipples came from. Men are not just going to start suckling on our nipples without first being obsessed with them.
The most likely reason men evolved to obsess over our nipples is to do with fertility
As said, the likelihood is men initially became obsessed with our breasts because they realised they could use them as firstly, tools to work out if we were of pregnancy age, and secondly, tools to work out which of us of pregnancy age was the best to mate with i.e. the most fertile. That means it is all to do with working out our baby-making potential. The probability is their initial obsession with our nipples came about for the same reasons.
When we get pregnant, our nipples change shape. It is very easy for a person to identify a pregnant woman through her nipples. A man can’t get a pregnant woman pregnant. So, if we imagine an ancestral alpha male looks at two females, one has nipples that say I’m not pregnant, the other has nipples that say I am. Who would it be logical for him to mate with?
That certainly seems like knowledge males who wished to pass on their DNA would obsess over.
Final words
Breasts tell men we are of pregnancy age, the firmness of our breasts tell them how young we are and thus our levels of fertility, our nipples tell them whether we are pregnant or not. When we learned to stand on two feet, all of these factors became highly useful to the males of the time.
That means the reason we have permanent breasts is that the males of our ancestors from several million years or so back — likely for the above reasons — kept picking women who had the most breast tissue. Females identified that the males were doing this, and as such, started using their chests to try to attract males, over several million years this led us to forming permanent breasts. From there it’s likely we— at some point, probably more recently, perhaps very recently — started using the power of suckling on breasts to try to further cement a bond with a male i.e. to get him to stick around.
That means any time you ever see a man gawping over breasts, or slavering over them, you know why we have permanent breasts. The irony is the female equivalent is the male crotch area. That’s why whenever a man’s crotch area appears to be bulging, it’s so hard for women not to look. We want to know if he is fully developed and in the mood. The reasons we want to know are most often different from the reasons men want to know if we are — but not all of the time.
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