Breasts: Guys it's a good thing to love them

Jokes about breasts, and men looking at breasts, are so common place that they have become a cliché. How many times have you seen a man talking to a curvaceous woman only to have her point to his eyes and say "Hey, buddy, up here!"? It's funny  because it's true. The male eye does have a way of drifting south. But why? Why are heterosexual men so fascinated by women's breasts? Being an educated man (of sorts) I would like to propose an answer.

Biologically speaking, this human male breast obsession is pretty flippin weird. Personally I am not a huge fan of large breasted woman and prefer a classier sort of damsel. Men are the only male mammals who are  fascinated by breasts in a sexual way. Women are the only female mammals whose breasts become enlarged at puberty, independent of pregnancy. We are also the only species in which males caress, massage and even orally stimulate the female breasts during foreplay and sex. Interesting fact huh?

Women do seem to enjoy the attention, at least at the right moments (and if they aren't then chances are you are doing something wrong). A survey by The University of Texas, polled 301 people -- including 153 women -- they found that stimulating the breasts or nipples enhanced sexual arousal in about 82 percent of the women. Nearly 60 percent explicitly asked to have their nipples touched.

Men are generally pretty happy to oblige. As the success of Hooters,"men's" magazines, a hundred million porn sites, and about 10,000 years of art tell us, men are very interested in breasts, and not because boys learn on the playground that breasts are something that they should be interested in. It's biological and deeply engrained in our brain. In fact, research indicates that when we're confronted with breasts, or even breast-related stimuli, like bras, we'll start making bad decisions(and not just to eat at Hooters). Seriously if you want to distract a man just shove a pair of breasts in his line of sight.

For example, in one study, men were offered money payouts. They could have a few Euros right away, or, if they agreed to wait a few days, more Euros later. In this version of a classic "delayed gratification" (also called inter temporal choice by behavioral economists - this is just a fancy way of saying that a group of economists got together and watched porn) experiment, some men watched videos of pastoral scenes while others watched videos of attractive women with lots of skin exposed running in slow motion. I guess like something out of Baywatch. The men who watched the women's breasts doing what women's breasts do opted for the smaller-sooner payouts significantly more often then men who watched the pastoral scene.

Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that full breasts store needed fat, which, in turn, signals to a man that a woman is in good health and therefore a top-notch prospect to bear and raise children.But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to sleep around so to speak. Sadly the legal system appears to be changing that. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible,regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.

Rather, there's only one neurological explanation, and it has to do with brain mechanisms that promote the powerful bond of a mother to her infant.Yip it all comes down to the fact that women want to have babies....and lots of them.

When a woman gives birth, her newborn will engage in some pretty elaborate manipulations of its mother's breasts. This stimulation sends signals along nerves and into the brain. There, the signals trigger the release of a neuro chemical called oxytocin from the brain's hypothalamus. This oxytocin release eventually stimulates smooth muscles in a woman's breasts to eject milk, making it available to her nursing baby.

But oxytocin release has other effects, too. When released at the baby's instigation, the attention of the mother focuses on her baby. The infant becomes the most important thing in the world. Oxytocin, acting in concert with dopamine, also helps imprint the newborn's face, smell and sounds in the mother's reward circuitry, making nursing and nurturing a feel-good experience, motivating her to keep doing it and forging the mother-infant bond. This bond is not only the most beautiful of all social bonds, it can also be the most enduring, lasting a lifetime.

Another human oddity is that we're among the very rare animals that have sex face-to-face, looking into each other's eyes. We believe this quirk of human sexuality has evolved to exploit the ancient mother-infant bonding brain circuitry as a way to help form bonds between lovers.

When a partner touches her breasts it sparks the same series of brain events as nursing. Oxytocin focuses the brain's attention to the partner's face, smell, and voice. The combination of oxytocin release from breast stimulation, and the surge of dopamine from the excitement of foreplay and face-to-face sex, help create an association of the lover's face and eyes with the pleasurable feelings, building a bond in the women's brain.

So joke's aside, it would seem that our fascination with women's breasts, far from being creepy, is an unconscious evolutionary response prompting us to create a loving, nurturing bond. So according to my logic it's a good thing us guys like to ogle women's breasts!

[Source Huffington Post]