Woman: An Intimate Geography (25 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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and it is not limited to men, or to strictly sexual tableaux. "Everybody loves breasts," Anne Hollander, the author of
Seeing Through Clothes
, told me. "Babies love them, men love them, women love them. The whole world knows that breasts are engines of pleasure. They're great treasures of the human race, and you can't get away from them." The first thing that women did in the fourteenth century, when they broke free of the shapeless drapery of the Christian era, was to flaunt their bosoms. Men shortened their outfits and exposed their legs, women lowered the neckline and tightened the bodice. They pushed their breasts together and up. They took the soft and floppy tissue of the breasts and molded it with corsets and whalebones into firm, projecting globes. ''As a fashion gimmick, you can never go wrong with breasts," Hollander says. "They may be deemphasized for a short period, as they were in the sixteenth century, when tiny breasts and thick waists were in vogue, and during the flapper era of the 1920s. But breasts always come back, because we love them so much."
What we love is not the breast per se but the fantasy breast, the aesthetic breast of no practical value. At a recent exhibition of Cambodian sculpture spanning the sixth through fifteenth centuries, I noticed that most of the female deities depicted had breasts that might have been designed by modern plastic surgeons: large, round, and firm. Helen of Troy's breasts were said to be of such flawless, curved, suspended substance that goblets could be cast from their form, as Ezra Pound told us in Canto 120: "How to govern is from Kuan Tze/but the cup of white gold in Petera/Helen's breast gave that." In the art of ancient India, Tibet, Crete, and elsewhere, the cups never runneth over, and women are shown with celestial breasts, zero-gravity planet breasts, the sorts of breasts I've almost never seen in years of using health-club locker rooms. On real women, I've seen breasts as varied as faces: breasts shaped like tubes, breasts shaped like tears, breasts that flop down, breasts that point up, breasts that are dominated by thick, dark nipples and areolae, breasts with nipples so small and pale they look airbrushed. We erroneously associate floppy breasts with older breasts, when in fact the drooping of the breast can happen at any age; some women's breasts are low-slung from the start. Thus the high, cantilevered style of the idealized breast must be considered more than just another expression of a taste for youth.

 

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We don't know why there is such a wide variety of breast sizes, or what exactly controls the growth of the breast, particularly the fat tissue that gives the human breast its bulk. As mammary glands, human breasts follow the standard mammalian pattern. A mammary gland is a modified sweat gland, and milk is highly enriched sweat. Prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production, predates the evolution of mammals, originally serving to maintain salt and water balance in early vertebrates such as fish in essence, allowing fish to sweat. In monotremes, the platypus and the spiny anteater, which are considered the most primitive of living mammals, the milk simply seeps from the gland onto the nippleless surface of the mother's skin, rather as sweat does, and is licked off by the young.
Breast tissue begins to develop early, by the fourth week of fetal life. It grows along two parallel milk ridges, ancient mammalian structures that extend from the armpits down to the groin. Males and females both have milk ridges, but only in females do they receive enough hormonal stimulation later in life to achieve complete breastiness. If we were rats or pigs, our twin milk strips would develop into a total of eight teats, to meet the demands of large litters. Mammals such as elephants, cows, goats, and primates, which give birth to only one or two offspring at a time, require only two mammary glands, and so the bulk of the milk strip regresses during fetal development. Among four-legged grazing animals, the teats that grow are located at the hindquarters, where the young can suckle beneath the protective awning of a mother's powerful hind legs and rib cage. In at least one primitive primate, the aye-aye, the twin teats also are situated at the rear end of the mother. But among monkeys, apes, and humans, who either hold their young or carry them clinging to their chests (the better to navigate arboreally), the nipples graced with milk are the uppermost two, closest to the armpits.
Our potential breasts do not entirely abandon us, though. The milk ridge reminds us of our lineage subcutaneously: breast tissue is distributed far more extensively than most of us realize, reaching from the collarbone down to the last two ribs and from the breastbone, in the middle of the chest, to the back of the armpit. In some people the milk ridge expresses itself graphically, as extra nipples or entire extra breasts. Recalling her years as a lingerie saleswoman, an essayist in the
New York

 

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Times Magazine
wrote about a customer looking for a bra that would fit her unusual figure. The woman bared her breasts to the essayist, Janifer Dumas. The woman was a modern-day Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, who often is portrayed with multiple breasts. In this case, Artemis had three equal-sized breasts, the standard two on either side of her thorax and the third directly below the left one. Dumas found the perfect item, a "bralette," similar to a sports bra but with a more relaxed fit, no underwire, and a wide elastic band to hug the rib cage. "It occurred to me that this was also the type of bra I sold to women with recent mastectomies," Dumas wrote, "a piece of lingerie designed for comfort, and, as it turned out, able to accommodate more or less.''
Primordial breast tissue arises early in embryogenesis, yet the breast is unusual among body parts in that it remains primordial until puberty or later. No other organ, apart from the uterus, changes so dramatically in size, shape, and function as the breast does during puberty, pregnancy, and lactation. It is because the breast must be poised to alter its contours repeatedly throughout adulthood, swelling and shrinking with each new mouth to feed, that it is prone to turning cancerous. The genetic controls that keep cell growth in check elsewhere in the corpus are relaxed in the breast, giving malignancy an easy foothold.
The aesthetic breast develops in advance of the glandular one. Early in adolescence, the brain begins secreting regular bursts of hormones that stimulate the ovaries. The ovaries in turn discharge estrogen, and estrogen encourages the body to lay down fat "depots" in the breast. That adipose tissue is suspended in a gelatinous matrix of connective fibers that extend from the muscle of the chest wall to the underside of the breast skin. Connective tissue can stretch and stretch, to accommodate as much fat as the body inserts between its fibers; the connective tissue's spring gives the breast its bounce. Estrogen is necessary to the aesthetic breast, but it is not sufficient; the hormone alone does not explain the wide variability in breast size. A woman with large breasts does not necessarily have higher estrogen levels than a small-breasted woman. Rather, the tissue of the breast is more or less responsive to estrogen, a sensitivity determined in part by genetic makeup. Among the sensitive, a very small amount of estrogen fosters an impressive bosom. Estrogen-sensitive women who take birth control pills may discover that they need bigger bras, while the estrogen-insensitive can

 

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swallow oral contraceptives by the foilful and find their breasts unmoved. Even some children are extremely sensitive to estrogen. Berton Roueche, the great medical writer, recounted the story of a six-year-old boy who began growing breasts. Eventually, the source of the hypertrophy was traced to his vitamin tablets. A single stamping machine had been used to punch out the vitamins and estrogen pills. "Think of the minute amount of estrogen the stamping machine passed on to the vitamin tablets," Roueche wrote. "And what a profound effect it had." The boy's breasts retreated on cessation of the vitamin tablets, and his parents could breathe again.
Conversely, androgens such as testosterone can inhibit breast adiposity. As we saw earlier, women who are genetically insensitive to androgen may grow very large breasts. Men whose gonads fail to produce enough testosterone sometimes suffer from gynecomastia. Without testosterone to keep breast growth in check, the men's small amount of estrogen has the opportunity to lay down selective depots of fat hurriedly, demonstrating once again that the line between maleness and femaleness is thin as thin as the fetus's bipotential genital ridge, as thin as the milk ridge in all of us. Yet androgens don't entirely explain discrepancies in breast size among women either. Many women with comparatively high testosterone levels, women whose visible mustaches and abundant armpit hair make it clear that they are not insensitive to the androgens coursing through them, nonetheless have full frontal shelves. Thyroid hormones, stress hormones, insulin, growth hormone all leave their smudgy fingerprints on mammogenesis. In sum, we don't know what makes the aesthetic breast. We don't have the hormonal recipe for the universal Mae West breast. If science fiction television is any indication, though, in the future, the heartbreak of "micromastia" (plastic-surgeon-speak for small breasts) will be surmounted, and if our brains don't get bigger, our breasts surely will. Today, the average non-lactating breast weighs two thirds of a pound and measures about four inches across and two and a half inches from chest wall to nipple tip. The average brassiere size is a 36B, and it has been since the modern bra was invented about ninety years ago. On television shows like
Star Trek
, however, every woman of every race, whether human, Vulcan, Klingon, or Borg, is as bold in bust as in spirit, and no cup less than C will be cast.
Estrogen also helps spur the elaboration of the practical breast, the

 

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glandular tissue that presumably will soon secrete its clouded, honied sweat. A series of firm, rubbery ducts and lobes begin threading their way through the fat and ligamentous glue. Each breast usually ends up with between five and nine lobes, where the milk is generated, and each lobe has its independent duct, the conduit that carries the milk to the nipple. The lobes are subdivided into about two dozen lobules, which look like tiny clusters of grapes. The lobes and lobules are distributed fairly evenly throughout the breast, but all the ducts lead to a single destination, the nipple. As the ducts converge on the nipple, curling and bending like snakes or strands of ivy, their diameters widen. The circuitry of lactation follows the hydrodynamic pattern that we recognize from trees, or the veins in a leaf, or the blood vessels in the body. The lobes and lobules are the foliage, the fruits and leaves, while the ducts are the branches, thickening into a braid of trunks. But while in a tree or the body's vasculature the fluid of life is pumped from the widest conduit out to the narrowest vessel or vein, here the milk is generated in each tiny lobular fruit and pulsed to the spacious pipeline below. The ducts perforate the skin of the nipple, and though these portals ordinarily are concealed by the warty folds of the nipple tip, when a woman is nursing her nipple balloons out and looks like a watering can, each ductal hole visible and visibly secreting milk.
The ducts and lobules do not fully mature until pregnancy, when they proliferate, thicken, and differentiate. Granular plugs the consistency of ear wax, which normally keep the ducts sealed up, begin breaking down. The lobules sprout microlobules, the alveoli. The dairy farmers commandeer the breast. They push fat out of the way to make more room for themselves. The breast gains as much as a pound while lactating. The areola, that pigmented bull's-eye surrounding the nipple, also changes markedly in pregnancy. It darkens and seems to creep down the hillock of the breast, like lava spreading slowly from the peak of a volcano. The areola is permeated by another set of modified sweat glands, the little goosebumps called Montgomery's glands, and the bumps multiply in the maternal breast and exude lubricating moisture to make the sensation of suckling bearable. After weaning, the lobules atrophy, the ducts regress, the areola retreats, and the fat reclaims dominion over the breast more or less. Women who breastfeed their children often complain that their breasts never recover their former

 

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bounce and bulk. The fat grows lazy and fails to reinfiltrate the spaces from which it was edged out by the gland. The aesthetic breast is a bon vivant, after all, a party favor. For reliability, look to the ducts and lobules. They'll return when needed, and they're not afraid to work up a sweat.
Breasts weigh a few ounces in fact and a few tons in metaphor. As Marilyn Yalom describes admirably in her cultural study
A History of the Breast
, the breast is a communal kiosk, open to all pronouncements and cranks, and the endorsements of the past are easily papered over with the homilies of today. The withered tits of witches and devils represented the wages of lust. In Minoan statues dating from 1600
B.C.
, priestesses are shown with bare, commanding breasts and snakes wrapped around each arm. The snakes strain their heads toward the viewer, their extended tongues echoing the erect nipples of the figurine, as though to warn that the powerful bosom they bracket might as soon dispense poison as love. The breast is a bralette, able to accommodate more or less. The multibreasted goddess seen in many cultures projects tremendous strength. So too do the Amazons, those mythical female warriors who lived apart from men, consorting with them once a year solely for the sake of being impregnated, and who reared their daughters but slayed, crippled, or abandoned their sons. The Amazons are most famed for their self-inflicted mastectomies, their willingness to cut off one breast to improve their archery skills and thus to resist conquest by the male hordes surrounding them. For men, Yalom writes, "Amazons are seen as monsters, viragos, unnatural women who have misappropriated the masculine warrior role. The missing breast creates a terrifying asymmetry: one breast is retained to nurture female offspring, the other is removed so as to facilitate violence against men." For women, the Amazon represents an inchoate wish, a nostalgic longing for the future. "The removal of the breast and the acquisition of 'masculine' traits suggests this mythic Amazon's desire to be bisexual, both a nurturing female and an aggressive male, with the nurturance directed exclusively toward other women and the aggression directed exclusively toward men." A softened variant of the Amazon icon occurred in eighteenth-century France, when the figure of Liberty often was shown with one breast clothed, the other bared, her willingness to reveal her breast (or at least her indifference to her temporary state of dishabille) evi-

 

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