Following up from her last feature–which I would argue has to be the best article of 2008–Hanna Rosin has another feature in The Atlantic about breastfeeding. It, too, is great. I’m going to keep an eye on Rosin’s writing.
In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
Read the rest of this titillating story about women fucking–or not–in the New York Times Magazine.
A study called Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation, published in the journal Body Image, describes how Gueguen tested “the effect of a woman’s breast size on approaches made by males. We hypothesised that an increase in breast size would be associated with an increase in approaches by men.” The study ends with an 827-word ode on the topic sentence: “Our hypothesis was confirmed.”
A related experiment produced a study called Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation, published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. There Gueguen reports that “1,200 male and female French motorists were tested in a hitchhiking situation. A 20-year-old female confederate wore a bra which permitted variation in the size of cup to vary her breast size. She stood by the side of a road frequented by hitchhikers and held out her thumb to catch a ride.
“Increasing the bra-size of the female-hitchhiker was significantly associated with an increase in number of male drivers, but not female drivers, who stopped to offer a ride.” [The Guardian]
You might not agree, but a study has revealed that a large number of British men prefer women with smaller breasts.
According to the study, one in three British men find a woman’s big assets too much to handle — while nine per cent of men find large breasts a turn-off, 22 per cent will hardly consider dating anyone with larger baps. [Express India]
Breastfeeding is disgusting and no one wants to see it.
The end of a news story about a breastfeeding protest in Windsor, Ontario finished with this:
“Windsor needs to get a grip and wake up because breastfeeding is a normal, natural thing,” said Diane Pepin of Windsor.
To which I reply: so is defecating.
