Seriously. Sometimes I think everything wrong with America would gradually settle down if we could just collectively disillusion ourselves from the notion that human female nipples are an indecent horrid thing.
If it had been men’s nipples, which are otherwise useless, that had been sexualised, that would’ve been much less weird; but it’s fine for me to go around topless and nobody cares.
Men conflate women's sexuality with child rearing to control women > men insist women cover voluptuous body parts > men exploit women's sexuality with modesty constraint for additional power and control > men decide women's nipples are hidden = modesty, and sexualize women's nipples > nipples somehow mean something different if they're attached to a woman
(Compare monkeys, which don't.)
No sources or background, just throwing darts at a plausible "the ones who didn't died" scenario.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Most mammals do fine with nipples and no breasts, whether they're nursing or not. And women lactate after giving birth; they can't do it on command.
there are good articles and youtube videos on why woman's boobs are sexy.
the common denominator is that in all societies all boobs are considered sexy. lindybeige's channel suggested it may have to do with some sort of trickery. ie the woman wants to be protected so they are always 'full' unlike other animals.
I think the fact that they are considered sexy across all cultures regardless of shape/size tells us something obvious. they are to show the woman is of mating age.
That does raise one obvious question: is the cultural difference (1) a real difference of sexualisation of body parts, or (2) does the average [†] hetero women look at topless men the same way that the average [†] hereto man looks at topless women, but society as a whole hasn’t noticed because it is male-dominated and not enough men in power ask women?
{As an aside: In the context lindybeige would be an example of argument from authority fallacy; expecting him to be right about comparative global sexuality is like expecting sexplanations to be right about comparing the relative merits of ancient Athenian and Persian armour.
That doesn’t mean he must be wrong (if I said that I world be making the fallacy fallacy), but surely there is a better example to use than him?}
[†] to emphasise: average as in “no I can’t just ask my exes that would be anecdotes”
there are a lot of situations where it would be considered inappropriate for a woman to expose most of a breast (though perhaps not nudity, per se). the degree of coverage socially required for a man or a woman varies a lot. like if I wore cargo shorts to work, it would merely be against the dress code. if I wore only a speedo (or a woman wore a bikini), it would be inappropriate.
once you've decided you have to make and enforce rules about nudity, you need to make them unambiguous. "cannot show nipple" is a lot less ambiguous than "most cover most of breast". "must cover entire breast" is also fraught; how do you decide exactly where it begins? if you agree that female breasts are sexual features, it doesn't seem that weird that nipples would be where the line is finally drawn.
just for the record, I don't think the world would end if women could expose their breasts without repercussions.
The theory is that this aids with conception.
...and as for you going topless in public, actually we do care; nobody wants to see that. ;)
Fair enough, I walked right into that one. :P
Citation needed.
Several thousand years of Judeo-Christian cultural indoctrination teaching that because Eve tempted Adam into original sin, women and their bodies are inherently unclean and can lead men astray, and thus are to be treated as taboo.
This was going on long before Judeo-Christianity existed, and in almost every single culture on the planet before each made contact with the first Christian.
> I think _everything wrong with America would gradually settle down_ if we could just collectively disillusion ourselves from the notion that human female nipples are an indecent horrid thing.
Emphasis added—I should have re-quoted in my post, as I think it got lost. It's not that our obscenity standards are good or that we should ignore that problem—but it's not going to magically solve everything else too!