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Breast

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Oh mistress, let your breasts be your fields! ... your wide fields which pour forth grain! —Anonymous

The breasts are two prominences located on the upper ventral region of the torso among humans and other primates. Both sexes develop breasts from the same embryological tissues. The relative size and development of the breasts is a major secondary sex distinction between females and males. There is also considerable variation in size between individuals. Female humans are the only mammals which permanently develop breasts at puberty; all other mammals develop their mammary tissue during the latter period of pregnancy; at puberty, estrogens, in conjunction with growth hormone, cause permanent breast growth.

Her quince-shaped breasts her wondrous charms declare.
—Leonidas of Tarentum

Quotes

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  • Her breasts, like two pomegranates of even size, stood at bay as it were.
  • There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.
  • Her comely limbs composed with decent care,
    Her body shaded with a slight cymarr;
    Her bosom to the view was only bare;
    Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied,
    For yet their places were but signified.
  • The fanning wind upon her bosom blows,
    To meet the fanning wind the bosom rose;
    The fanning wind, and purling streams, continue her repose.
  • An infant waking to the paps would press,
    And meets, instead of milk, a falling tear.
  • Asteria, mend my cousin's handkerchief;
    It sits too narrow there, and shows too much
    The broadness of her shoulders—Nay, fie, Asteria,
    Now you put it too much backward, and discover
    The bigness of her breasts.
  • She lays her breasts out too, like two poach'd eggs
    That had the yolks suckt out.
  • Her paps are like fair apples in the prime,
    As round as orient pearls, as soft as down;
    They never vail their fair through winter’s frown,
    But from their sweets Love sucks his summertime.
  • In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.
    • Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984)
  • We have a bunch of women there who are really something. Especially two of them. There’s one of them wears her breasts like I would wear the Iron Cross.
    • Willi Heinrich, Das geduldige Fleisch (1955), translated as The Willing Flesh (1956), ch. 7
  • ... wishing my self (specially an Evening) in my Sweethearts Armes whose pritty Duckys I trust shortly to kysse.
  • Her breast, a place for beauty’s throne most fit,
    Bears up two globes where love and pleasure sit,
    Which, headed with two rich, round rubies, show
    Like wanton rosebuds growing out of snow;
    And in the milky valley that’s between
    Sits Cupid, kissing of his mother queen,
    Fingering the paps that feel like sievèd silk,
    And press’d a little they will weep pure milk.
    • Robert Herrick, "The Description of a Woman", not included in Hesperides (1648)
  • They pluck the fatherless from the breast.
  • Her quince-shaped breasts her wondrous charms declare.
  • Her paps are centres of delight,
      Her breasts are orbs of heavenly frame,
    Where Nature moulds the dew of light
      To feed perfection with the same:
  • Then unconfined each did tipple
    Wine from the bunch, milk from the nipple;
      Paps tractable as udders were.
    • Richard Lovelace "Love made in the first Age. To Chloris", in Posthume Poems (1659)
The more robust notion of natural selection is the key to understanding why women have breasts, not the problematic idea of sexual selection.
—Frances E. Mascia-Lees
  • Perhaps we should not be surprised by such statistics: after all, men seem to have an overwhelming attraction to breasts. Isn’t a woman’s wish for an enhanced bust line just a natural response to a primal desire to attract a mate? Many contemporary thinkers would suggest that this is the case. They invoke the notion of sexual selection in their arguments, arguing that some time long, long ago in the human evolutionary past, some males became erotically aroused by females with visibly enlarged breasts, choosing them more often as sex partners than their “flat-chested” sisters, thus maintaining this trait in human populations. Some writers even argue that men’s attraction to breasts was a key to the survival of early humans. Given the putative significance of breasts to the human species, is it any wonder that women in the twenty-first century spend millions of dollars, and take medical risks, to enhance theirs?
  • Although sexual selection arguments are extremely popular, there is another, more plausible explanation for why enlarged breasts evolved. As I will argue, females with visible breast enlargement would have been better able to support themselves and their infants in the environment in which our early human ancestors lived. Indeed, I suggest that the more robust notion of natural selection is the key to understanding why women have breasts, not the problematic idea of sexual selection.
  • Whatever the exact selective advantage of fat, it is clear that the evolution of permanent breast enlargement in human females need not be explained through their erotic appeal to men. What my colleagues and I hoped to show by presenting our explanation is that a reasonable argument based on natural selection could be developed. Our model is not as “sexy” as the explanations that see breasts exclusively as erotic attractors of men. But it avoids relying on such poorly substantiated concepts as differential parental investment, female dependency, and sexual selection, ideas that may reinforce twenty-first century notions about women and gender roles but have little, if no, empirical evidence to support them. The idea that female breasts are little more than objects of sexual attraction for men is a popular one in many European societies, and certainly in the United States, among not only producers and audiences of slick programs on “The Learning Channel,” but also quite obviously among many scientists. But, it seems, they may be indulging more in sexual fantasy than scientific fact.
  • Et, prenant la main de son amie, elle la posa sur sa poitrine, sur cette ronde et ferme enveloppe du cœur des femmes, qui suffit souvent aux hommes et les empêche de rien chercher dessous.
    • And taking her friend's hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman's heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.
    • Guy de Maupassant, Le Signe (1886), translated by Roger Colet as "The Signal", Selected Short Stories (Penguin, 1971), p. 290
  • Und mancherlei so gut Erfundenes giebt es da, dass es ist wie des Weibes Busen: nützlich zugleich und angenehm.
    • And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (1882–5), translated by Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (1954)
  • But I love slenderness. I love virginal breasts.
  • I want to laugh because I have already forgotten about the Renoir bodies, the virginal breasts.
  • He says I am breeding a little giant. I see him looking at my more aggressive breasts.
  • Her breasts were higher than any woman's he had ever seen, placed almost parallel with the shoulder line, and they were absolutely round and big. It was these breasts which had first attracted him. Their being placed so provocatively, so near the mouth, pointing upwards, somehow awakened in him a direct response. It was as if his sex had a peculiar affinity with these breasts, and as soon as they showed themselves in the whorehouse where he had found her, his sex raised itself to challenge them on equal terms.
  • Breasts like ripe red cabbage; they bobble a little when she leans forward.
  • And then he describes... how he bent down and kissed her breasts, and how, after he had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her corsage, or whatever it is they call these things.
  • I can’t get past the fact that food is coming out of my wife’s breasts. What was once essentially an entertainment center has now become a juice bar.
  • Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue,
    A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd,
    Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,
    And him by oath they truly honourèd.
    These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred;
       Who, like a foul usurper, went about
       From this fair throne to heave the owner out.
  • Let not the virgin’s cheek
    Make soft thy trenchant sword, for those milk paps
    That through the window-bars bore at men’s eyes,
    Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
    But set them down horrible traitors.
  • The breasts of Hecuba,
    When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier
    Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood
    At Grecian sword, contemning.
  • The flower that I would pluck
    And put between my breasts, O, then but beginning
    To swell about the blossom—she would long
    Till she had such another, and commit it
    To the like innocent cradle, where, phœnix-like,
    They died in perfume.
  • Ladies, I guarantee you if you take a shower with your boyfriend by the time you step out of that shower your breasts will be sparkling clean.
    • Sarah Silverman, as quoted in The Mammoth Book of More Dirty, Sick, X-rated and Politically Incorrect Jokes (2013), p. 69
  • I need not tell thee of the lily white, ...
    Nor of thy paps where Love himself doth dwell,
    Which like two hills of violets appear.
  • A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.
  • Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
  • Of her there bred
    A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed,
    Sucking upon her poisonous dugs.
  • Some were so from their source endu’d,
    By great dame nature, from whose fruitful pap,
    Their well-heads spring.
  • The wanton Maidens him espying, stood
      Gazing a while at his unwonted guise;
      Then th’one her selfe low duckèd in the flood,
      Abasht, that her a straunger did avise:
      But th’other rather higher did arise,
      And her two lilly paps aloft displayd,
      And all, that might his melting hart entise
      To her delights, she unto him bewrayd:
    The rest hid underneath, him more desirous made.
  • If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets an R rating; but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?
    • Sally Struthers, reported in John Cook, Leslie Ann Gibson, The Book of Positive Quotations (2007), p. 103
  • When a woman in a lonely place bends down, as if to pick up something, and pierces, as it were, a man sitting or standing, with her breasts, and the man in return takes hold of them, it is called a "piercing embrace."
  • When a man places his breast between the breasts of a woman, and presses her with it, it is called the "embrace of the breasts."

Other uses

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See also: Heart; Thorax (Chest)
  • In the nine heavens are eight Paradises;
    Where is the ninth one? In the human breast.
    Only the blessed dwell in th' Paradises,
    But blessedness dwells in the human breast.
  • Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
    Thou tamer of the human breast,
    Whose iron scourge and tort'ring hour
    The bad affright, afflict the best!
  • No, traytress, angry Love replies,
    She’s hid somewhere about thy breast,
    A place nor God nor man denies,
    For Venus’ dove the proper nest.

See also

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