Woman: An Intimate Geography (27 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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acknowledge today with a wedding ring. Shakespeare's theater was constructed around a circular stage, and it was named the Globe.
We live life vertiginously, attending to the round. Who knows why. It may have all started with the face. The first thing that a newborn pays visual attention to is not the breast, which the infant cannot adjust its focus to see from its ringside position, but the mother's face. Human faces are round, much rounder than those of other adult apes. The white of the human eye, which is absent in our simian cousins, serves to emphasize the roundness of the iris. When we smile, our cheeks become round, and the uplifted corners of the mouth and the downturned corners of the eyebrows create an image of a circle within a circle. Only humans universally interpret the smile as a friendly gesture. Among most primates, a smile is a grimace, an expression of threat or fear.
Or it may have all begun with fruit, the mainstay of our foraging years, the brass rings we reached for, the fantasy of abundance. Fruit is round, and so are nuts and tubers and most of the edible parts of plants. Or was it our reverence for light? The sources of all light, the sun and the moon, are round, and the rounder they are, the brighter they shine. They die in each cycle by the degradation of their celestial geometry. As long as we have been human, we have observed the preponderance of the circle and the link between that which is round and that which defines us. The circle illuminates and delimits. We can't escape it. We can't get enough of it.
The breast is the body's most transparent way of paying homage to the circle. Over the centuries, the human breast has been compared to all the round things we know and love to apples, melons, suns, moons, cherries, faces, eyes, Orient pearls, globes, mandalas, worlds within worlds. Yet to focus exclusively on the breast is to neglect the other ways in which the human body commemorates and resonates with roundness. The buttocks, of course, are round and conspicuous. Our long human necks curve into our shoulders, a parabola of grace when seen from behind. Our muscles too assume a species-specific roundness and prominence. Other animals become extremely, densely muscular without forming the projecting curves seen on human athletes. Many creatures can outrun us, but none have our distinctive calf muscles, which, like the buttocks, are curved on men and women alike. The biceps of the arms can look breastlike. So too can the deltoids, the

 

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muscles of the shoulders. Highly developed chest muscles give the impression of cleavaged breasts. The curvaceous sensuality of the muscular male was not lost on the ancient Greeks, nor on Michelangelo, nor on the photographer Bruce Weber, who in his pictures for Calvin Klein underwear gave us a nude male chest as vociferous as the conventional female cleavage shot. Dancers of both sexes, who have radiant, muscular bodies that are as if drawn with spirographs, emphasize and consecrate the curve through movement. To defy the choreographed curve is to renounce, mock, or affront the pretty.
We are attracted to well-defined curves. It has been suggested that humans shed their body hair better to reveal the curviness of female breasts and hips, but why then would we not have had a more targeted hair loss around the areas in question? Instead, the aesthetic benefits of depilation must be viewed globally. The entire body becomes the proscenium, to expose whatever curves we have to offer. Our options are in part determined by our physiology and our hormonal milieu. Women are rich in estrogen, the hormone that controls the maturation and release of the egg each month, and estrogen is adept at laying down fat depots. The primate breast was capable of supporting expansion; it was primed to be curved. Men are moneyed in testosterone, which is necessary to sperm production, and testosterone helps lay down muscle. In neither case do we need our curves. We can be strong and fertile, swift and milky, without them. Still, mysteriously, we have curves and we are drawn to curves, and to those who wave them in our faces. We are drawn to rounded breasts and rounded muscles. We are drawn to prominent cheekbones, those facial breasts, or are they facial buttocks, or minibiceps, or apples, or faces within faces?
Here I must note that the benefits of being considered attractive are not limited to the ability to attract mates. Attractive people attract allies. As an extremely social species, dependent on the group for survival, we can accrue advantages to ourselves and our offspring in a series of harmonics that reinforce and amplify one another. If you have friends, you have defenders, and your children have defenders. Attractiveness is as often used for the purposes of displaying to the members of your own sex as it is to arouse the interest of the opposite sex. Display can be extremely competitive, but it can also be solicitous. Women display for each other, and dress for each other, and are concerned about what

 

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other women think of their appearance. We conventionally interpret such preening as competitive, a bit catty, and we assume that the ultimate goal is to show the gals who can win the boys. But female display also can be affiliative, implying the possibility of an alliance. In that sense, women may have ''chosen" breasts on each other as much as men chose them on women. And the breast of choice for exhibition and persuasion is not the soft, sloping maternal breast or the virginal rosebud breast, but the strong, prominent breast, the breast that can practically be flexed like a muscle, the breast that stands out in a crowd.
The zebra finch is a natural aesthete, but the bird has its structural and intellectual limitations. It can't fabricate its own hats. If it could, it might become reckless. It might start building crests as high as the hair of Marie Antoinette. Or it might thread the crest with strands of Lycra, to abet its bounce and waggle and to leave no finch's visual cortex unexploited. A crest would be a perfect trait to accentuate. There's not much you can do with a leg band, but a feather cap can be made to crow: Look at me! No, look at
me
.
We have not only taste but the wherewithal to indulge, inflect, and abuse it. Breasts, like crests, lend themselves to manipulation. They are ideal accessories, and we have exploited our sensory exploiters. Breasts are much easier to work with than any other body part. They are soft and compressible. They can be lifted up, squeezed together, thrust forward, padded out, prostheticized. Cinching in the waist is hard, though women have done it, and have fainted and died from the effort; hoisting up the breasts is relatively painless. The fetishization of the breast goes hand in hand with our status as clothinged apes. Not only did necklines plunge in the fourteenth century, the first corsets elevated the breasts to the occasion. More often than not, the ideal breast is an invented breast. Decolletage, the tushy breast, is an artifact of clothing. Naked breasts don't dance cheek to cheek they turn away from each other. Breasts vary in size and shape to an outlandish degree, but they can be whipped into an impressive conformity, and because we are human and we can't leave anything alone, we have whipped away. We have played on the eye's tendency to follow the round, to be attracted by the hemisphere, and we have inflated and mollycoddled it.
We can take some comfort from the fact that men's curves are under increasing pressure to expand as well. The introduction of the Nautilus

 

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machine has ushered in the era of the attainable David, whose chest and arms are breaking out with breasts all over. We can wring our hands raw in priggish despair over the contemporary emphasis on surface and our homogenized appraisal of beauty, but though the technology is new, the obsession is congenital. We've been scolded for our vanity since Narcissus discovered the reflective properties of water. We have been threatened with visions of withered witches' tits if we refuse to mend our ways and stop worrying about our bodies or staring at the moons and melons of others.
To say that all breasts are pretty is like saying that all faces are pretty: it's true but false. Yes, we all have our winsome components, and we are genotypically and anatomically unique and uniqueness has its merit. At the same time, we know beauty when we see it. Beauty is a despot, but so what? Our mistake is in attributing grander meaning to a comely profile than it already has. High cheekbones, a high butt, and a high bosom are nice, but none should be viewed as the sine qua non of womanliness. If breasts had something important to say, they would be much less variable and whimsical than they are. They would be like mere mammary glands, a teaspoon per breast per woman. If breasts could talk, they would probably tell jokes every light-bulb joke in the book.

 

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8
Holy Water: Breast Milk
The Virgin Mary, mother of Christ, felt no pain in childbirth. She kept her virginity and presumably her hymen throughout life. If she was spared the curse of Eve, she may not have menstruated, or defecated or urinated, for that matter. Her corpse did not decay after death but ascended whole to heaven. She defied anatomy, biochemistry, and the laws of thermodynamics. She had little in common with other women, let alone with the "lower" mammals that women, through Linnaeus, conceptually linked to
Homo sapiens
. Nonetheless, Mary expressed her femaleness and joined her taxon in one unambiguous fashion: she used her mammary glands. She suckled the baby Jesus. The
Maria lactans
, or
Madonna del latte
, is among the most prevalent images in Western art. From the early Renaissance onward, the Virgin often is shown with one breast exposed and the infant Jesus either preparing to suckle or already grazing the tip of the nipple with his lips. The exposed breast is usually an odd-looking object, a sort of billiard ball that seems barely attached to the rest of the chest and may be closer to her clavicle than to the mid-rib cage, where breasts usually reside. Regardless of the technical skill of the artist, the exposed breast was by convention rendered inaccurately. Viewers were meant not to dwell on the carnality of Mary's bosom but to consider the purity and possibilities of the extraordinary nourishment within. How limitless is the power of the breast that suckled the Almighty; it gave life to the one who gives eternal life to all. And just as the mammary gland of an ordinary woman is fortified by its suppliant, generating more milk the more it is suckled, so the breast of Mary was strengthened and sanctified through intimate contact with the holiest of mouths: it

 

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secreted
and
absorbed. The Virgin's nipples surely never cracked or blistered.
As a sacred fluid, the milk of the Virgin ranks just below the blood that flowed from Christ's wounds. If there were enough splinters of the True Cross in reliquaries throughout Christendom to construct an entire cathedral, there were enough vials of Mary's milk to feed its congregation, prompting the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Calvin to wonder cynically "how that milk . . . was collected, so as to be preserved until our time." We can imagine that Mary's breast simply never ran dry, and that it will nourish the world when the world must end. In one fifteenth-century fresco by an anonymous Florentine painter, the Virgin is shown cupping one breast in her hand and pleading with the adult Christ for the salvation of a group of sinners huddled at her feet. The inscription reads, "Dearest son, because of the milk I gave you, have mercy on them."
The Madonna's was not the first
latte
to be exalted, nor the last. The milk of a Greek goddess was said to confer infinite life on those who drank it. When Zeus sought divinity for his son Hercules, born of an adulterous affair with the mortal Alcmene, he sneaked the infant into the bedroom of his sleeping wife, Hera, and put him to her breast for a taste of infinity. A musclehead from the start, Hercules suckled so hard that Hera awoke, and she shook him off in outrage, spurting milk across the skies hence the Milky Way. Hercules already had swallowed enough, though, to join the ranks of the immortals.
If a woman's menstrual blood is frequently considered polluted, the reputed purity of her breast milk restores her to homeostasis. As Valerie Fildes describes in her classic study,
Breasts, Bottles, and Babies
, the Ebers papyrus of the sixteenth-century
B.C.
recommended human milk as a treatment for cataracts, burns, eczema, and "expelling noxious excrements in the belly of a man." The wet nurses of ancient Egypt were exalted as no other class of servants was. A royal wet nurse was invited to royal funerals. The children of a royal wet nurse were considered milk kin to the king. Only two characters recognize Odysseus when he returns home in rags after his twenty-year sabbatical: his faithful dog, Argus (who dies happy after seeing his master), and his wet nurse, Eurykleia. Her breasts have long since shriveled, but they retain traces of the purity that once flowed through them, and true purity, like loyalty,

 

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