breast for itself, independent of, and often in spite of, its glandular role. We love it enough that we can be made squeamish by the sight of a breastfeeding woman. It is not the exposure of the breast in public that makes us uncomfortable, for we welcome an extraordinary degree of décolletage and want to walk toward it, to gaze at it. Nor is it the reminder of our animal nature, for we can eat many things in public and put pieces of food in a baby's mouth or a bottle of breast milk, for that matter without eliciting a viewer's discomfort at the patent display of bodily need. Instead, it is the convergence of the aesthetic and the functional that disturbs and irritates us. When we find the image of a breastfeeding mother lovely or appealing, we do so by negating the aesthetic breast in our minds and focusing on the bond between mother and infant, on the miraculous properties that we imagine human milk to have, or on thoughts of warmth, comfort, and love recalled from our childhood. The maternal breast soothes us and invites us to rest. The aesthetic breast arouses us, grabs us by the collar or the bodice, and so it is used on billboards and magazine covers and everywhere we turn. The two conceptual breasts appeal to distinct pathways. One is ancient and logical, the love of mama and mammary. (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written: "The Latin term for breasts,
mammae
, derives from the plaintive cry 'mama,' spontaneously uttered by young children from widely divergent linguistic groups and often conveying a single, urgent message, 'suckle me.'") The other pathway is much newer, specific to our species, and it is noisier and more gratuitous. Being strictly human, the aesthetic breast puts on airs and calls itself divine.
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Because the display of the beckoning breast is aggressive and ubiquitous in the United States, we are said to be unusually, even pathologically, breast-obsessed. In other cultures, including parts of Africa and Asia, breasts are pedestrian. "From my research in China, it's very clear that the breast is much less sexualized there than it is in American culture," Emily Martin, the cultural historian and author of
Flexible Bodies
, said to me. "It's neither hidden nor revealed in any particular way in women's dress or undergarments. In many villages, women sit in the sun with their breasts exposed, and older women will be out washing clothes with their breasts exposed, and it's all completely irrelevant to erotic arousal." Yet if breast obsession varies in intensity from country to country and era to era, it nonetheless is impressively persistent,
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