ABSTRACT
A woman’s breasts bear the paradoxical burden of being esthetic organs. They are modified sweat glands that secrete what is essentially enriched sweat, a lactational charge without which the human race, until very recently, could not have survived. At the same time breasts in Western culture have long been considered the paired centerpieces of female erotic beauty, a woman’s ‘natural jewels,’ in the words of the culture critic Anne Hollander, and the things that make men “stupid” as the humorist Dave Barry has put it. Imagine if the pancreas had to be pretty while releasing insulin. Or, just for fun, imagine if fashion and female taste dictated the display of a man’s reproductive organs through a bit of pelvic decolletage [Angier, 1997, p. 4].
