They like big busts and they cannot lie.
The chicken-and-egg debate has got nothing on this longstanding DD-ilemma. After years of speculation, Polish scientists may have finally solved one of the preeminent questions of our time — why gentlemen prefer boobs.
“What we can say is breasts are sexy — naturally so. Men like breasts,” declared study author Michal Stefanczyk, from the University of Wroclaw in Wroclaw, Poland, while describing his findings, which were published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, the Times reported.
In scientific terms, the researcher concluded that it is nature rather than Western societal conditioning that’s behind heterosexual men’s appetite for tatas — in other words, chest men are born and not made, per the study.
They’d reportedly set out specifically to answer whether this arousal reflects an innate biological preference or “a repressive patriarchal system that sexualizes women,” the myth-bust-ers write.
To shed light on this bra-inspiring question, Stefancyzk decided to study if this law of attraction was present in a society where there was no shortage of naked breasts on display.
So the team studied Dani tribe of Western New Guinea, Indonesia, where up until 20 years ago, it was customary for the women to go completely topless. After that, the society became increasingly influenced by Western culture, which resulted in more women covering up.
The scientists polled 40 older Dani men who grew up when toplessness was the norm, as well as 40 younger males who came of age when women covered up.
Each group was asked how often they touch their partner’s breasts during sex and how turned on they felt upon spotting a woman’s naked chest.
Did absence make the heart grow fonder when it came to bare busts? Most definitely not.
“The two groups did not differ in terms of how frequently they touch their partner’s breasts during sexual intercourse, [or] how sexually aroused they feel when they see naked female breasts,” the study authors wrote.
In summation, men found breasts titillating even in a society where they are boob-iquitous.
Despite only studying one tribe and relying on older men’s mammary memories, Stefanczyk said that it was safe to conclude that treasuring chests was not a byproduct of Western cultural imposition.
In fact, researchers have long theorized that breasts may have evolved to communicate that a woman was youthful and fertile, Livescience reported. Some studies even show that men prefer large breasts and a high hip-to-waist ratio — although this so-called formula for the “perfect female body” was recently disputed by mathematicians.
Of course, these latest findings did not mean that bosoms are the be-all-end-all, per Stefancyzk, who noted that the test subjects claimed these assets were unimportant when choosing a life partner.
Stefanczyk also said he wasn’t making a value judgment on whether men’s fixation was good or bad, explaining, “It is what it is, but if we agree it’s natural, let’s think what we can do about it.”
Steve Stewart-Williams, a psychology professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, said he found the new study “persuasive.”
“I’ve often heard people argue that men’s love of breasts is just an invention of Western culture, and that there are cultures out there where breasts are no big deal to men,” he declared. “It’s always struck me as implausible — could Western culture have randomly created a male obsession with women’s elbows or nostrils?”
Nonetheless, other studies have shown that breasts don’t necessarily hold universal appeal.
In a 1951 survey of 191 cultures, anthropologists observed that breasts were considered sexually important to males in just 13 of those cultures, nine of which preferred big breasts, Livescience reported.
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