It shouldn’t be embarrassing and this is actually my point, but ironically I don’t know how to start this text. Most of us have been preprogrammed to consider the topic of breasts as sexual, so we tend to talk either too little or way too much about it (the latter is avoidance too actually, just a different kind).
A social construct is a kind of agreement between members of the same society about something considered “normal”, acceptable. Importantly a social construct is arbitrary, in the sense that there’s no real need for it, no physical constraint requiring it. Of course it may appear necessary to people once the society integrated it for a long time, by habit and because other layers of society are added over it. For instance, business people usually consider that wearing a tie is an important part of the job. There’s obviously no link between business skills and wearing a tie, it’s an arbitrary rule. This is a social construct.
The requirement for women to hide their breasts is quite clearly a social construct. I don’t know to what extent this is well known or considered a fringe opinion. Nowadays this certainly is well known in some circles, at least among feminists and sociologists. But the vast majority of society accepts this as a kind of natural order and people rarely question its arbitrary nature.
Since this may go against the intuition for many people, let’s explain it clearly. Let’s not even consider the whole nudity question and assume that it’s “natural” for both genders to hide their genitals (it’s a simplification, but one thing at a time). Breasts are not genitals, they are secondary sexual traits, that is features which normally appear based on one’s biological sex. So of course they are related to sex, but not more than facial hair, which is a secondary sexual trait for males. To my knowledge, no society requires men to hide their facial hair or considers visible facial hair as nudity.1
When something has been accepted by the vast majority over generations and generations, it becomes undistinguishable from a natural law. It feels as “natural” for female breasts to be seen as sexual attributes as for birds to sing. After all, straight men are aroused by women’s breasts, right? It has always been so and it looks like it will always be. As a consequence, societies create laws to protect “morality”: indecent exposure laws of course,2 but society is affected in multiple other ways like the movie rating system, how social media moderate their content, but also topless bars, the lingerie business… All of this and much more because men find boobs sexually appealing.
It does not occur to anyone that this is less a cause than a consequence of the sexualization of female breasts: straight men like women’s breasts because the whole world around them says that women’s breasts are supposed to be sexually appealing… therefore they are appealed as well, because it’s a feeling validated and encouraged by society for straight men. This works like a successful marketing campaign: people like Coke because everything around us says that Coke is a good/cool/refreshing drink. If it was intended by somebody, one could say that we have been manipulated, brainwashed. We have been trained until it feels completely natural and intuitive, like a dog learning a trick and being rewarded for it. It might be hard to admit when something is so deeply intertwined in our culture and lives: the sexualization of women’s breasts is an artefact of how societies developped, biased towards men’s views of women as sexual targets.
At an individual level, we can observe how much this social construct influences us. It raises the question of how much of what we consider our identity really belongs to ourselves: when something as deep and intimate as this appears to be largely dictated by past society, what is left? Of course, a lot of people find comfort in the stability of a traditional vision of the world, thus prefer to keep believing in myths such as this one. Humankind is very slowly emerging from its cave.
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Sure, this difference could be explained by the fact that the rules of society have been designed from the point of view of men; but if this was the explanation, then male facial hair should have the same appeal to (straight) women that breasts have on (straight) men. ↩︎
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Notice how indecence is a moving target: a woman showing her legs would have been shocking in Victorian England, but nowadays it’s normal for teenagers to show a lot more; likewise, it’s perfectly fine in Brazil to be dressed with a nothing but a tiny item of clothing strategically located, but it’s frowned upon for a woman to even show her face in Saudi Arabia. ↩︎