Breasts of Almea

[Aurora Rossa]

Eddy, if by "frontal sex" you mean "having sex facing one another", I should point out that this is, in the West at least, a rather recent invention.

It is? The way Christian fundamentalists talk about it (when they talk about sex at all), you'd think it was the only natural way.

[hwhatting]

Eddy, if by "frontal sex" you mean "having sex facing one another", I should point out that this is, in the West at least, a rather recent invention.

Can you give any evidence for that? Or tell what were the preferred alternatives "in the West" before that?

I remember reading somewhere that Bonobos have sex facing each other(they seem to be the only Primate Species besides us to do it that way). So it seems strange to me that this should be a recent development in our species (or in that particular case, in one, i.e. our Western, culture).
Maybe Aidan can shed some light on this?
Best regards,
Hans-Werner

[brandrinn]

face-to-face sex is not at all a recent innovation in ours or any culture. at present, it is the most common position for almost every single culture in existence. human biology works amazingly well with this position, compared to other animals. was it always this way? well, yeah. very little visual data is known about sex, but there are a few important sources, even carvings going back to the bronze age. i'll google for some images later, but i remember seeing that on the history channel once.

[Shm Jay]

I say this as a man of course

Psssht. You?re just a boy though an older one. Talk to me about being a man when you turn 21.

[Leo]

According to Desmond Morris and others, the back-to-front shift of sexual signals happened in all primates that stopped being quadrupedal and started to spend more time sitting and walking on two, making the chest more visible than the butt. Some apes display colored shapes of naked skin on the chest that are located on the butt in other apes and monkeys. This theory is far from being stupid, considering that the instincts are rather primitive things. Morris goes into great details about that in The Naked Ape and probably other books, in a very convincing way.

[Gremlins]

I've heard that it was because originally, humans and other primates liked big butts. When humans became bipedal and made the shift to front sex, the originally flat breasts became rounder to resemble buttocks to make up for it. If that sounds stupid, I should point out that I don't remember exactly how the theory went.

Obviously, it evolved after humans evolved on of their most useful features- the desire to try new thing. One female randomly mutated growths around her nipples and the male humans, being curious and sex crazed, squeezed them. As she got more attention than the other females, she had more sex and therefore more children, the females also having these protrusions and therefore getting more attention and more sex, so more children

[Chengjiang]

face-to-face sex is not at all a recent innovation in ours or any culture. at present, it is the most common position for almost every single culture in existence. human biology works amazingly well with this position, compared to other animals. was it always this way? well, yeah. very little visual data is known about sex, but there are a few important sources, even carvings going back to the bronze age. i'll google for some images later, but i remember seeing that on the history channel once.

Frontal sex isn't limited to humans either; it's the most common form of sexual interaction in bonobos, as I recall. That said, humans do use a lot of different sexual positions, in practice pretty much regardless of culture.

[BGMan]

This is supposed to be a language and culture board, and here we have folks talking about gazongas. How teenage.

[Pthagnar]

Mammalian protruberances.

[Chengjiang]

This is supposed to be a language and culture board, and here we have folks talking about gazongas. How teenage.

Although, on the other hand, I don't know of that many teenagers (outside this board) who will turn a conversation about breasts into one about the history of sexual practices and the evolution of human secondary sexual traits. (OK, I do know a few people in their late teens who would, but these are not entirely normal people. They're much too fun to be that. )

[NakedCelt]

The whole breasts-as-replacement-buttocks thing is one of Desmond Morris's less plausible ideas. Apart from anything else, breasts don't actually look very much like buttocks until they're squeezed into clothing — there's no central cleft, for instance. Sexual selection is a likely enough explanation, but more likely the appeal is simply: large breasts = plenty of fat on the body = able to feed a baby. It wouldn't have mattered much initially just where the extra fat was located, but once women with large breasts started giving birth to the sons of men with a genetic preference for large breasts, the feed-forward cycle was in motion.

[Rodlox]

Somone without nipples would look very... incomplete to me. The same with eyebrows and fingernails, or the absence thereof.

Ghost

In the original Planet of the Apes movie, they didn't have eyebrows on any of the apes, except the one Taylor falls in love with. She had eyebrows, to make her more attractive by human standards.

That's a little unfair, don't you think? He falls in love with Nova, the human (at least he's willing to drag her completely useless carcass all over the planet); he grows to like the ape woman (what was her name again?).

On topic, the apes didn't really have breasts, did they? Do real apes?

Primate breasts are flat. I'm not really sure why human ones protrude.

primate breasts protrude...when they're lactating.

[sintau.tayua]

I like the idea that males wouldn't have nipples. Has anyone else used this idea?

Argh - this is annoying. I haven't specifically 'used' this idea, as my conworld exists mainly as a fuzz of details. However, males not having nipples was one of my special ideas - logical; giving an easily explainable difference between k'su* humans and earth humans; and original. Now it's not original. Poo.

Ah well, I'll still use it, since I did think it up independent of all youse.

-----------------------------
* an apostrophe indicates that the sound before it is an ejective. It cannot be used except after a stop consonant, of course.

[Mashmakhan]

I like the idea that males wouldn't have nipples. Has anyone else used this idea?

Argh - this is annoying. I haven't specifically 'used' this idea, as my conworld exists mainly as a fuzz of details. However, males not having nipples was one of my special ideas - logical; giving an easily explainable difference between k'su* humans and earth humans; and original. Now it's not original. Poo.

It's not possible either. Click here.

Basically the rule is that, if it exists in one sex, it will exist in some form in the other. Therefore, if your species is a mammal and so females have mammary glands and nipples, males will too. I'm not sure about mammary glands and to be honest the idea frightens me, but nevertheless that means either your males will need to have nipples or both males and females will need to forfeit them.

If this point has already been brought up, my apologies.

[Soap]

Male humans can lactate. In fact, most baby boys start lactating right before they're born as the mother's lactation hormones start flowing through the placenta into the baby's body. But it can also happen with hormonal imbalances in adulthood and in a few cases even without imbalances.

But male humans could have evolved to be effectively nipple-less. Just because both sexes have some analog of every organ doesn't mean it can't be buried inside the body in one gender but not the other. I mean, female's ovaries don't descend like the testicles of males, so there's no reason that male's nipples should have to break the skin either. Am I right?

[Radius Solis]

Male humans can lactate. In fact, most baby boys start lactating right before they're born as the mother's lactation hormones start flowing through the placenta into the baby's body. But it can also happen with hormonal imbalances in adulthood and in a few cases even without imbalances.

But male humans could have evolved to be effectively nipple-less. Just because both sexes have some analog of every organ doesn't mean it can't be buried inside the body in one gender but not the other. I mean, female's ovaries don't descend like the testicles of males, so there's no reason that male's nipples should have to break the skin either. Am I right?

Yes. We probably couldn't have evolved to have lost all trace of nipples, but we could have easily ended up with male nipples being only vestigial bits of tissue buried under normal skin.

[sintau.tayua]

I mean, female's ovaries don't descend like the testicles of males, so there's no reason that male's nipples should have to break the skin either. Am I right?

No. Sorry, males testes have to be outside the body because they need to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body for sperm to be produced.
But good point, anyway.


However, My conworld is created by a omni-everything god, so I can just say that this god created human males without nipples.

[NakedCelt]

I mean, female's ovaries don't descend like the testicles of males, so there's no reason that male's nipples should have to break the skin either. Am I right?

No. Sorry, males testes have to be outside the body because they need to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body for sperm to be produced.
But good point, anyway.

Er... what Soap asked was "there's no reason that males' nipples" — nipples, not testes — "should have to break the skin". I believe there are many male mammals without any trace of external nipples.

Most mammal testes have to be slightly cooler than body heat to produce sperm. This is not the case with elephants or the large African rhinoceros species, and it's also not the case with whales, seals, or sea-cows. It is a good and unresolved question why most mammals have evolved such temperature-sensitive testes; surely slightly more heat-tolerant testes could be withdrawn to a much safer place, thus giving the animal a major reproductive advantage? The example of the large mammals and the aquatic mammals shows there's no reason why heat-tolerant testes can't evolve; so why haven't they?

[Geff Fletcher]

The whole breasts-as-replacement-buttocks thing is one of Desmond Morris's less plausible ideas. Apart from anything else, breasts don't actually look very much like buttocks until they're squeezed into clothing — there's no central cleft, for instance. Sexual selection is a likely enough explanation, but more likely the appeal is simply: large breasts = plenty of fat on the body = able to feed a baby. It wouldn't have mattered much initially just where the extra fat was located, but once women with large breasts started giving birth to the sons of men with a genetic preference for large breasts, the feed-forward cycle was in motion.

Jared Diamond, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, puts forward the idea that a female's large breasts are a sexual signifier much like the tails of birds of paradise or the manes of lions.

The reason females developed large breasts instead of, say, beards is down to genetic chance; that is, it's easier for women to evolve enlarged breasts than beards because breast size is related to oestrogen levels and body/facial hair to testosterone levels.

[brandrinn]

Most mammal testes have to be slightly cooler than body heat to produce sperm. This is not the case with elephants or the large African rhinoceros species, and it's also not the case with whales, seals, or sea-cows. It is a good and unresolved question why most mammals have evolved such temperature-sensitive testes; surely slightly more heat-tolerant testes could be withdrawn to a much safer place, thus giving the animal a major reproductive advantage? The example of the large mammals and the aquatic mammals shows there's no reason why heat-tolerant testes can't evolve; so why haven't they?

I did a bit of googling, and it seems elephants, whales, etc have a slightly lower or more variable body temperature than humans and that they have better techniques for regulating different parts of their body. "Rete mirabile"s, clusters of veins packed close together, are used by several terrestrial and aquatic mammals (including elephants) to keep important areas from overheating. Apparently, elephants use "rete mirabile"s to keep their goods cool.

[BGMan]

The whole breasts-as-replacement-buttocks thing is one of Desmond Morris's less plausible ideas. Apart from anything else, breasts don't actually look very much like buttocks until they're squeezed into clothing — there's no central cleft, for instance.

I dunno... my conservative father complains about women with their low-cut tops and how it looks like "plumber's butt on the chest".