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I like breasts. Too much. Whenever I start thinking I have a more complicated view of the world than your standard issue "guy," I encounter a pair of breasts and "revert to saved" as it were. I become a stuttering buffoon with repetitive motion disorder. Breasts represent for me the collapse of reason, the boundary my rational faculties bump up against. And I am not alone.
At the Oscars this year, Jennifer Lopez's breasts, unflappable under the effervescent mosquito-netting bodice of her Chanel dress, left viewers squinting, fashion mavens conferring disdainfully and a record number of people running to their computers to download images that showed more than ABC's squeamish cameras. The consensus among my female friends was that Jennifer's dress was "tacky" and "attention seeking" (a cruel appraisal indeed). Seek and you shall find Jennifer Lopez was for the first time the number one search engine entry on Lycos after the Oscars.
It may be common knowledge that the breast exerts a powerful sway over the modern world, but I find my own degree of rapture difficult to explain. It may have something to do with my history as a tactile hedonist I have a weakness for things that give but resist (something a friend explains away as my Nicholson Baker complex). Opening tennis ball cans, ripping slices of American cheese, puncturing Schaeffer fountain pen cartridges, folding the impossibly thin tinfoil wrapping of Nestle Crunch bars I consider these to be good ways to spend an afternoon.
In the universe of tactile experiences, the breast is the Everest. My girlfriend humors me and I sit there squeezing for what seems like hours, speechless, communicating my helplessness in Morse code. There is something about the breast that I can wrap neither hand nor brain around. I am like a baffled scientist repeating over and over an experiment with incomprehensible results. The taut, springy resistance, the jouncy aftershock it can't be! Let's check again it's much the same, but will it feel the same a few seconds from now? It seems logical but squeeze, hold, release, squeeze-squeeze, hold, release each squeeze invites the next like cigarettes or potato chips. There is something ungraspable in all this grasping.
The woman on the receiving end of all this squeezing is remarkably good humored about it I think she finds it alternately amusing and annoying, and probably a bit odd as well. Other things are fun to squeeze after all: Nerf footballs, Charmin, warm macaroni and cheese but I've yet to cuddle up with the casserole dish.
There are many explanations, of course: for one, the breast is the most conspicuous synecdoche for the female body, that desirable landscape that men can enter but never fully inhabit. We are a species divided by chromosome sequence; sex is perhaps the most resolute lesson in life that you can't have everything (the corollary lesson, which takes an extra few years to figure out, is that if you could, it would all be less fun). The male experience of feeling breasts is a kind of grope across the divide.
There is also, of course, the Freudian suckling explanation: we all have a wistful yearning for dad's hands through our hair, mom's sweet milky teat and a life of soft food and leisure time. This may help explain the bizarre range of responses I tend to experience when I witness a woman breast-feeding in public.
First, there is the fourteen-year-old illicit thrill of actually seeing a breast (call your friends!). Then the disconcerting revelation that this is what breasts are for of course! which short-circuits my attraction. It all makes so much sense all of a sudden, it's like the Nasdaq crash, irrational exuberance flattened. There is a terrible sense of loss it's like watching a Van Gogh canvas used as a tablecloth: it serves a purpose, but previously it transcended purpose. Finally there is the stunning beauty of mother and child joined, the corporeal ecosystem at work, and all that. Seriously, powerful stuff.
It's reasonable to suspect, of course, that I am jealous, that I suddenly feel superfluous, that I don't want to be reminded that I am too old, that I have been replaced. It's quite possible that I want to be held, that I want to suckle, that the peculiar thrall of the breast is a combination of both infant fantasies and more salacious mating instincts.
At the end of the day, I enjoy not understanding my breast obsession, and in fact it's only recently that I have enjoyed the condition itself. In earlier years I resented the sway that women and their bodies had over me it made me feel pathetic and sexually needy (a far more deep-rooted and prevalent condition among men than most women realize). For this reason I used to ration my boob squeezing: three squeezes before bed and then straight to sleep. Only now, many breasts later, somewhat more sated at the seasoned age of thirty-three, have I fully made peace with my predilection, befriended my helplessness. It's bigger than me. As a friend said recently, there were probably guys over the millennia who didn't have much interest in breasts, but we out-reproduced them. Now there is just us.
