Bosom Buddies

This post is one that doesn't seem to fit into any other of my blogs, so it's going here. I'll try to give it an evolutionary spin accordingly.

My bosom buddy Nan (not her real name) told me yesterday she has recently had to have a malignant lump removed from one of her breasts. It is the first time, in the long history of benign masses which Nan has had to endure that the new spot on her mammogram has not been merely a cyst. Nan got so used to discovering benign lumps that she mistakenly delayed getting a mammogram for a lump her self-testing revealed last year ... a delay which worked eerily to her advantage this year! Because she put off her 2007 mammogram, her 2008 diagnostic came only six months after the prior one. Her cancer showed up on the more recent one, but not on the previous one, with the result that she knows she has caught this dangerous new mass very early indeed!

Nan and I are old, dear friends who have never been romantically involved with one another. Even though I am a guy, I find that I share her pain and peril, her fright and fear almost as much as I imagine any of her gal friends would do. Nan is almost like the sister I never had, and although she has two brothers, I believe she thinks of me as sort of an honorary third brother as well.


What is it about the breasts that make them as a site for cancer seem doubly problematic, vis-à-vis, say, the colon or the pancreas?

If colon or pancreatic cancer is successfully overcome, life returns to normal.

Breast cancer, though, carries with it the threat or actuality of a mastectomy. If Nan's cancer, God forbid, has spread to her lymph nodes (her diagnostic for that is still in the offing) she will probably need to have one or both breasts removed.

Now, I haven't expressly brought this possibility up with her, so I don't know for sure how she would feel about it. But I think I know how she would say she feels. She would say something like, "I'm past the age of having children and potentially breast-feeding them. Other than that, a woman's breasts are useless appendages of adipose tissue and ductwork. Good riddance to them!"

Well, since I too am past the age of fatherhood, would I feel OK with losing a testicle to malignancy — again, God forbid that the occasion should ever arise?

No, truth be told, it would be crushing to my self image to lose even one of my family jewels. And if that ever were to happen, my missing gonad would not affect in the slightest the way I look to the outside world when fully dressed. No one could tell I was "hanging" any differently than I was before.

If I were of Nan's gender and lost one or both of my breasts, though, then absent reconstructive surgery or a prosthesis I would quite simply look maimed to one and all.

There are prosthetic testes, I believe. The problem is not just how "normal" we look, though, but how normal we think we are.

Most of us lose organs — an appendix, tonsils, adenoids, etc. Our identity is not bound up with such tissue, though. Women, Nan included, have hysterectomies., and they don't seem to curl up and die, figuratively speaking, when this procedure is performed on them. Why not? I think it's because they're typically past the age when they want children, so their uterus and ovaries are no longer factors in their identity.

Testicles, on the other hand, remain bearers of a man's identity throughout his life. He thinks of them as the basis of not just his fertility but also his virility, his manliness.

Likewise, a woman's breasts seem to furnish the basis for her femininity image ... or so it seems, at least from the male perspective. The male of the species makes a symbolic link between what his testicles mean to him image-wise, and what the breasts must mean to a woman.


The question arises of whether a woman really identifies her sexual image with her breasts as much as we men believe she does.

I think yes.

Even though the breasts are but "secondary sexual characteristics" that no longer have a life-or-death biological function in this age of bottles and infant formulas, evolutionarily the mammaries of Homo sapiens, or the female version thereof, played a big role.

Or why are they so big, size-wise? Why are the nipples so prominent?

The mammary organs of our primate cousins and evolutionary forebears are small and hidden in fur. When body fur departed and hominoid creatures began to walk upright, female breasts and nipples got big for the first time. The reason? My guess is that they made it easy for male and female hominids alike to tell the difference between the sexes from afar.

Imagine you're a hominid male bonded with a certain nubile female. Your band of brothers — and sisters, and close and distant cousins — roams the savannah day by day in search of food. As you spread out on your daily forage, you and your mate don't necessarily stay side by side, but you tend to keep a jealous eye on her as you both go about your hominid business. Quite often you notice that her "personal space" is being shared by another in your band. Anything to worry about? Not as long as you can see breasts on Hominid #3!

In fact, a female who happens to be under-endowed in the boobs department is apt to find herself becoming (wrongly) the object of male tantrums of jealousy from time to time. The other females are apt to shun her out of fear of repeated nasty boyfriend incidents, all because Susan Simian looks too much like a boy. This is the kiss of death in a social species like us and all our evolutionary ancestors. So natural selection is going to get busy and start pumping up those (what will one day be) bra sizes in an understandable quest to ensure domestic tranquility.


Then, rather unexpectedly, those ballooning breasts, those mushrooming mammaries, become more than just long-distance no-reason-for-jealousy confirmers. They become cause for male arousal, since us guys like to be sure that lovely creature we are wiggling our eyebrows at from afar will turn out to be worth it, up close and personal. What better to act as signals that arousal is appropriate than those newly pneumatic boobs?

In short, evolution has given the breast socio-sexual roles that it was never, as a mere milk-producing appendage, supposed to have. And evolution has implanted those roles in our brains in ways that our culture, when it arrived on the scene, would only magnify.

So, now, when someone like my bosom buddy "Nan" is confronted with the possible need for a mastectomy, the potential loss of one or both breasts must threaten her sense of personal socio-sexual identity in ways that make little rational sense. As if the threat of dying of cancer weren't enough to have to deal with ...