What is it about female breasts? The intrigue resides in the fact that female breasts provoke interest and carry meaning far beyond their biological utility as effective baby feeding devices. In our culture, the sexual connotations of female breasts may have eclipsed acceptance of their function. Breastfeeding in public, to wit, is still widely shunned, in large part because an exposed breast is seen first and foremost as sexual provocation.
While contemporary popular culture often busies itself with debating whether exposed breasts are empowering or degrading to women, social scientists have been more interested in the question of whether the sexualization of female breasts is a mere cultural artifact, a byproduct of the dominant male gaze and the repressive patriarchal system, or a biological adaptation by which breasts—because they signal fertility and lactational capacity—have become sexually arousing to heterosexual males. The question is whether breasts are attractive when and because they are covered, as the cultural constructionists claim, or covered because they are inherently attractive, as evolutionary science hypothesizes.
A recent (2025) study by Polish researcher Michal Stefanczyk and colleagues took a novel approach to exploring this question. They studied 80 men from among the Dani people, a horticulturalist ethnic group residing in the Central Highlands of Papua. This indigenous, isolated, non-Western population has in recent decades undergone social norm changes regarding women’s attire. Specifically, previous norms of toplessness have been supplanted by the more recent norm of breast-covering.
Participants were divided into two distinct groups by age. Younger ones (mean age=24) have grown up in a culture where covered breasts have become the norm. Members of the older group (mean age=50) grew up when breasts were exposed. Participants were interviewed one at a time and were asked questions about whether touching their partners’ breasts was a part of their sexual repertoire, whether their levels of arousal at the sight of exposed breasts, and whether their partners’ breasts were an attractive feature for them.
Comparing the Results for Both Groups
The researchers found that older men (who grew up during the topless era) did not differ in their views, preferences, or behavior compared with younger men raised in times when women covered their breasts publicly. Both groups reported frequently touching their partners’ breasts during sex and high sexual arousal at the sight of naked female breasts. Interestingly, both also placed relatively low importance on their partners’ breasts in evaluating overall attraction. Female breasts, it appears, are inherently at play in the mating game, although they may not be central players.
These findings suggest that male sexual arousal at the sight of elicited female breasts might be an “innate mechanism rather than a cultural by-product of specific, sex-differentiating social norms.” The results contradict the idea that breast covering results from cultural sexualization of the female body and the high importance assigned by a culture to the female breast, common Western culture conventions, and that regularly seeing naked female breasts will remove the attendant curiosity and sexual charge. By showing that female breasts need not be usually concealed to provoke sexual connotations, this study, conducted with a non-Western sample, provides evidence for the claim that breast attractiveness is coded into our biology and is thus quite independent from social dress and sexuality norms.
The authors conclude that “this study offers preliminary support for the hypothesis that male sexual interest in female breasts is an evolutionarily based tendency and neither an effect of the Westernization of clothing habits (and thus, covering female breasts in public) nor the ‘sexualization of what is hidden.’”
At the same time, the fact that a certain tendency is coded genetically does not necessarily make it immune to social influences. Culture’s influence on human behavior runs wide and deep. Attraction to female breasts may be universal, yet whether and how breasts are shown in public is guided by societal norms and dictates, and varies greatly across cultures and throughout history. Such variations, it now appears, represent attempts at managing the attraction, but, as is the case with the sexual impulse in general, can neither engender nor eliminate it.
