A lot of men spend a lot of time trying to grab a glance of tit. But when Midsommer star Florence Pugh wore a sheer top to a recent fashion event – showing off her boobs, nipples and all – angry men around the world told her to cover up.
Some railed against this surprise boob exposure; other ungrateful fellows complained that the boobs she exposed were too small. The question: Why oh why was Pugh exposing us to … THEM?
Pugh responded to her boob-haters by asking some questions of her own:
Why are you so scared of breasts? Small? Large? Left? Right? Only one? Maybe none? What. Is. So. Terrifying.
Over on RedState, a red-blooded American male named Brandon Morse tried to explain just why, even though he likes to look at boobs, he doesn’t want to see Pugh showing hers off in public. And it was a pretty revealing post, though not at all in the way its author intended.
Let’s go, Brandon:
What Pugh is demonstrating here is a very common issue in modern society; a blatant disrespect toward men.
I don’t think her boobs are being disrespectful at all.
The fact is, while she might not see breasts as a sexual attractor, men do. It’s naturally wired within us. Boobs are so attractive to men that when we look at them we actually become healthier.
So your complaint is that she’s making men healthier by showing off her boobs?
Apparently realizing that this little factoid — citation sorely needed — isn’t going to do his anti-public-boobing argument much good, he moves on to … babies and how everyone wants to make them, even when they don’t want to make them literally.
For a moment, let’s take out the higher thinking we humans are capable of and strip us down to our base instincts. Our animal selves are hardwired to procreate. Even people who don’t want children are slammed pretty hard with the urge to mate.
Dude, you know that people aren’t procreating with boobs, right? Procreation involves another part of the body that is somewhat south from there.
But you see, boobs indicate that a woman can have babies, and men like that (in their pants) about women.
Breasts are an indicator that a female is in the child-bearing range
Uh, girls can reach puberty — and develop boobs — as young as eight, you weirdo perv. It sounds an awful lot like you’re saying “if there’s grass on the field, play ball.”
… and the healthier her breasts look, the more a male might find himself naturally drawn to her.
So this woman is presumably one of the healthiest women to ever live.
Those breasts aren’t just going to be able to feed his offspring, they’ll be good at providing comfort and safety for their progeny as well.
Uh, boobs do what exactly? Are they bulletproof, or something? Can they shoot out fireworks to scare off bears?
Wait a second I’m being told that they can.
A lot of features go into a male of our species finding a woman attractive, but in every case, the revealing of the breasts is always a big deal. They don’t even have to be big. They just have to be there.
Then this woman could be one of the healthiest in the world also?
Breasts have inherent sexual value because breasts are a key component in the propagation of our species, the whole reason behind sexual attraction in the first place.
So now he is getting to his main point: that men can’t help but go AWOOOGAH every time they see boobs.
[T]rying to carry on a conversation, talk to clients, or even just drive down the road would be far more difficult if the woman in front of them is flashing her high beams in his direction.
Work that metaphor!
Women often complain that men don’t take them seriously enough, but rest assured, adding exposed breasts to the mix won’t make it any better.
So douchebag men think less of women when they see their boobs? That sounds like a douchebag problem, not a boob problem.
In 2009, the National Geographic reported on a study where men were shown scantily clad women while hooked up to machines that read brainwaves. When shown these pictures, the male brain reacted and fired up, but only in certain parts:
And in a “shocking” finding … some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain that usually responds when a person ponders another’s intentions.
This means that these men see women “as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds,” Fiske said. “The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens.”
Effectively, men stopped seeing the woman as a conscious person and began seeing her as a *gasp* sex object. The woman was effectively whittled down in the mind to be equal to that of a tool.
And once again this sounds like a douchebag problem, not a boob problem.
Already you can hear the feminists roar in outrage, but maybe they should check their anger first. Again, this isn’t something a man can help.
Are we talking about men or 14-year-old boys? Men don’t have to respond like animals to seeing boobs. They can learn to respect women even if these women have grade-A hooters.
It’s deep-wired in him by nature to do this, and indeed, the propagation of our species requires this. A man seeing a woman as a sex object isn’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, I can show you a whole host of internet content provided by everyday women who subconsciously love this fact about men
So how many Onlyfans pages does this guy subscribe to anyway?
A man can be sexually attracted to a woman while still appreciating her mind and personality, of course.
Glad to hear that.
In fact, it often feeds into sexual attraction, but with that said, men are driven to populate based quite a bit on visual stimuli.
They’re driven to fuck; can’t you just say that? It’s not like guys are going around asking women to “populate” with them. (Well, incels might be.) Why do these guys write about human sex as if they were Martians encountering it for the first time?
Freeing your nipple in front of a man would cause parts of that man’s brain to activate.
It lights up the whole nipple appreciation zone (NAZ) in the midbrain nuclei.
His baser instincts would become incredibly loud in his mind, and whether or not he’d want to, his thoughts would revolve around sexuality. Whatever he’s doing would become far more difficult.
You know, however basic our human lusts are, most straight men can actually survive looking at boobs. Their lives don’t fall apart. Their boob-liking instincts don’t drive out everything else in their heads.
His focus would be continuously drawn to the exposed breasts in front of him and the image would haunt him for weeks.
Those have to be some boobs!
He wouldn’t be able to look at you without the image of your breasts popping up in his mind.
How horny is this guy anyway?
This isn’t sexism or misogyny. It’s just nature, and men aren’t going to suddenly lose that instinct because of a few Instagram posts.
I’d like to think that men are a bit more than the sum total of their basest instincts. It’s weird how many antifeminist men out there supposedly defending men from feminist critics actually think that their fellow men are a bunch of slavering beasts whose heads start producing steam every time they get a glimpse of boob.
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You are right David. I did start getting my boobs at age 9. And I didn’t have my first period till 12. So yeah. 9 year old me was not of child baring age
I’ve been to too many mixed-gender saunas to ever take arguments like this seriously.
Occam’s Razor: US men only fixate on boobs being exposed because it is rare and strongly associated with sexy times in our culture. That’s all.
As for the National Geographic study, it sounds like they set up a situation practically perfect for men to sit there and indulge the Male Gaze, and we are supposed to make massive inferences as to society when “some of the men studied” do so? What would make more sense to “prove” this guy’s point would be to have topless women do job interviews or something and see how well men in varying countries respond to it.
Women sunbathe topless on public beaches all over Europe, and somehow all the men around them carry on with their lives without turning into drooling mindless beasts.
But then, it always seemed to me that a lot of (straight) mean in the US are seriously freaked out by their own erections. And then they blame women for their freak-outs. Sometimes they’ll go “OMG you gave me a boner! You must cover up so this never happens again!” and sometimes they’ll go “OMG you gave me a boner! Now you owe me sex!” Either way, though, they expect women to fix the “problem,” because God forbid men take any responsibility for themselves.
@Rusalka
“It’s not my fault! I’m not to blame! It is the Gypsy girl! The witch who sent this flame!”
This guy would be instantly thrown out of any naturist resort. Lotsa boobs, none of them being sexy. Lotsa cocks, same.
The Mr. loves him some boobs, but was never thrown out of the resort or a hot tub, and certainly wasn’t haunted for weeks. Although we did get a laugh about the woman who’d gotten rigid, completely hemispherical implants.(Not till after; we do not comment upon people’s bodies in front of them).
This guy needs a mental health counselor, not for Florence to put her boobs away.
@.45: Yeah, running the test with topless women in a professional setting might provide some useful data.
This is all simply a twisted perversion (as opposed to a conscious and creative perversion) brought on by, mainly, a simple lack of familiarity. A lack that has fixated such that it cannot be broken up by any simple means.
A good therapist could solve this. All it takes is learning that body parts are PARTS of PEOPLE very much like themselves.
What really amuses me about this is, none of these men have ever looked at any anthropology of different cultural groups. In many tribal groups the women are topless all the time especially in warm or tropical areas, and somehow the men can control themselves. Wearing shirts and bras is a modern globalization thing there. It is culturally relative.
This guy can be haunted by the memory of boobs for weeks? This sounds like a guy who spends so much time trying to repress his sexuality that he just makes it worse. Just let yourself have the thought and some alone time, sir; you will then be able to focus on things that are not boobs.
I know this is a little off topic, but if anyone is interested in saying whether male privilege exists or not and why or why not, please do this survey:
https://s.surveyplanet.com/k9b4zokl
Sorry for being off-topic!
@Acid
I don’t know acid, does it exist? where’s your baby’s daddy at. maybe he can tell you if it does.
I’ve been to events/environments where nudity is allowed, from highly sexualized to family-friendly. Even in the ones without some sort of behavioral policing, it turns out that the vast majority of men can and will behave themselves.
There is one kernel of truth hidden in all that nonsense: that in a culture where women’s bodies are highly sexually commodified, seeing certain parts of them unexpectedly can be distracting. Which wouldn’t be any worse than any other distraction, except that some people¹ have apparently decided that all men are mindless, violent rapebeasts with the attention span and personal agency of a toddler on crack²… and there are a small number of men have decided to take this to heart despite being offended by the very idea of it.
¹There are some lesbian-focused radfem schools of thought which say this explicitly, but despite the stereotype it’s not really a feminist thing; mostly it’s anti-feminists, who rarely say it explicitly but often strongly imply it.
²In case this is not obvious, I’m being hyperbolic.
So the obvious solution is – change the culture. Not at all easy, as there are entire industries who get all up in hackles when you do anything to make sex sell less, on top of the usual people who have things so ingrained in their worldview that anything which threatens their worldview must be violently resisted. And then there are people who actually do understand the concept but want women’s bodies to remain sexualized, because they want sex to remain private, dirty, and “special”, for their own fetishy reasons… And also we have so many other things on our plate right now… well, here in the US anyway, I’m sure there are at least a few other countries out there which could legalize nudity outright tomorrow if there was enough push for it.
@Elaine
One of the things that I love about “Hellfire” is that as Frollo insists “it’s not my fault,” his imagined chorus counters “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” “My fault, my fault, my great fault.”
He knows that he is lying to himself.
I do understand why many people, men and women, don’t want women to expose their breast in public. It’s a pretty well ingrained cultural trait in the Western world to sexualize women’s breast. For a random person a women bare chested who isn’t breastfeeding is pretty much exposing herself and I completely get that people don’t want to see random women exposing themselves for the same reason people don’t like receiving unsolicited dick picks (sure dick picks is taking it one step further but both events are similar).
Sure, a fashion event is probably the sort of place where you should expect people wearing clothes that are definitely playing if not outright breaking social conventions and taboos. I don’t think Florence Pugh has done anything explicitly wrong, but I do get the discomfort of many people toward it and I find it a bit hypocritical to act is if she didn’t purposefully broke a pretty basic social taboo.
That being said, the dude has been waaaay over playing his hand to the point of ridicule. Yes, you can perfectly and legitimately be offended by women going bare breast in daily life and consider this a case of indecent exposure, but his entire “boobs are super-sexual and men can’t help it being perverts” type of argument is a bit grotesque and a complete exaggeration and a certain obfuscation of the actual problem behind a bunch of pseudo-science. The man is clearly not confident enough to make an argument based on perfectly legitimate feelings and socially ingrained values and perception and instead tries to go for “it’s science” as it were a better avenue.
You know, I hope he’ll never hear of the movie “Kirikou and the sorceress”.
@Acid K.
I would love to take your survey, but I have to wash my hair.
Also, for reasons of power.
David wrote:
That’s a mispresentation of the “slavering beast theory” from the linked blog post.
It’s an analysis of rape culture. The point of the the blog author (who nowadays goes on social media by name Cliff Jerrison, he/him) is that sexual violence, specifically as committed by men against women, is implicitly or sometimes explicitly blamed on the perpetrators being not ordinary men. The analyzed idea here is that the men who commit rape are a distinct type, who also generally come off as unlikeable and obviously creepy in social settings. This stereotype of a rapist is called “slavering beast” in the blog post.
Based on this stereotype, you can always find grounds to defend an accused rapist you happen to personally like – because the reason you like him is probably because in your perception he’s a decent and likeable person with no obvious red flags. You can accept that rape is generally common, but if a particular accused man doesn’t appear in your perception to be a stereotypical rapist, then you can easily dismiss the accusation as false or highly suspect. At the same time, you can assume that women could avoid rape by simply being wary around obviously creepy men, while seeing no reason for women to be wary around “ordinary” men.
This is different from the idea that all men are easily sexually distracted. It may contradict the sometimes presented idea that ordinary men might lose control of themselves when sexually provoked, which supposedly leads to sexual violence. However, Morse is rather implying that ordinary men do control themselves and simply suffer discomfort around sexually provocative women, which is entirely compatible with the “slavering beast” stereotype. OTOH there’s also the idea that while ordinary men are not rapists, they might predictably or justifiably commit sexual a little harassment when provoked.
As noted in comments above, feminism rarely sees all men as dangerous to women. IMO this isn’t really common in rape culture either, and inasmuch it does occur, the conclusion is that women should only protect themselves in ways that do not inconvenience men in any way. This includes models where women’s vigilance is supposed to inconvenience the imaginary stereotypical rapist, but not any real individual men.
I think David relied on the wrong pervocracy post and meant to reference this one:
http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-myth-of-boner-werewolf.html
@Elaine
I feel like this should be a good rule for men (and people in general, I suppose) to follow: if you find yourself unironically agreeing with a Disney villain, stop and reconsider your life choices. But I suspect this Brandon dude will never reach that level of self-awareness.
@Elaine That song is honestly the most terrifying part of a disney movie. Definitely not kid friendly.
@Acid Yes, it exists
The idea that ordinary men can be worked up into an uncontrollable frenzy around women who tempt them is certainly a part of rape culture. That’s the whole idea of “she was asking for it” or “why did she go home with him if she didn’t want sex”. There’s also the idea that only creeps rape people, so that if your perfectly respectable friend is accused of rape, that harpy was obviously lying. Yes, the two ideas are contradictory, but the same misogynists generally do say both.
Brandon Morse probably doesn’t consider himself a slavering beast where boobs are concerned. Misogynist men like him pretend to make sweeping universal statements about the supposedly barbaric nature of men, but they don’t call for keeping men on 24/7 lockdown for the good of women or of society. What they really believe is that other men need controlled while they themselves are paragons of self-control, nobly keeping their impulses in check. Like the typical hero story among Christian evangelicals of remaining steadfast in the face of temptation.
Could just be me, but I’d really rather all those fat white guys trying to catch skin-cancer would put a shirt on. You know the ones: complaining about a woman doing what men do every day.
@ Ten Bears
Is that a Sabbo-Tabby kitten I see in your icon?