• Im_old@lemmy.worldEnglish
    133·
    9 days ago

    I had to scroll back in my saved posts to a million years ago to resurrect this.

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      8 days ago

      That metaphor (breasts as fruit) transcends language though. Whatever you call fruits you’ll end up calling breasts. Here’s the song of Solomon which was semetic.

      I said, ‘I will go up to the palm tree; I will take hold of the boughs thereof.’ Now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples.

      Instead of viewing things like this etymologically, it’s better to see them as universal metaphors that transcend language and culture. Similar to light and darkness.

  • Majorllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
    842·
    9 days ago

    If y’all could please direct me to the thighs and calves galaxies I’ll be on my way. I enjoy boobs as do most humans, but I am a legs man.

  • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    42·
    9 days ago

    In German and Dutch it’s way worse: “Säugetier” and “zoogdier”. Both can roughly be translated to “sucking animals”. I was taught in school that it’s called that because babies suck on the mother’s breasts to be fed and this is a unique trait to mammals. So in conclusion, we all suck.

  • sik0fewl@lemmy.caEnglish
    40·
    9 days ago

    Ackshully, “galaxy” (or rather, “galaxias”) means “Milky Way” already, it’s just a translation. It was less ambiguous when the only galaxy we could see was the Milky lights that covered a lot of our sky.

    Of course, we realize there’s more than one galaxy now, so the meanings have diverged.

          • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            9 days ago

            May I suggest reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos? Or watch one of the TV shows.

            While your average human is about as smart as a brick, there are so many minds throughout history that were able to pull humanity out of our dark caves and into space.

            What we need, to survive as a species, is to nurture people, give them (proper) education, and more will come up.

            • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              I grew up on Sagan. I’m not saying we should accept anything the way it is or not take inspiration from our achievements, just that we should not be prideful or expect any greatness from anyone.

              We’re currently smarter than we’ve ever been in a lot of ways, but I find the smarter you are it only changes the kinds of mistakes you make.

              I do agree that humans increase in value the more you value them, and vice-versa. Society should be structured around maximising “human capital”, so to speak.

          • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            8 days ago

            My great aunt explained to me as a child in the 70s that the moon was round because gravity pulled it into a sphere. This woman was born around 1890, educated in a one-room schoolhouse and lived on a Civil War-era farm in bumfuck West Virginia.

            And then ya got what we have here today.

        • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          9 days ago

          Just looking at them, they appear fairly similar to nebulas within our own galaxy. It took sophisticated spectroscopic measurements to realize they’re actually much further away.

  • latenightnoir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    9 days ago

    I mean… I think we can all agree that boobs are at least universally non-threatening, even without counting the symbolisms of nourishment, nurturance, life, fertility, etc. At least I don’t think we’re at the point where hiding machine guns or hellish snakes in boobs is viable. … Right?

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    17·
    9 days ago

    We’re the only(?) species that have evolved them to become more than their basic function. Other species use colors and other features for mating signals, humans use shapes. Definitely wired to be interested in them.

    • the_weez@midwest.socialEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      Hold up, are other hominids interested in boobs? Any other mammal? Any non mammals into boobs? How much tiddy science have we really done here? I need tiddy facts.

      • Uli@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        19·
        9 days ago

        This might be pseudoscience I got taught 20 years ago, but I have been under the impression that human evolution of breasts as a secondary sexual characteristic has to do with the shift to becoming bipedal. Like a lot of animals, early hominids would see the rear end of a fellow hominid and know this as a trigger for copulation. But when homo erectus started standing upright, butts weren’t so universally erotic anymore. They had a whole back and head above them now. Breasts didn’t need to be very large to fill their function, but an increase in size gave them a curvy appearance similar to a set of butt cheeks. And early humans were like, yeah, I think that’s right, and selected for increased (or at least variable) breast size.

        • the_weez@midwest.socialEnglish
          15·
          9 days ago

          Listen, I’m not trying to refute anything here. I’m just saying that some extra tiddy experiments are probably required in order to fully understand this phenomena. I know that not everyone is cut out for this kind of thing, so I’m willing to take one for the team here. I just need a little funding and a steady supply of consenting tiddy owners.

              • KingJalopy @lemm.eeEnglish
                5·
                9 days ago

                I’m 42, I have at least several hours worth of experience across many decades. Hopefully that’s adequate? I have references.

                • the_weez@midwest.socialEnglish
                  3·
                  9 days ago

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        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          It’s probably part of it, but there’s definitely also other stuff like the fact that human breasts are always prominent, unlike most other animals where the sexual display stuff waxes and wanes with them being fertile.

          The best hypothesis i’m aware of is that human sexuality is just really strange and kinda… slutty… (this applies to everyone). Like it seems that our default way of going about things before civilization fucked it up was to just kinda have fun with anyone who caught our fancy and reciprocated the feelings, so our dicks evolved to scoop out sperm and tits evolved to always be on display so no one can tell if you’re fertile or not, and presumably same thing with us having no mating season to speak of.

          Just try to be attractive so as many people as possible will want to bang you, and maybe if you’re lucky you can even find someone who likes you enough that they actively avoid banging others, which is pretty damn sweet because you know that kid will be yours. But in the end it doesn’t really matter whose kid is whose, because everyone will help raise them.

        • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.eeEnglish
          12·
          9 days ago

          Boobs don’t need to be large? Have you seen cow udders? Or a wet nurses tits? A lot of women cannot produce enough milk so they used to have a wet nurse, which is basically rent-a-tits.

          • Uli@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            4·
            9 days ago

            Oh my. Lots to dig into here.

            Let’s start with breast size. No, breasts don’t need to be big to produce adequate milk. Many women with small breasts have breast tissue that is dense with gland structure, meaning they have plenty of milk production capabilities.

            About 1 - 4% of women do struggle to provide enough milk for their offspring, but this is typically a hormonal issue that has less to do with breast size and more to do with ovaries. As long as the mother’s breasts increase by about a cup size during pregnancy, it is expected they will have adequate milk production.

            Here’s a source on the topic:

            https://www.didymos.de/en/blog/small-breasts-no-milk/?srsltid=AfmBOoqepv0oQNz0TGIpPESnwNiIT2-eVP7aY7a_GHCI2Tn29O19FVMD

            Yes, wet nurses used to be prevalent. And yes, they used to be hired when mothers could not produce enough milk on their own (that 1 - 4%). But childbirth used to be a lot more dangerous, so a major role of wet nurses was to provide for the infant when the mother died during childbirth.

            But the primary use of wet nurses was by the upper class. Not because the mother required help producing milk but because such activities were seen as lower class. They would leave it to the wet nurse to feed the baby which also allowed them to stop lactating sooner and return to a fertile state where they could produce more children sooner.

            It’s also interesting you bring up dairy cows because they are a prime counter-example to your point. Over many generations, we bred and selected for dairy cows with large udders for increased milk production. They didn’t produce such huge volumes of milk until we started breeding them to do so. So, they are a good example showing that animals in nature do not need large breasts to produce an adequate volume of milk, but breeding for larger breasts can increase the milk production to excessive levels. And cause back problems.

      • stray@pawb.socialEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        I’m not aware of any other species sexually selecting for mammary size. Some birds do a puffy chest thing.

        It might be a learned association rather than anything instinctive about tiddies. There’s this one study where they gave rats a backpack fetish, but it has a sad ending because then they murdered all the rats. They did phrase the murder like they were doing a Satanic ritual though, and that kind of took some of the murdery edge off it for me.

        I’ve been looking forward to like 20 years from now when all the incels will be into girls with too many fingers.

      • pressanykeynow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        9 days ago

        Tiddy loving might be a cultural thing. Human species that don’t need clothes care little for the boobs. Though they live south, so either they are used to it or it might be Neanderthal(or other varieties) genes that some of us inherited. We certainly are boob fetishists among the mammals.

        • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          There’s only one extant human species and we don’t know anything about soft tissue in extinct species of humans

  • pocopene@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    9 days ago

    Just wait till you know the etymology of mastodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon

    Edit to save a click: "A mastodon, (from Ancient Greek μαστός (mastós), meaning “breast, and ὀδούς (odoús) “tooth”)”

    Edit 2: the “mast” in “mastodon” is the same one as in “mastectomy”