August 2009 Archives

From as far back as I can remember I have always loved the beach.

My earliest memories of the beach date back to when our dear mother (who hated the beach) would take me and my younger sister on the train to Aspendale and we would spend the day on the beach.

Of course, as I got older I began to spend more and more of my time at the beach noticing that some of the people there had breasts and I liked looking at them. I guess for most young guys, this is where we learn most about womens' bodies. Now in my fifties, I still can't go to the beach without some sense of anticipation of what delightful sights I might present themselves.

So it's not surprising that one night I typed the words "I love the beach" into my search engine. I was only a little surprised to find that there is a website with exactly that name. (I'm not going to put the link here because the site contains gratuitous nudity. Breaststories would have to have a really good reason to link to such a site. This is not a moral position, it's just that breaststories is not an avenue for people to find pornography. There are plenty of ways you can do that without me providing another one.)

This (I love the beach) site contains hundreds of pics and movies of topless or naked women at the beach without their knowledge. I do have serious qualms about that. Not enough however to stop me from browsing through the site and even paying for a short duration membership to browse more than the brief free tour.

Moral qualms aside, this is an interesting site. If it were conducted with an appropriate ethics analysis and approval from a reputable research institution (which would be very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain) it would make an excellent ethnographic study.

If you could show it to young adolescent boys, and get them to take it seriously, I believe it could change their lives. (Having said that, the hard part here would be to get them to take it seriously.) I doubt the operators of the site have given it more than a scant thought, but the question it raises is "what would the world be like if women went top free as often as men did?"

As I said in my recent post "Antecedents" a great deal of the attraction breasts have for us guys is their mystique. We seem them bouncing around under tops, we see their cleavage and occasionally we see a nipple revealed. But rarely do we get to see them unadorned in any sort of normal environment.

The overwhelming feeling I had viewing some of the movies on this site was "this is nice." Just seeing women walking around talking and playing games with bare breasts, without all of the sexual overtones we usually associate with bare breasts was nice.

Perhaps if we lived in a world like that, we could learn to accept breasts for what they are - just another, albeit nice, part of the body.

Links:

Topfree Equal Rights Association (Canada)

Go Topless

Breast Feeding Mum Plans Protest

From time to time I come back to this topic - where in our transition from boys to men did we become so fascinated with breasts.

Still after 35 years together, my partner still wonders why I am so fascinated with breasts.

We were talking about this again the other day when I remembered what it was like going through early puberty. All these people (ie girls) who used to be more or less just other friends started developing into women. The most obvious external sign of this change was their development of breasts. Even as a father of four (now all adult) daughters, I can have no real idea what this is like for a woman. I can imagine its a bit exciting. Growing up is.

More to my point here is that I do know what it was like as an observer. One the one hand it's fascinating. I would have liked to have known what it was like. What does it feel like? What is it like wearing a bra? How does a bra work? What are all the different types of bras for? Do you feel sexy having breasts? Do you like to show them off? All of a sudden you are starting wear interesting things under your tops - things I now know the names of but then did not. Things like chamisoles.

All this is interesting for an observer, but you know you are not allowed to ask. So you peek. You do want to know what your erstwhile friend's breasts look like but you are not allowed to see them. They become a secret part of a woman's world and they become something that creates a barrier between girls and boys.

I do wonder if our fascination has something to do with wanting to break this barrier down. It doesn't operate at a conscious level but I really do think it's there.