JUST about every man has some sort of fascination with women's breasts. Some wax poetic about small ones, while for others, larger is better. Some men have such a fascination that they will encourage and even pay hundreds of thousands on implants for their women; others have baby envy when their women give birth, competing with the suckling baby for breast-attention.

The attention isn't seen as normal for some experts, who quote theories like Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex when explaining the man-breast infatuation.



Could it be that a boy's feelings of desire for his mother, repressed since childhood, causes him to later associate the sucking of a woman's breast to getting close to his mother?

"I think there's a link definitely, with breast-envy, irrational attachment to a woman's breasts and irrational love of breasts to some sort of complex," US psychology doctorate student Carey White said. "From what I''ve seen in some studies and from anecdotal evidence, men who are not breastfed and those who were; men who had a close attachment to their mothers and those who weren't were usually the ones with a deep attachment problems when it comes to breasts. At each end of the spectrum you have those who would do anything to have a woman with bigger breasts; those who have problems with new babies staking claim to their territories, and those who can't go to bed at nights without a breast as their cushion."


Sexologist Shelly-Ann Weeks, said though that for most men, "[when they are] looking at a woman's breasts they are not thinking about their mothers."

"I think it has more to do with how the breasts look — more of a sexual thing — and some men are obsessed with it for no reason at all — maybe because they think that it's a manly thing to do," she said. "They think breasts are great, and they look nice, and it makes them feel happy when they play with them."

While also debunking the Freudian theory, a Kingston-based breast specialist said the reality is that the breasts are part of the sexual apparatus.

"The most important thing women have breasts for is sexual reasons — not breast feeding," he argued.


The specialist, who has done extensive research on the human breasts, said humans are the only ones with breasts remaining full outside of pregnancy.

"The others have nipples but they don't have breasts," he said, also explaining that the number of nerve endings in the nipple makes it part of the erogenous zone.


"One could argue that men like breasts because women like breasts. If you are in a relationship with a woman the key to sexual pleasure is to address all the erogenous zones. And therefore men will pay attention to that because I guess they have to. Now the other side of it as to why men like breasts — you could look at it from a primitive point of view. An ancient man who was trying to have kids would look at the things that would signal to him that the woman would have healthy children. These were full breasts and wide hips. And so you find that men have evolved to be attracted to those things," he said.