How Baby

I think evolutionary psychology is pretty neat, but BOY, can it be used to justify some stupid bullshit. Like this gem, from a reddit thread about why men are ‘hardwired’ to find certain kinds of breasts sexually attractive. Littered across that thread, like shrapnel from an explosion at the student newspaper opinion section, were a ton of people essentially taking their modern biases, fumbling backwards, and assuming that those biases were deeply rooted in the human brain as ‘natural’ just because they’re the dominant ideology today.

I’m not an expert myself, but surely there’s just as much likelihood that in an environment without modern medical care (where maternal death or failure to thrive was a significant risk!) that sagging breasts was actually a mark of reproductive fitness? That someone had already successfully borne and fed children, and therefore would be likely to survive bearing more? That a postpartum body is not an aberration, but a site of power and celebration?

It just drives me up the wall when people try to use our ‘innate nature’ to explain their own biases, like it’s not possible that our collective past is complex and surprising, and challenges their beliefs – especially when those beliefs are sexist, racist, homophobic, fatphobic, ableist, etc.