Life Isn't All Funbags And Games

I love my girlfriend, including her small breasts, which are nicely proportional to her small body. But, the sight of big breasts does more than distract me, it makes me reconsider everything with my girlfriend. Not being 16, I recognize that giving in to impulses to get close to big breasts will probably be far more complicated than it's worth. I guess I'm a victim of Playboy and the rest. Is there a way to dial this impulse down a notch or two?

--Breast Stressed

There’s nothing like trying very, very hard not to think of big breasts to get you doodling them in the margins of your invoices at work. And then your boss wants to know why all your zeroes have little dots inside them. “Uh…leaky pen?” Do you really think you’d be into small boobs if only the ones Playboy featured were a little less melon-like and a little more like two Red Hots on a wall? There’s actually a good chance a desire for big breasts predates Hugh Hefner by, oh, 10,000 to 1.8 million years or so. That’s when men evolved to go for the features they still go for today -- based on which women would be the healthiest, most fertile candidates for passing on their genes. Maybe that’s why some of the biggest honking hooters you’ll see are on a Paleolithic statue of a woman estimated to be roughly 250,000 years old. “Barbie--Manufactured by Mattel, Designed by Evolution” is a chapter in the new book on human behavior, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. In it, the authors, evolutionary psychologists Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, reference research that suggests women with big breasts are more fertile, and women with both big breasts and small waists are much more fertile. In fact, data from the study, led by Polish researcher Grazyna Jasienska, showed that women with the latter shape have about 30 percent higher levels of the reproductive hormone estradiol, which could mean these women would be “almost three times as likely to get pregnant as other women.” Unfortunately, being able to say “Evolution made me do it!” won’t get the elephant in the red satin push-up bra out of the room. I called Kanazawa to discuss your question, and he advised, “I think it’s more mature to recognize that there’s no perfect mate…and if she has 90 percent of what he wants, he’s doing better than most people.” Well, yes, but knowing what’s mature and being satisfied with what’s mature are two different things. The reality is, nobody spots somebody from across the room and wants to have sex with them because they look like they’d be kind to puppies. Of course, in society’s eyes, you’re shallow and horrible for caring about a woman’s breast size -- unless you’re one of those guys who finds big boobs vulgar and unattractive, in which case you have a “preference” for smaller ones. I’m guessing you wanted to be “better than that,” and to buy into the idea that physical attraction shouldn’t be so important -- and went on your first date with this woman as the person of higher consciousness you aspire to be instead of the hooterhound you are. Cutting back on your exposure to big boobage may help, but since you say a mere sighting makes you “reconsider everything,” you need to be honest with yourself about exactly how big a thing you have for bigguns. You can love your girlfriend’s beautiful mind, and appreciate “the little things,” but this isn’t going to end well if, for you, the cup is not just half-empty, but filled with wadded-up Kleenex.