I’m as much of a fan of bosoms as anyone. Not the rock-my-soul Abrahamic kind, you understand, the other kind. But my titular fandom is tested by what seems to be daily Facebook “friend” invitations from amply-endowed young women (or bots) whose sole claim to my friendship appears to be the said endowments. Nothing else: no schools to show, no places, no jobs, no other information, just big tits. Here’s one that popped up a couple of days ago:

Which isn’t to say this ladybot doesn’t have anything else to offer, titillating or not. I’m reminded of an interview with the Bolivian-English actress Raquel Welch (née Tejada), she of One Million Years B.C. She said she was a skinny, scrawny kid who loved dancing and acting but couldn’t get any decent roles until her mid-teens when, as she put it, “the equipment arrived.” Everything changed, and next thing she was miniaturized, boobs and all, in Fantastic Voyage, leading to her three-spoken-lines-deerskin-bikini role in One Million Years. (I still have a crush on her, you understand, she was just a lovely, genuine person by all I’ve read and seen.) (For the record, I hate the word “boob.” Can’t understand how it got in here.)

Not to boast, but at 80, I think I’ve seen ‘em all: big, small, high, low, firm, soft, creamy white, copper brown, artificially added-to and subtracted-from, not forgetting none (post-mastectomy). And I can truly say, they’re all great in my memory. Breasts make me happy. I’ve never seen a pair that didn’t make my heart, among other organs, stir a little with pleasure.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to nipples, and specifically, Why do men have nipples? The obvious response is, “Why not?” They’re harmless, somewhat erogenous, interesting even. The late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a long essay on this, in which he also discussed the anatomical equivalence of the penis and clitoris* under the title “Tits and Clits.” (Which his editor at Nature nixed.) As Gould explained, we men have nipples because they develop in the womb before embryos have identified as male or female, so by the time any anatomical differences kick in, nipples have already developed. Another way of looking at it is that we all started out female, so male nipples are left over from that time. (To be clear, sex is actually determined at fertilization by the 23rd pair of chromosomes, either XX = female or XY = male, but it takes about 16 weeks for any differences to be visible by ultrasound.)

* The difference between a clitoris and a golf ball, I’m told, is that most men will spend ten minutes looking for a golf ball.

Twenty years ago, before it became woke, Scientific American was a worthy and sensible magazine. In response to the “male nipples” question, the editors deferred to Gould’s “spandrel” theory, writing, “…we should not immediately assume that every trait has an adaptive explanation. Just as the spandrels of St. Mark’s domed cathedral in Venice are simply an architectural consequence of the meeting of a vaulted ceiling with its supporting pillars, the presence of nipples in male mammals is a genetic architectural by-product of nipples in females. So, why do men have nipples? Because females do.”

Glad I’ve got that off my chest.