Down Mammary Lane

22Apr08

I got this ppt today from a friend with the subject “Increase your life span” and the ppt had a lot of beautiful women doing a nice strip at ease for me and exposing their gravity-defying assets. The theory which he put forth is you can elongate your life span by 10 minutes if you stare at the bosoms of the fairer sex and went on to suggest that you should indulge in this activity on a daily basis. Caveat: Only watchy. No touchy-touchy.

I don’t know whether this is true or not but I am all for life-enhancing activities and till such time there is a Life Extension program or something similar as in Ubik, my dear fellow men indulge. Before writing this post I was contemplating whether to write this post mainly because I live in a society where repressed sexuality is the order of the day and any open talk of this sort is blasphemous. I know many of my female friends (see how cleverly I avoided the term girl friends) and readers will be shocked at my post (i.e if at all they read it ) and there will be a lot of moral fatwas issued against me. I say goddamn, goddamn!

I was watching this amazing movie Cashback yesterday by Sean Ellis which is about a painter who loves to paint the beautiful female form with all its contours, curves, lines and indentations. I realized how honestly the Europeans can depict their love about two of the most beautiful and natural things in a near perfect way. Watch Fellini’s Amarcord or City of Women. Watch The Dreamers by Bernardo Bertolucci. These are masterpieces in their own right but the depiction of the female: pristine, uninhibited and unadulterated is what I am talking about.

I have always envied painters because of their ability to represent the female nude beautifully on canvas. A very good friend of mine is one heck of a painter or rather sketcher as he calls himself. He makes amazing nudes and I am not talking here as a pervert but as someone who appreciates art and the female body.

Coming back to the topic of the bosoms.

The importance of breasts through ages can be understood from the following:

When Heracles was a baby his father, Zeus decided to let the infant Heracles suckle on his divine wife Hera’s milk when she was asleep, an act which would endow the baby with godlike qualities. When Hera woke up and realized that she was breastfeeding an unknown infant, she pushed him away and the spurting milk became… the Milky Way.

Carolus Linnaeus’s coined the term Mammalia, from the Latin mammae (milk-secreting organs), even though milk secretion is a characteristic of only half the human race.

Eugene Delacroix’s bare-breasted portrait of “Liberty Leading the People“ demonstrates the breast’s potential as a political symbol which alas is forgotten in the times of the Wonderbra and Victoria and her secrets.

These are proof of the way we have looked at the female breasts through the ages.

If you are a male above 18 and you haven’t seen Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s La dolce vita, my dear friend you have wasted a lifetime. Forget about above 18…If you are male and you haven’t seen Anita Ekberg you have wasted a lifetime. Thankfully due to my love for Italian Neo-realist films (La Dolce Vita isn’t neo-realism though) that I came across this Goddess of a Swede. The moment when she goes and gets drenched in the fountain of Trevi is one moment that I want to get frozen for eternity.

Our own Raj Kapoor, who knew the thin line between sensuality and titillation and often crossed it, after making Satyam Shivam Sundaram famously commented that people will go to see Zeenat’s tits and come back remembering the movie. That it is he who created the archetype of a white saree clad semi nude female getting drenched under a waterfall or rain is a credit to the genius of the man.

I can go on a limb and say 99% males are closet breast worshippers. The rest 1% are breast worshippers.

People like Russ Mayer made a career out of well endowed actresses. Russ who once was a photographer with Playboy went on to make seminal cult movies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Vixen! and Up! never ever underestimating the importance of the female form (read breasts).Once when participating in a panel discussion at Yale University, he was confronted by an angry woman who accused him of being “nothing but a breast man.” His immediate reply: “That’s only the half of it.” J

Which reminds me of Marilyn Yalom’s “History of the Breast”

and an old limerick:

There once was a woman who was quite begat. She had three babies named Nat, Pat, and Tat.

She said it was fun in the breeding, but found it was hell in the feeding when she saw there was no tit for Tat.

N.B: I don’t know why I wrote this post. May be because I was entirely jobless today or may be because I wanted you to appreciate the twin wonders of nature. Whether you liked it or not it was the breast I could do.

Suggested reading:

· Wikipedia

· Marilyn Yalom’s “History of the Breast”

Filed under: Cinema, Fun, Life, Movies, Scandal   |  6 Comments
Tags: Adult, Amarcord, Anita Ekberg, Arbit, Art, Bernardo Bertolucci, Bosom, Breasts, Carolus Linnaeus, Cinema, City of Women, Crap, Eugene Delacroix, Eva Green, Fellini, Fountain of Trevi, Greek Mythology, Humor, La dolce vita, Liberty, Liberty Leading the People, Life, Life Extension, Mammal, Mammaries, Marilyn Yalom, Milky Way, Movies, Mythology, nude, nude painting, Philip K. Dick, Raj Kapoor, Russ Mayer, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Scandal, strip, Taxonomy, The Dreamers, Tit for Tat, Tits, Ubik, Zeenat Aman