But when it comes to the obsession with breasts, humans are alone. Can you picture the breasts of a dog? Not the nipple, the breast shape. How about a cat? horse? ape? whale? Can’t picture them? Exactly! Human breasts are huge compared to all other mammals. Other mammal udders do swell up when nursing, especially cows and pigs, etc., but then they completely retract to a flat belly when unused, unlike us humans with perpetually protruding breasts.

And by the way, why exactly is a baby-feeding organ considered sexually attractive? Why aren’t we attracted to a large uterus? Or bulging ovaries? Or a voluminous birth canal? Or a heaving pair of testicles?

And what’s up with asses? Useful for running and sitting, but what do they have to do with reproduction?

Or for that matter, why is a peahen turned on by a peacock’s bright colorful long sexy tail? Why is a female frog wooed by the male’s deep croaking bulging neck? Why is the male baboon aroused by the female’s inflamed red butt? This is just nature having fun with runaway sexual selection: some random trait that somehow fell into fashion as a sexual signal, then that trait and the lust for it became more and more exaggerated over the generations. Apparently human’s quirky runaway sexual signal is hemispherical pairs: tits and ass.

Do you notice which body parts have the most English synonyms?

To accentuate their hemispherical pairs, women wear bras, cutlets, lift tape, and shapewear (formerly control-top pantyhose, girdles, corsets, bustles, and bum-rolls), and they get boob jobs and butt lifts. Even minimizer bras and the fun-size A cup still show a rounded shape, so it is more about the shape than the size. And both men and women work out, diet, and ask, “Do these jeans make my butt look good?”

But what about the attractiveness of ripped abs, luscious hair, a devilish smile, or a large bank account? Yes, of course, there are many, many sexual attractors, and many, many exceptions. (For a complete list, see the whole internet.) But from the outside perspective of our alien abductors, these preferences seem much more varied by culture, era, and individual tastes. To them, the most common human obsession happens to make the least logical sense: hemispherical pairs.

What’s interesting is that these so-called sexual signals are revered even when sex is not on the table. (Ahem, I meant figuratively!) Women show off their hemispheres even if they don’t want a mate and are just meeting their girlfriends for brunch. They’ll compliment each other’s sexual attractiveness even if they are heterosexual, and they often feel inferior to other women who are more attractive. And if a woman loses her breast to cancer, her identity as a woman is threatened, even if she already has fully grown children and is long retired from breastfeeding.

Sexist Much?

“But why aren’t you talking about men?” I don’t know. Why are men’s sexual signals so much less visual than women’s? Sure, muscles and fitness are hot, but most men are neither muscular nor fit, while most women of all sizes have clearly visible hemispherical pairs. And penis size? Sure, some people take that seriously, but it’s normally not seen until mating is already underway, and really it’s more of a running joke than a serious criterion. If humans were like birds, men would be the ones with brightly colored head plumage and tail feathers. But apparently humans evolved the opposite of birds, where women have most of the visual signals. Not even our aliens owners know why.

And let’s be honest: the female brain is way more sophisticated than the simple male brain:

When measuring attraction, women consider so many more variables than men do, and with much more personal preference: e.g., some women would gladly trade looks for wealth while others absolutely would not. Men, however, notice looks first, and are not likely to trade looks for any other attributes. So it stands to reason that aliens observe men’s common preferences much more easily than women’s varied preferences.

Sexy vs. Beauty vs. Cutie

Sexiness, beauty, and cuteness are separate things, right?

Cuteness is why we don’t eat babies. Evolution programmed us with a safety mechanism: when we see big eyes, big foreheads, small noses, and small chins, we feel an urge to take care of them and not enjoy them as a delicious snack (even though they are super easy to hunt).

Sexiness is how evolution programmed us to select mates who are fertile, healthy, and have good genes. Good genes make symmetric faces, which we find attractive. Muscles, broad shoulders, and a long penis signal that a man is sexually mature, while breasts and hips signal a woman is sexually fertile. Smooth, unblemished skin, cleanliness, smelling nice, and youthfulness all correlate with good health.

And Beauty is . . . well, the same, but different. I mean, they’re different, right? But no matter how much we try to explain this our alien masters, we mostly use the same criteria for both beautiful people and sexy people. For that matter, we describe them as cute too: A beautiful/sexy woman with large eyes and small chin is “cute”, and a man may be “cute” and have a “boyish charm”.

So it seems evolution was pretty lazy in giving us different instincts for different purposes. Cuteness, beauty, and sexiness all got mashed together, and it’s up to culture to sort them out.

If physical attraction is evolution’s way of making us make more humans, why do we care about it so much in all of the relationships where our goal is zero babies? Why can’t we turn off that instinct and just choose a good boyfriend/girlfriend the same way we choose a good espresso machine? Even when people say it’s the beauty on the inside that counts, what they really mean is to put less weight on external beauty, because it’s impossible to not care at all whether someone is gorgeous or hideous. Superficiality is hard-wired into our genes.

Good = Bad = Good

When we explain human sexuality to our alien owners, we give them a clear message that sex is good . . . and bad . . . and good.

Adolescent owners of newly emerged body parts feel a peer pressure to start racking up sexual experience points. Even in adulthood, people who fail to meet a certain sex quota every year are mocked and outcast as virgin nerd dweebs. So sex has a social value.

But society also says sex is shameful and should be kept secret. And people who exceed their sex quota are mocked and outcast as sluts (mostly women, which is another issue).

Our alien observers cannot make sense of this perplexing contradiction. It probably evolved like this:

Clearly sex has both biological and cultural drivers. Evolution programmed a core sex drive, then our cultures amplify that to varying degrees and in varying ways.

“And they wash away their natural body musk, and replace it with musks from other animals.”

No joke: many perfumes use[d] secretions from beaver butts (castoreum), deer butts (musk), sperm whale butts (ambergris), and other animals. The strange thing is that research shows a little bit of natural human stink is actually arousing, but somehow people got it in their heads that humans smell gross while beaver butts smell sexy. Culture has mutinied against nature.