These are my replies to the long post about huge long breasts:

I've
>seen video(s) or photos of women of other cultures grasping behind the
>nipple, stretching their subareolar tissue upward/forward for an inch or
>two, with the heavy breast tugging below it.

Not sure what you mean here.  I've never seen anyone do this.  Women in Mali
don't do anything to prepare their breasts for breastfeeding.

>Is it just the difference in clothing (lack of bra/support) all of their
>reproductive life that results in this?

They don't do it on purpose, I'm sure of that.  Malian women vary greatly in
height, and many are over 6'.  They are also often quite well padded as
adults.  Not HUGE obesity,  but plenty well-nourished.  Some women have just
huge breasts, but that's not the case in the women with the 3-4' long
breasts.  These women have relatively "normal" looking breasts, say a D cup
size, but the "breast" is at the end of a long ropy length of skin.  I
myself often wondered how in the world the blood vessles grew that long.
Women *do* wear bras in Mali, probably half the time, and it is quite the
amazing thing to watch a women put one of these breasts into a bra cup, just
sort of accordion-folding the long ropy part, and then tucking the "breast"
itself in on top.

Most women with breasts like this were older, as in late 40s, perhaps, had
had many many many pregnancies, births, lactations.  I think that the main
forces in Mali that conspire to give women droopy, flattened breasts are (1)
they wear their babies tied to their backs with a long piece of cloth, which
is overlapped and knotted TIGHT across the tops of their breasts.  Babies
aren't on their moms' backs all the time, but at least several hours every
day. (2) the women do a lot of hard labor that involves repeated up and down
motions of the upper body, for pounding millet mostly (several hours every
day), but also chopping firewood, and hoeing in the fields -- that's got to
stretch that skin tissue, especially if the mother is not wearing a bra (3)
they often do not wear a bra.  They also tend to fluctuate a lot in terms of
their weight, depending on how much money they have, how good the rains were
that year, and therefore the crops, how sick they've been with malaria, etc.
So some of that extra skin may come from getting stretched out during the
good times, and then losing weight during the bad times.

I never saw anyone (in Mali, or anywhere else) with the huge nipples I've
read described on LactNet.  Can't say I noticed *any* particular variation
around my own norm of pencil-eraser sized-nipples.  Never saw anything
different enough to notice, anyway.


She wrote in response to the above post:
>>Amazing! Not to mention the nerves, the lymphatics and probably the
>>ducts, for certainly the lobular tissue is still up near the chest wall
>>and axilla and not at the end of this 3-4' long "stalk"?


To which I replied:
Well, it certainly looked like a "breast" at the end of the stalk -- i.e.,
that the fat and glandular tissue was in its normal place right behind the
nipple and areola.  I don't really see how the milk could be made up on the
chest and sucked/ejected all the way down to the breast.

Kathy Dettwyler

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