I have a favorite quote from Andrew Greeley-something to the effect that
"Man is a symbol-creating animal, and he manages his thinking by moving
symbols around in his mind."

Why is the areola a different color from the rest of the breast, someone
asked. Some bring up the idea of it's being a visual target for the baby.
But baby's seem to be suided more by feel when they are learning, and are
quite a bit older before their desire to nurse might be triggered by the
sight of the breast. Someone else quoted Desmond Morris about the most
logical answer being a sexual symbol to the male.

I would like to propose that for eons before our culture was so full of
manmade symbols, many people were familiar with natural symbols found in
the agricultural world. There was a time when men, the first to be
educated to read and write, were not yet producing written symbols that
may have reflected their own interests! (I doubt the bull gets "turned
on" by the cow's teats. Nature has provided phermones. Likewise, the male
platypus mates despite the female's lack of nipples.)

It occurred to me that the delivery system for milk is also species
specific, like the milk itself, even though the glandular tissue of any
species is practically undistinguishable from that of any other species
when placed under the microscope. Sea mammals have a very forceful milk
ejection reflex because milk transfer must take place quickly while
swimming. The platypus mom oozes milk onto her front, because her young
have bills, and couldn't use nipples if she had them. The bovine calf,
and the goat kid and the colt, for instance, have longer palates than
human or any anthropoid newborns, so nature, in her wisdom, formed the
teat as part of the anatomy of those mother animals.

Perhaps nature has made the areola a different color to indicate to women
that there is something useful and important about it. Young girls in an
agricultural society where milking and stripping of milk from teats of
dairy animals was an everyday occurrence, or perhaps even their duty,
also routinely saw mothers handling their breasts as feeding tools,
probably including some hand expressing

Maybe, without being surrounded by man-made symbols (including hollow
manufactured symbols designed to feed babies, or dolls), just maybe,
those young women were first drawn by the coloring of their areola to
think of it as a body part with a practical use, that of helping milk
emerge from the nipple!

The areola, a body part with a practical use! What a concept for us to
help 21st century females re-learn, precisely because we have all grown
up learning from the man-made symbols with which we are surrounded.

Jean
**********
K. Jean Cotterman RNC, IBCLC
Dayton, OH USA

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