Author of the week: Florence Williams

last updated 8 January 2015

For years, Florence Williams never gave her breasts much thought, said William Porter in The Denver Post. Then the Colorado journalist became a mother and began breast-feeding. “I was wowed,” she says. “I felt like a mammal, and I don’t think we feel like mammals that often.” A report she read inspired her to research toxins in breast milk. Suddenly, she was a teenage boy: All she could think about was boobs. “The human breast is quite unique,” she says, citing a theme of her new book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. “That they’re encased in fat from puberty onward is really unusual. And there’s the question of whether they evolved as sexual signals for men, or do they serve the fitness of the woman and her child? It’s a fundamental debate.”

Another of Williams’s surprise findings is that breasts are bigger than ever, said Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com. Even putting aside the 300,000 women who undergo implant surgery every year, there’s been an increase in average breast size, which Williams attributes to U.S. dietary changes. Not that that trend necessarily makes American men the luckiest in history. “Plastic surgeons would like us to believe that there’s a universally preferred large breast, but the evidence just doesn’t bear that out,” Williams says. Still, she understands that such an obsession can be useful. “Breasts are filled with contradictions. The more we can understand their complexity and appreciate that complexity, the healthier we’ll be down the road.”