The Universe Is Vast and Apparently Has Tits
Somewhere in a concept artist’s folder is a creature that evolved beneath the frozen crust of a planet without sunlight. She communicates through magnetic fields. Her skeleton is made of something we haven’t named. Her species reproduces by leaving mineral deposits in a communal trench.
She has breasts.
I keep returning to this because I think it contains an explanation for something larger, although every time I try to extract that explanation, I end up staring at a lizard in a bikini.
Why do we keep putting mammalian teats on anything remotely female in science fiction?
The obvious answer is that people like breasts. I accept this finding. Excellent work, everyone. But it doesn’t quite explain why the habit survives contact with creatures for whom breasts imply an entire biological system the creator otherwise appears to have forgotten.
What is the robot nursing?
The question sounds juvenile until you realize someone designed the robot, approved the robot, modeled the robot, textured the robot, and put the robot on the promotional artwork. At several points in that process, people had opportunities to consider what the breasts were doing.
Presumably, they were doing their job.
That job just wasn’t lactation.
Breasts in creature design can function as a label: this one is female. A viewer can read the label immediately, even when everything surrounding it is scales, steel, or luminous alien jelly.
This is useful shorthand. It is also a peculiar admission. We have transported the audience across twelve thousand light-years, but apparently we cannot trust them to meet a woman without familiar chest geometry.
A creature can have six arms and a mouth that opens sideways. Give her breasts and the uncertainty becomes manageable. She’s a lady. We know what to do with that information.
Or we think we do.
Because “female,” “woman,” “feminine,” “mother,” and “sexually attractive to a human observer” are different things. The design folds them into one shape and moves on. Even among humans, breasts are hardly a universal or exclusive test of womanhood. Applied to a creature that buds from a wall, the shortcut starts to look less like biology and more like an interface.
The audience recognizes the icon. No onboarding required.
I suspect that recognition explains more than horniness alone.
Horniness is certainly in the room. It has a visitor badge and knows the art director. But the broader impulse seems to be our desire to make the unfamiliar arrive with something familiar attached.
We want alienness at a tolerable dose.
Enough strangeness to feel discovery. Enough familiarity to know where attraction, sympathy, and romance are supposed to go. A radically different body might ask us to learn what its gestures mean. A familiar body painted blue lets us get straight to the flirting.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Sometimes the blue space woman exists because somebody wanted to draw a blue space woman. Pleasure is a perfectly serviceable artistic motive. I don’t need every illustrated nipple accompanied by a dissertation on evolutionary history.
What interests me is how easily a preference starts impersonating an inevitability.
The male creature gets to look like the species. The female creature gets to look like a human woman wearing selected features of the species.
Imagine two stone people. One is a magnificent heap of fractured granite. The other has a waist, smooth thighs, and two carefully rounded boulders. The first design explores what a person made of rock might be. The second seems worried we might forget which rock we’re allowed to find attractive.
Once I notice that asymmetry, I start seeing the breasts differently. They become evidence of where the imagination stopped negotiating.
We reconsidered the skeleton. We reconsidered the face. We gave the species a civilization that remembers events backward.
Then we reached the woman and restored the factory settings.
There are interesting exceptions available even inside this habit. A robot might have breasts because its manufacturer designed it to satisfy human expectations. That could tell us something about the manufacturer, the customers, or the robot’s feelings about its assigned body. An alien might adopt a human silhouette deliberately. Familiar anatomy can become part of the story.
But those explanations require the fiction to notice what it has done.
Without that attention, the design simply carries our assumptions into space and calls them extraterrestrial.
I think that is what keeps catching at me. Science fiction offers an opportunity to encounter life that does not organize itself around us. Yet we keep furnishing the encounter with reassuring evidence that our tastes still matter. Even here, beneath another sun, someone has evolved to look good on our posters.
There’s something funny about that. Something almost tender, too. The species dreaming of contact keeps packing its own comforts.
I started with the question of why the insect queen has breasts. I thought the answer would be some combination of sex, marketing, and lazy design. Those explanations still work.
But now I’m wondering how much unfamiliarity I actually want from an alien. How long I would stay interested in a creature whose body gave me no easy clues about its identity, intentions, or desires. Whether I would accept having to learn.
I’d like to think so.
The concept artist has sent over a revision. She has antennae now.