Why are we attracted to body parts?

I think about this sometimes. The answer, of course, is hormones. But it still seems so weird.

It’s weird that you can be attracted not just to a physical person, but to a piece of flesh. To a calf. A neck muscle. A pec. A breast. A back. Even if that body part is clothed. You can even be turned on by just a hairstyle.

What prompts this is that on my way back from lunch just now, I was noticing breasts. Not in a lascivious way; I was just noticing them. Sometimes you walk into an elevator and there’s a woman in there and you can’t help but notice the woman’s breasts before you notice anyone or anything else in the elevator. You quickly look away and feel embarrassed and wish you could apologize. This happened to me on way out of the building. Later, outside, I noticed a woman’s breasts again, and I felt embarrassed. But how can you not notice? They’re these two protruding lumps of flesh. They’re just… there. Almost looking back at you. But the fascination they create is out of proportion to their being mere lumps of flesh.

Sometimes I think about my feelings. I try to “see around” them. If you say or look at a particular word over and over again, like “yogurt” (yogurt. yogurt. yogurt. yogurt.), the word loses any sort of meaning and degenerates into a series of random sounds or letters.

A similar thing can happen with feelings. I might be sitting on the subway one day, see a guy in a t-shirt sitting across from me, and feel attracted to his arm. There’s just something about his arm that turns me on – perhaps the way the guy is displaying it, perhaps the tendons on the arm, perhaps the arm’s skin tone or the arrangement of the arm hair, perhaps the way the color contrasts with the t-shirt, perhaps the way the rest of the arm disappears tantalizingly up the shirtsleeve. I keep looking at the arm – surreptitiously – and as I stare, the arm eventually devolves into a random shape of flesh with no accompanying context. I start to wonder why we’re attracted beyond all proportion to a lump of flesh of a particular shape. I still find myself attracted to the arm, but now these other thoughts and concepts have become mingled in with it, competing for my attention and complicating what had been a nice simple attraction.

Why are people who are attracted to guys attracted to their muscles? They’re just muscles. Or tendons. Flesh. Shapes. I don’t get why I feel this way.

I wish there were some way to quantify this attraction. I wish there were some device that could detect and measure tiny particles as they pass invisibly from the guy’s right arm to my eyes.

And why is it our eyes that notice these things? Why, if an attractive guy walks past me on the street, might I have a strong desire to turn my head and keep training my eyes on him? Why are we so visual? The reason we’re primarily attracted to someone by sight instead of by smell, taste, hearing or touch is that our sense of sight works at farther distances than the other four senses. But it still seems odd, when you really think about it. You physically turn your head, crane your neck because you find someone attractive. There’s no inherent connection between these two things. The only reason it happens is because that’s the way we human beings are put together.

It seems weird, though. Light bounces off someone’s body and travels to your eyes; your optic nerves send data along an electrical pathway to some primeval part of your brain, and thence to other, more interesting parts of your body, which communicate back to your brain the message “we likey”; your brain thinks “me likey too” and it makes your neck muscles turn so that your head turns so that your eyes will continue to capture the light reflecting off the person so pleasantly. All while drool is trickling out of your gaping mouth.

We’re curious creatures, we humans.