Talk:Cleavage (breasts)

Only men like cleavage?

"In many cultures, though not all, men typically derive erotic pleasure from the visible display of cleavage." I don't know from personal experience (being a cis male) but I hear that lesbians and bi women also find cleavage attractive. One must also consider nonbinary people. IAmNitpicking (talk) 02:24, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

The article doesn't imply otherwise, but the size of the male population is much, much larger than those other groups, so that will have much more social consequences and it makes sense to focus on that. We also have to stick to what the sources say and emphasize matters in the way they do. Crossroads ^-talk- 03:50, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

This is another feminist derived article that likes to put men down for being men, I wish this would stop. ZL3XD (talk) 10:31, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

who's titties are these?

the headless photo at the top of the page is uncredited beyond that it is from flickr and without copyright. it is possible that the model might not want to have her titties on top of the Wikipedia page for cleavage. There is also a bit of an element of antisemitisim to the framing of this, as the picture is of her holding a text in hebrew, and farther down the page, there is a picture of a Muslim woman playing chess who is allowed both her modesty, and her identity.

Would it be possible for somebody to draw something? (perhaps a diagram, indicating what, exactly, is the cleavage) I realize this is a contentious topic. 38.103.136.34 (talk) 23:05, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what they actual issue is here. If a model isn't identifiable without credit then it stands to reason she wouldn't object as doing so she would have to identify herself going against the reason for her objection.

I also don't know where the antisemitism comes from. I can't even make out the text let alone that it is Hebrew but maybe it just looks Hebrew because it is so garbled and out of focus. But assuming this is true there is an assumption that women want their modesty preserved when this is more a cultural prescript. In many countries that aren't Islamic you'll find a lot of Muslim women that don't follow these prescripts as well as Jewish women today blend in with the surrounding cultures and I've found a lot of them that will even be pictured naked so if they don't preserve their own modesty I can't see how the connection is made that it's antisemitic. Biofase ^flame| stalk  19:22, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 26 October 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. After much-extended time for discussion, there is a clear absences of consensus in favor of the proposed move, and no consensus in favor of any proposed alternative move. BD2412 T 03:44, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

---

• Cleavage (breasts) → Cleavage
• Cleavage → Cleavage (disambiguation)Cleavage (disambiguation)

– It's the clear primary topic by pageviews. Gets more views than all the other potential topics combined. It's certainly the first thing that comes to mind when the average person hears the word. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 08:26, 26 October 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. HundredVisionsAndRevisions (talk) 18:33, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Support per nom. Thanks, Glasspalace (talk | contribs) 14:45, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

• Support. Clear primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:34, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
• So you're literally invoking WP:NWFCTM in the nomination? :)

Views of Cleavage that probably correspond to a click towards the breasts article 316 (34.0%) Views of Cleavage that probably correspond to a click towards other identifiable articles 198 (21.3%) Clicks from Cleavage to something that we can't identify (anonymized) 107 (11.5%) Views of Cleavage that can't be assumed to correspond to any outgoing clicks 308 (33.2%)

All-time page views of Cleavage (breasts) per day 871 (44.1%) All-time page views of Cleavage (embryo) per day 332 (16.8%) All-time page views of Buttock cleavage per day 216 (10.9%) All-time page views of Cleavage (crystal) per day 202 (10.2%) All-time page views of Cleavage (politics) per day 109 (5.52%) All-time page views of Cleavage (geology) per day 81 (4.10%) All-time page views of Bond cleavage per day 65 (3.29%) All-time page views of Cleavage furrow per day 55 (2.79%) All-time page views of Toe cleavage per day 37 (1.87%) All-time page views of Cleavage factor per day 6 (0.30%)

Per WP:DPT, let's have a look at some stats. WikiNav at Cleavage says we had 875 views there, and could identify 316 clicks to the proposed primary topic, 198 to other identifiable topics, and 107 filtered. Monthly page views with redirects show it was actually 929 incoming views (Special:WhatLinksHere/Cleavage redirects, per FAQ). A pie chart to the right illustrates this data slightly differently.

What would be the explanation for why only a third of readers who land at the list go to the proposed primary topic? It's the first item in the Anatomy section. It doesn't look very hard to find.

Looking at mass views for all linked topics, I don't see the basis for the claim for more views than all the other potential topics combined. Another pie chart to the right, yay. I've generously removed some articles where cleavage isn't in the title, and it still isn't enough - with some diastema, proteolysis and cleave views also being about readers looking up "cleavage", it's probably even further away from the 50% mark.

This strikes me as an overly casual proposal. I suppose it might be topical :) but it's not actually clear how this would really help the average reader. (Oppose)

Maybe we need to reorder the sections to put Anatomy first (per the ordering guideline), but based on previous discussions (WT:D) it's not likely to matter a lot. --Joy (talk) 12:23, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

If you notice, WP:NWFCTM says that "Perhaps the most commonly rejected argument is that a primary topic should only belong to what "first comes to mind"." It doesn't disqualify it as an argument, just says that it shouldn't be used as the primary argument. And in fact it's not being used as the main argument. This isn't some gotcha moment, I know full well what the policy entails. My primary argument is based on pageviews, and when you remove partial title matches, it indeed has a large lead in pageviews. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 23:35, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

You have to explain what you mean by partial title matches in this context, because it's not really apparent that it matches the meaning from the disambiguation guideline. --Joy (talk) 05:30, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. What pageviews are you looking at??? That was my reaction when I looked at pageviews and WikiNav after this was first posted and this is bolstered by Joy's more thorough analysis. This proposal is based on a demonstrably false assertion about pageviews and a 'method' of determining primary topic that is explicitly warned against. There is no basis to support this proposal. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 01:42, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

  Several of the things mentioned in Joy's pie chart are partial title matches. If you eliminate those, my argument is in fact true. The pie chart is just misleading by including things that aren't referred to solely as "cleavage". ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 23:30, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

  Which ones, can you explain this? Why are they listed here if they're not matching real-world usage? --Joy (talk) 05:29, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose The term has many other meanings. Some other top types in colocation with 'cleavage' per ngrams: bond, DNA, chain, ring, fracture, slip, plane, flow, protein, rock, peptide. Adding those along with 'breast' to this Google proximity search for 'cleavage' within ten words of any of those keywords gives an unbiased picture of how they stack up, and 'breast' is not near the most frequent. (Here are the same queries in Books, and in Scholar for comparison.) !Votes here based on pageviews alone should be thrown out, as they are based on what random people search for and view. Random people are not a reliable source for determining usage of a term, especially when a goodly percentage of them are probably 12-year olds. Mathglot (talk) 10:15, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

  I think the argument to the contrary comes down to people not actually having to say the extra word when referring to the proposed primary topic, which then means it probably can't be detected by word proximity searches. Still, even the topic best known mononymously doesn't have to be primary topic, which is a higher standard. --Joy (talk) 14:46, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

  Yes it can, by doing a proximity search for a different word. While cleavage in this context is rarely directly preceded by breast, there is always context for it, and some other word (girl, woman, her, dress, etc.) will always be present nearby, and you can search for those, as in the link @23:59 below. The same is true of DNA cleavage, bond cleavage, enyzmatic cleavage, etc.; the difference being, that the in the latter set, all of the search results yield reliable sources, while in the former case, although there are a few reliable sources among the results (you can elicit them from Scholar, but not from web or book search) they are dwarfed by rom-com and soft porn. Mathglot (talk) 06:26, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

• Alternative proposal: Since a consensus against making Cleavage (breasts) the primary topic is emerging, how about this: Move said page to Breast cleavageBreast cleavage instead for natural disambiguation and consistency with Buttock cleavage and Toe cleavage. Thanks, 1isall (he/him) (talk | contribs) 12:32, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

  And leave the disambiguation page unmoved. Thanks, 1isall (he/him) (talk | contribs) 12:33, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Would be interesting to see 1isall's alternate proposal put to discussion. HundredVisionsAndRevisions (talk) 18:33, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I'll ping everyone who's participated so far:

@Glasspalace, @Joy, @Mathglot, @Myceteae, @Necrothesp, and the nominator @Zxcvbnm: do any of you have thoughts about my proposal? Thanks, 1isall (he/him) (talk | contribs) 20:51, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I oppose it, as I believe that "Cleavage" alone is primary for breasts. Saying that because "12 year olds" are searching for it makes it invalid as primary topic makes no sense. Wikipedia is not censored by age. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 23:18, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I apologize for not being clear in my previous comment. You are absolutely right that Wikipedia is not censored by age (or for any other reason) and I am *extremely* opposed to censorship at Wikipedia, so we strongly agree on that. My comment was about debunking the claimed support for the move based on pageviews of web pages. My point was that we make page moves based on what reliable sources say, and reliable sources are typically by authors of some standing in their field, who are published by reliable, independent, peer-reviewed journals, book publishers, magazines, and the like, and not by who shows up to read them. As far as articles on the web about breast cleavage, who reads those? A lot of adolescents, and other than Doogie Howser, the number of them with reliable publications about the topic is zero. A web pageviews tally is just a totally unreliable yardstick for measuring COMMONNAME here. Make more sense, now? (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 23:43, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm ambivalent. Breast cleavage uses natural disambiguation which is of course preferred. While there are plenty of sources that use "breast cleavage", my sense is that "cleavage" alone is more common so Cleavage (breasts) with parenthetical disambiguation is probably justified here. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 23:28, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

Your sense is strongly supported by this search in Scholar. Web search is completely unreliable for this, and even search in Books turns up tons of torrid fiction, with little in the way of reliable sources. Based on that plus your comment, I support the parenthetical disambiguation here as well, over consistency with other titles. Mathglot (talk) 23:59, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

I guess we'll just leave everything as is. Thanks, 1isall (he/him) (talk | contribs) 00:00, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm also guessing that this is sort of an IAR situation? Thanks, 1isall (he/him) (talk | contribs) 00:14, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

I don’t know that it’s IAR so much as a determination that the naturally disambiguated term is so much less common that the title is better with parentheses. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Zxcvbnm's assessment of the primary topic. Thanks, Glasspalace (talk | contribs) 00:01, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Still think it's the primary topic. -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:26, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

That sounds sort of natural, but it doesn't actually seem to be common, see for example Google Books Ngrams for related terms. Even if we were to assume that only a small part of the book references to just cleavage would be to this topic, the near-flat line of references to the term breast cleavage is still indicative of that term being comparatively very rare. --Joy (talk) 12:37, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Designing proper ngrams queries and interpreting them correctly is tricky. Arguing against my own !vote here, but in fairness, Joy, the fact that the term 'breast cleavage' is not a common bigram is not a fair argument to make here, partly because the rarity of that term does not imply that 'cleavage' is mostly something other than about breasts, it only means that that specific bigram is rare. What if, for example, 'breast cleavage' is very rare, but 'her cleavage' is very common? (In fact, the latter is over 300 times more common.) So, for example, the fact that 'bond cleavage' is 100 times more common than 'breast cleavage' doesn't necessarily mean that 'breast cleavage' couldn't be the PTOPIC, just because that bigram is rare; because if we look at 'her cleavage' vs. 'bond cleavage' it tells a different story which implies that 'breast cleavage' might be the PTOPIC even if the term itself is rare. (It isn't, but we can't tell from just those queries.)

Secondly, your ngrams top-10 link doesn't tell much of a story from the data, because the unmodified wildcard is too broad; if you restrict the wildcards to prefixed adjectives and postfixed nouns, then you get this one, which I think is much closer to what you were actually going for. But it still is not a good comparison, because you cannot compare unigrams like 'cleavage' with bigrams, as the low frequency of each bigram term is multiplicative and tells a false story; comparing only bigrams tells a better story, showing 'her cleavage' beating out all the other bigrams ('cleavage site' is #2). But even that appears to be time-sensitive; notice how different that chart looks if you show the data only through 2000, where 'her cleavage' is way down near the bottom of the pack, compared to the same chat since 2000, implying there has been an explosion of usage of 'her cleavage' since that date, while the other terms remain about the same as they have always been. Further queries would be needed to determine if this is some sort of explosion in romantic fiction publishing, as I suspect is the case. But that is not the end of the story, and now you have to deal with proper interpretation and go down to the links below the chart and examine what all those results from the top-scoring 'her cleavage' actually are, and if you examine them they turn out to be romantic novels, like the #1 'Guarding Her' (Reus, 2022), clearly not a reliable source for deciding a question like this. In the end, you reached the right conclusion, imho, but that one query did not support it. Ngrams is a great tool, but has to be used with care. Mathglot (talk) 20:52, 10 November 2025 (UTC) updated; (underscores are redaction, not emphasis.) Mathglot (talk) 21:29, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

This makes sense. To put it another way, the low frequency of "breast cleavage" could be entirely consistent with cleavage (breasts) being the primary topic for "cleavage" if all the other uses require some sort of modifier or qualifier like proteolytic cleavage or cleavage site, but "breast cleavage" never (or rarely) does. But I agree that upon closer inspection the various Ngrams do not show that "breast cleavage" is the clear primary topic.

I also looked at standard dictionaries to get a sense of usage another way. Britannica Dictionary and Cambridge both list "breast cleavage" as the first meaning but Merriam-Webster (usually my preferred dictionary) and Dictionary.com both list other meanings first. Collins provides definitions from four dictionaries they publish—two list "breast cleavage" as the first meaning and two do not. These results are mixed and dictionary definitions don't always correspond to the primary topic for our purposes but these results taken together do not show that cleavage (breasts) is the unambiguous primary topic. Additionally, the etymology ("word history") shows that the meaning associated with crystals is oldest. Thus by long-term significance (WP:PT2), "breast cleavage" is not primary topic. The various Ngrams reviewed also show that other uses have been more common fairly recently. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:17, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

Re 1st paragraph: yes, precisely. Mathglot (talk) 21:33, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

Also, the #1 definition in a dictionary is not necessarily the most frequent one. For example, OED listings for multiple enumerated definitions are diachronic; the #1 meaning of meat is "food". So that has to be factored in as well, since breasts have been a topic of discussion longer than biochemistry. Mathglot (talk) 21:59, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

One other note regarding Ngram interpretation: Several of the common forms are related uses, for example those related to bond cleavage in chemistry and biochemistry. Sometimes a modifier is needed for more precision—enzymatic, oxidative, proteolytic, hydrolytic, DNA, etc. In assessing usage, these would count towards bond cleavage which is the article that summarizes many of these uses and is best suited for expansion (if needed) to cover other specific types. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:27, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

@Mathglot The issue there is that both 'breast cleavage' and 'her cleavage' aren't visible at all in the output of the original query I posted, so they're inherently insignificant compared to mononymous usage. If a term's mononymous usage is far more common than any other, and no single form of natural disambiguation is found in this general data set to match this topic, then it's not possible to even start to argue that there is a form of natural disambiguation that applies to this topic that would be relevant from the usage perspective. Even if any of these phrases managed to show a more than a usual spike in any time period like this last 20 years, they're still a blip on the radar - and in that case also a violation of WP:Recentism. It should go without saying that we don't make decisions by cherry-picking the most recent period. --Joy (talk) 06:19, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, 'breast cleavage' is visible as it was part of the query you posted, and does appear on the graph. Can't comment on most of the rest, as I didn't quite understand the point. I did understand the last part, and imho you misunderstand WP:Recentism. In fact, with respect to reliable sources age does matter, and the more recent sources, especially in scientific or related fields are considered superior. Cherry-picking does not apply here because no Wikipedia editor chose any of the sources; they are merely statistics displayed as term frequencies for all books in Google's book index having the queried term. But this is starting to feel o/t. Mathglot (talk) 07:21, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Are we looking at the same graph? It's only on the graph because I explicitly listed it in the query. It's also colored blue, as its own pattern. If you hover over its blue label, you can see that it barely registers, it's constantly around 0. Can you please click the link again and confirm that that is what we're both seeing?

I don't think it's a misunderstanding of recentism to apply it here - the word has clearly existed for quite a while now and is apparently ambiguous in book mentions, so if we were to overly concentrate on what the most recent few decades of books ngrams say about it, without pondering the merits and the history, that would indeed be imbalanced. We're not talking about any sort of an analysis of recent reliable source content, just the usage statistics based on our own observations, so that aspect of (not-)recentism is not relevant to this argument. --Joy (talk) 07:47, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

• Support, clear PRIMARYTOPIC.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:18, 4 November 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. Doesn't seem to be the PT1 in RS, and evidence presented isn't sufficient to establish PT1 by Wiki navigation IMO. Better evidence is needed to establish such a consensus. No strong opinion on alt proposal of NATDIS for this page, though I do think that it's common enough to not be considered obscure or made-up which is enough, it doesn't actually need to be close to the mononymous use. Alpha3031 (t • c) 10:16, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.