why do nipples get hard
In: Biology
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It’s the same muscle behaviour that creates goosebumps.
It’s not that useful for us without much hair, but if we were still furry, it would help us stay warm when cold, or look bigger when scared. Just like when a cat fluffs up its tail.
But because evolution doesn’t get rid of unnecessary features if they don’t lower our survival rate, we still have a lot of these autonomic responses that don’t really apply to our current biology. At least as far as we can tell.
Muscle and nerve reaction to stimulation or environmental stimulus. Basically it’s similar to what happens what you get the chills and your skin tightens to get your arm hair to stand up but because of the shape of the muscle in the nipple, it causes the skin to bunch up and stick out.
So it’s easier for a baby to latch onto them (newborns are a bit useless, and need all the help they can get).
It happens to men too because men also have nipples, made of nipple material. Their mammary glands are just not developed enough to actually feed anything.
Evolution is like this. Pretty much every mammal has nipples as milk production zones. Somewhere way back in our ancestry, the babies descended from stiff-nipple mothers survived better than those whose mums nipples didn’t react, so here we all are.
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