In which Dr. Socks becomes so disgusted with the casual ineptitude of the ev-psychos that she descends to name-calling and cursing
In the stock photo catalog this pic is labeled “sexy man.” But according to ev-psychos, if you’re a woman you’re not turned on by this. So stop looking at it. Stop! Here, this is what you want:
Bill Gates, Sex God.
Actual quote from actual book1 (emphasis mine):
A simple example of how evolutionary psychology operates is how it looks at the evolution of behavioural differences between males and females. Fertile men can potentially have many offspring right through their adult lifespan, whereas women are much more restricted by birth intervals, their shorter reproductive life (given menopause), and the need to nurture their offspring. Thus it is argued that past evolution has operated such that men are attracted by potential fertility in a prospective partner, while women are attracted by men who are likely to provide stability and resources after reproduction. There is certainly good evidence to back up such theoretical expectations from a range of human societies, yet it is clear that such imperatives are not the whole story, given variations such as partnerships that continue in the face of reproductive cessation or failure, and homosexual relationships.
No, there isn’t “good evidence,” you fucking moron. Why is it so hard for these stupid old men to realize that the TV shows they watched in the 1950s weren’t a reliable guide to female nature?
What the evidence actually shows is that in societies where women can only gain access to certain resources through marriage, they (quite sensibly) are more likely to choose mates with those resources. This is an economic decision, not a matter of sexual attraction. (Though note that even in such societies, many women follow their hearts anyway and marry the good-looking ne’er-do-well.) In societies where women’s mate choices are not economically constrained, they go for the hotties. They go for good-looking, personable men, because they can. The Mosu, the Wodaabe — the women in those societies always follow their hearts, and their hearts lead them to sweet, sexy men with big brown eyes and handsome faces. And nice muscle tone. And broad shoulders. And delicious furry treasure trails that go all the way down….sigh.
Buy a clue, ev-psychos: teenage girls the world over don’t have posters of Bill Gates up on their bedroom walls, okay? They’re not drooling over Donald Fucking Trump. Ever notice that?
No, of course they’ve never noticed that. They’re too busy saying things like “it would make no sense for a woman to be easily aroused by the sight of a naked man.”2 Call me cruel, but I hear in that the plaintive plea of a man who has never met a woman who was aroused by the sight of his naked body. Perhaps it’s a form of desperate denial to imagine that the teenage girls who buy cheesecake posters of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp are just trying to figure out where 18th century pirates kept their wallets. You know, so they can choose a high-status mate on their next time-travel trip.
Shit, even the half-assed experiments the ev-psychos themselves have done show that women are sexually attracted to sexy men, though god knows the ev-psychos seem utterly incapable of reading their own data. In one experiment a group of women at a private college were shown two different male models in various outfits — a homely guy in a Burger King uniform and then in business attire, and a handsome guy in a Burger King uniform and then in business attire. The women strongly preferred the handsome guy to the homely guy, and preferred each man when he was in business attire to when he was in the Burger King outfit. A normal person would interpret that to mean that the women in the study preferred good-looking guys, and also preferred a person of their own social class to a person of somewhat lower socioeconomic status. (And also, possibly, that the BK uniform isn’t doing anybody any favors in the fashion department.)
But the ev-psychos interpreted the study to “prove” that women choose mates based on status, and that this is an innate and universal female behavior. They ignored the part about all the women preferring the good-looking guy. They also ignored a bunch of other stuff, like the fact that numerous studies have demonstrated that all humans show a robust preference for mating with people of their own social class, which is why college women (at a private, largely upper-class school, at that) were pretty much guaranteed to choose the business guy over Burger King Boy. They ignored the fact that in American society, as in most Eurasian societies for the past several thousand years, women’s marriage choices have been economically constrained, so that women are strongly conditioned to look for a “provider” mate. They ignored the fact that the preferences of American college women tell us nothing about female humans in other societies, especially societies that are very differently structured. They ignored the fact that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the behavior of American college students in the late 20th century is a suitable proxy for human behavior in the Pleistocene. And speaking of the Pleistocene, they ignored the fact that the anthropological evidence suggests that women in those early societies, as in modern foraging groups, provided the bulk of the sustenance and weren’t even reliant on male provisioning.
Instead, they just proclaimed that their half-assed study “proved” that women are attracted to high status, and that this is an innate, universal female behavior caused by some fucking brain module that evolved in the Pleistocene.
This is why people consider ev-psych junk science. For chrissake, this shit makes the blood type diet look like particle physics.
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1The Complete World of Human Evolution, Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews, 2005.
Note that I do not actually think Chris Stringer is a moron; he’s excellent in his field and I’ll take him in a match with Milford Wolpoff any day. But ev-psych is bullshit and he’s being entirely too kind to it.
2Steven Pinker, Professional Twit Extraordinaire.
83 Responses to “In which Dr. Socks becomes so disgusted with the casual ineptitude of the ev-psychos that she descends to name-calling and cursing”
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Jokerine says:
ZOMG! I want to see the picture that totally (like) doesn’t look sexy, because I prefer (like) rich men. Just so I know when to look away (like) in the future. I can’t though. Are you sure you put it in?
October 1st, 2007 at 5:18 am EST -
Infidel says:
The trouble with discounting theory using contrary evidence is that it begins to support an alternate evpsych bullshit theory.
Pleistocene women began and eventually through evolutionary processes attained a desire for nice looking men apart from the mans ability to provide. -
kristi says:
Wonderful post, Violet. It does sound like some of the evo-psych guys have issues in the relationship department. Until proven otherwise, I believe they cooked up this theory while sitting around a keg and whining about how no women ever go for the Nice Guys.
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Bill says:
GOV:
I still think you’re paying way too much attention to the absolute fringe elements of “evo-psyc”. Unless your goal is to call out the fringe, and expose their mis-statements (which I suspect is the case). I just hope there is no slippery-slope effect that causes your readers to insist that there is absolutely *no* biological basis for *any* behavior. As you know, I am a proponent of a biological basis from some behaviors, but this theory of women preferring wealthy men flies in the face of anything biological. Selection would obviously favor the preference for the most fit male - big, strong, attractive, etc. This example is so based on culture that it’s laughable. By the way, are there any prominent female evo-psychs? I’d be curious if they have different takes on these things than their male counterparts.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I still think you’re paying way too much attention to the absolute fringe elements of “evo-psyc”.
Maybe we should talk about what we mean by “evo-psych.” Because this isn’t the fringe of the work that’s being done. Have you read Buss? Have you read Pinker (who’s not doing the work, of course, just popularizing others’ work — but he’s the public face of ev psych.) I haven’t talked about Cosmides and Tooby yet, but I will one of these days, since I think massive modularity (which is the theoretical framework of the whole shebang) makes about as much sense as phrenology. That’s what calls itself “ev psych,” and that’s what I mean by the term.
But if you’re referring to the idea that some of our behaviors are grounded in our biology and the evolution of our minds, that’s not even a controversial idea. Witness the last several decades of language research. However, the people who are doing that kind of work (biologists, cog scientists, psychologists, paleoanthropologists) don’t seem to usually call themselves “evolutionary psychologists.”
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r68 says:
Women go for whoever is most successful.
If a woman is in a room full of cellists, she goes for Yo-Yo Ma. If she’s in a room full of movie stars, she goes for Johnny Depp. If she’s in a room full of rich guys, she goes for Bill Gates. And if she’s in a room full of nobodies, she goes for the 6′ 4″ dark-haired guy with broad shoulders.
[BTW, I worked for Bill Gates for a little while, and let me assure you that (a) women fell all over him, and (b) Melinda was dating another (taller, more handsome, FWIW) Microsoft guy and dumped him as soon as Bill expressed an interest.]
…teenage girls the world over don’t have posters of Bill Gates up on their bedroom walls
That’s true…but they also don’t necessarily have pictures of “hotties”. I dunno who girls put on their walls nowadays, but when I was a kid they had posters of the 5′ 7″ Kurt Cobain or the 5′ 9″ Axl Rose. And when I asked my most recent girlfriend who she thought were the sexiest men alive, she named Bruce Smith (she grew up in Buffalo) and Radu Lupu (she’s a classical pianist). Suffice it to say that neither is a “hottie”.Also, if you sincerely believe that women don’t prefer rich guys, I encourage you to go on match.com and check what criteria women desire in their dates. Specifically, check how many women specify a minimum income, then check how many men specify a minimum income.
Finally, just out of curiosity:
…their hearts lead them to sweet, sexy men with big brown eyes and handsome faces
If I said I tended to go for young, thin, blond, blue-eyed women, would you say that I was following my heart? -
The Ghost of Violet says:
Women go for whoever is most successful.
That’s the kind of inaccurate, uninformed gross generalization that is ev-psych’s stock-in-trade, which is why it’s junk science.
Personally, I prefer men who are good-looking and I always have. Don’t give a damn about “success.”
But as for those women who do prefer “successful” men, did you miss the whole part of the post about socialization in a culture where women’s mate choices have been economically constrained for thousands of years?
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nina says:
GOV, I love you. I loved you in your physical incarnation as Violet and I love you in your current spirit form. This whole series is brilliant. That is all.
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anna says:
So either looks or money are all that matters? Not everyone is shallow. Corny as it is, when you get to know someone they do seem more or less attractive based on personality. And when it comes to a long-term relationship getting along well outside of bed matters too. But of course, everyone “knows” that only losers date poor men/homely women, so people try to increase their social status through dating the “right” sort. That’s what it seems like to me anyway. I mean, I think Keanu is hot, but I’d get awfully bored being married to him.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Oh, anna, I agree with you that attraction and mate choice are complex. (And I was trying to allow for the personality element with references to ’sweet’ and ‘personable’ men.)
The problem is that as long as we’re stuck in stereotypical assumptions, like “women always go for high-status guys,” we’re blind. The mantra in feminist anthropology is, if you don’t ask the questions, you won’t see the data. We have to let go of preconceptions.
If we really want to find out what drives female mate choice, we need to study women’s behavior across all kinds of cultures. We especially need to study those societies where women’s choices are not economically constrained. And we need to evaluate carefully the behavior of women even in those societies where women are economically disadvantaged (like our own). We need to be open to reality, not stuck in hidebound stereotypes.
In the examples I mentioned, the evidence clearly contradicts the stereotype that women go for status rather than, say, looks. (In the Burger King example, those were pretty much the only criteria, since the women were looking at photographs and had no opportunity to evaluate the men’s personalities.) The Wodaabe hold male beauty pageants, and the women choose the best-looking guys for a night o’ love. The Mosu eschew marriage and the women are completely independent economically, and as a result they choose their lovers based purely on appeal — physical, sexual, emotional, whatever.
I’m probably like a lot of women (and people) in that my criteria would be different for a one-night-stand versus a long-term relationship. Keanu would be hot stuff for a night, yes, but for the long term I need somebody with a brain. (Though actually I’ve heard that Keanu is quite bright and well-read in real life, and just comes off as stupid in the movies.)
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Crys T says:
“Women go for whoever is most successful.”
Absolute, total bullshit. SOME women may, for their own personal reasons, do so, but NO woman I’ve ever known personally, including myself, has got into a relationship due to the man’s level of success.
Some of us go more for looks, some of us go more for personality, but NOT ONE SINGLE ONE OF US, out of ALL the women I’ve known in over 40 years of life, has gone for the successful guy.
I’m guessing you can’t get laid and instead of blaming the lack of anything likeable in either your physical person or your character, you blame women only going for the successful men. Well, I’m taking your security blanket away: it’s not that you can’t get a woman because other “Alpha Males” are snapping them all up, it’s that you can’t get a woman because there’s something seriously offputting about you (possibly your repulsive misogyny?).
“If she’s in a room full of movie stars, she goes for Johnny Depp.”
My arse. I mean, Johnny Depp is beautiful, but as far as I’m concerned, there is nothing sexually interesting about him. But that’s just me: many, many women find him hot. And, gee whiz r68 guess what? Many, many women found him sexually attractive long before he was successful. And many women have found him much more attractive than other male movie stars who have been more successful than him at any given time.
You know what that means? That not only is your “success” criterion nonsense, but that women are not one homogenous group. Put together five of us and you’ll find five VERY different definitions of what constitutes hotness in a man.
“…teenage girls the world over don’t have posters of Bill Gates up on their bedroom walls
That’s true…but they also don’t necessarily have pictures of “hotties”. I dunno who girls put on their walls nowadays, but when I was a kid they had posters of the 5′ 7″ Kurt Cobain or the 5′ 9″ Axl Rose.”And what planet were you living on that Cobain and Rose weren’t considered “hotties”? I know that men nourish this ridiculous fantasy that
all women want guys with Schwarzenegger physiques, but (yet again) men don’t have a single fucking clue about what women find hot.“Also, if you sincerely believe that women don’t prefer rich guys, I encourage you to go on match.com and check what criteria women desire in their dates.”
Oh yeah, because the women who post on match.com are a perfect random sample of the general worldwide population of women. Seriously: has it not occurred to you that if there is a certain sameness to the posts on that site, it’s because that site tends to attract a very particular type of woman?
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I’m guessing you can’t get laid and instead of blaming the lack of anything likeable in either your physical person or your character, you blame women only going for the successful men.
That was my diagnosis too, and if it’s accurate then there’s really nothing to say because nothing will penetrate.
This is just anecdotal, but every single guy I’ve ever known who was convinced that women are gold-diggers was himself unlucky with women solely due to his personality, though in his mind it was because of his bank account.
The most extreme example of this was a guy I worked with for awhile who was probably the single most unpleasant individual I’ve ever known. He was just a seething ball of nastiness. No one could stand to be around him. And yet his constant refrain was that the only reason women wouldn’t go out with him was because he wasn’t rich and didn’t have a big fancy car. “Women all want money, they just go for the big shots, the guys with everything,” he would grumble endlessly. “If I were making a hundred grand I’d have chicks hanging off me” he would say, while all the women in the room would struggle to control their facial expressions.
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r68 says:
That’s the kind of inaccurate, uninformed gross generalization that is ev-psych’s stock-in-trade, which is why it’s junk science
OK, I’ve read your and Crys T’s personal insults of me, and I’d like you to answer one question for me:
Is there room in this discussion, on this blog, for people who disagree with you?
If you’re interested in my response to your post, I’ll give it. If not and you’re just looking for warm bodies to insult, say the word and I’ll vanish.
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Chris says:
warm, HOT bodies to insult, r68.
Seriously, though. Hot or brilliant? What a luxury to be able to choose only one and draw academic conclusions thereby. IN the mean time, out here in the REAL world, those of us men who have the distinct misfortune to be both brilliant AND incredibly gorgeous must endure a living hell of constant and distracting female attention.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Of course people are welcome to disagree.
r68, I wasn’t personally insulting you. That was my assessment of your comment.
And yes, there is a powerful whiff of Nice Guy (or something worse) coming off of you here; just saying. Does it not strike you, the strangeness of a man telling a bunch of women what we really want? And that “what we really want,” according to you, just happens to conform perfectly to sexist stereotypes and just happens to completely contradict what we ourselves are saying about our experience?
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Just Another Teenage Feminist says:
Great post. I don’t know what other women look for in men, but I don’t go for the “hotties”. I generally go for the guy with the great personality. In the end beauty is just perception, and as a society we need to get over our obsession with our ever-changing and impossible standard of beauty.
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Infidel says:
Is there any truth to big eye, pudgy, cuteness being an evolutionary plus for the human race- or does it just so happen that a newborn is pudgy from having a sedantary beginning and big eyes because optics in mammals develop comparatively slowly to the rest of the body? Why are big eye pudgies cute anyway? And why are fuzzy mothers preffered to abundanza wire monkeys by cute little rhesus monkey babies? If you have the answers to these questions then how can you turn that into a money maker?
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renegade evolution says:
I just wanted to say I loved this post. I agree, and well done.
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r68 says:
Does it not strike you, the strangeness of a man telling a bunch of women what we really want?
Yes, you’re right, I shouldn’t have been so strident in my original remarks; it did sound like I was telling women what they wanted.
However, I hope you will admit that claiming I’m a bitter, angry guy who can’t get laid is essentially the equivalent of me calling a woman a fat, ugly owner of 10 cats; it’s cruel, mean-spirited stereotyping, and I would never do it. (BTW, I’m not going to respond to any suppositions about my wealth and/or dating history.)
Aside from a very small minority, I do not believe women are gold-diggers. And when I said “successful” in my original post, I didn’t mean the man had to be world-famous. But through my lifetime, I’ve often seen the following:
* women having crushes on their male teacher/professor
* women having crushes on their clergyman
* the best man at a wedding getting much more female attention than the other single guys (certainly true for me in the 2 weddings I’ve been best man, and the many for which I haven’t)
* women having crushes on guys in bands
* women going for the best dancer at a club
* women going for the best storyteller at a dinner partyAnd in very few of these cases did it matter how attractive or how wealthy the guy in question was. What mattered was that he was the center of attention. One of my best friends was in a band, just a stand-up bass player in a jazz band that got non-paying gigs at coffee shops and Barnes & Noble. He’s a short, skinny, soft-spoken guy who’s balding and wears baggy sweaters. During the six years I knew him, he never got hit on at parties, clubs, malls, restaurants…but women approached him like crazy when he was playing bass (and he’s now married to one, happily AFAIK).
My point is that, in my experience of the world, the guy who’s most charismatic and/or the center of attention is the guy who women like most. I don’t know and don’t care what label academics attach to that view; it’s just my experience.
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Nomen Nescio says:
out of interest: what’s the difference between evo psych and plain old psych?
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Infidel says:
So the attraction of women to men is hardly the kind of thing you could quantify or find trends in and basing conclusions on some kind of evolutionary process using test study statistics is batshit crazy and ev-psych is bullshit.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Nomen Nescio: the difference is that ev psych is even more scientifically rigorous.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
r68: one conclusion you could draw from your observations is that some women in American society are attracted to charismatic men. I’m sure that’s true, since we’ve all observed that. That’s quite different from saying that all women are attracted to charismatic men, much less that this is the governing principle for female human mate choice.
But another thing to notice is that you’re confusing correlation with causation. While some women I’m sure are attracted to the fact that a man is the center of attention, many more women I’m sure are attracted to the qualities that happen to make the man the center of attention.
Consider that if a Playboy model appeared at a stag party, she would almost certainly be the focus of all the men’s attention. Would you say that they’re interested in her only because she’s the center of attention? Or is it perhaps that she is the center of attention because all the men are attracted to certain qualities she displays?
And by the way, men also respond to charisma and to a woman’s being the center of attention. I’m not a gorgeous woman by any means, but in various situations (as a performer, as a teacher, as a raconteur) I have garnered exactly the same kind of attention from guys that you describe women showing to men.
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r68 says:
While some women I’m sure are attracted to the fact that a man is the center of attention, many more women I’m sure are attracted to the qualities that happen to make the man the center of attention.
Possible. I suppose nobody can prove it one way or another; I just believe that being the center of attention is the determinant the same way I believe smoking causes cancer. Take my wedding example: I’m the exact same guy, with the exact same looks, with the exact same (lack of) dancing ability, regardless of whether I’m the best man or not; yet I get more or less attention depending. The aforementioned Kurt Cobain once said (pre-death) that it made him somewhat angry that the same guys and girls who harassed him in high school thought he was the coolest guy in the world when he had a #1 record.
Re the playboy model: I’d say she’s probably the center of attention anywhere she goes (where there are straight males) because of what she looks like. I see your point that for many men charisma and being the center of attention add to a woman’s appeal; I just don’t think it’s as major a factor as it is for women judging men. My experience has been that if a woman is young, slender, and has a pretty face, good skin and long blond hair, she’s going to attract a lot of male attention regardless of whether she’s a party girl or a nebbish. Just my opinion.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Okay, but I still think you’re mixing things up.
Yes, being the center of attention does, in itself, raise one’s attractiveness quotient, at least in the eyes of some people. That works for both men and women. I used to be amazed at how much attention I got just from being a performer as opposed to walking down the street, though obviously I was the exact same person. I’m not aware of evidence that women are more susceptible to that effect than men, though it’s possible (and I don’t think any studies have been done on it).
But if you think that as a rule “being the center of attention is the determinant the same way I believe smoking causes cancer,” then I think you’re mistaken. I can tell you that from personal experience. There have been several instances in my life where a bunch of women were all attracted to the same guy, and it was because we were all turned on by his particular personal attributes: smart, funny, sexy, delightful personality, whatever. From each woman’s perspective it would have been much better if the other women hadn’t liked him, because then she wouldn’t have had the competition. But we all did, and so (alas) he was the recipient of much attention. Now, to some men looking on it might have seemed that we were attracted to the guy because he was the center of attention, rather than that he was the center of attention because we were all attracted. Personally I attribute that to the fact that many men (in my experience) have a hard time understanding what turns women on. They just don’t get that a guy with a terrific sense of humor, for example, is going to be hugely appealing to a lot of women.
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r68 says:
But if you think that as a rule “being the center of attention is the determinant the same way I believe smoking causes cancer,” then I think you’re mistaken. I can tell you that from personal experience.
I think we’re reaching that “agree to disagree” point, because that has not been my experience. Thousands of people get lung cancer having never smoked; millions of smokers never get lung cancer. I just think smoking biases your odds. Similarly, I’m sure lots of guys were attractive first and then became the center of attention because so many women were interested in them; I just think it’s much more common that being the center of attention draws women to you.
Personally I attribute that to the fact that many men (in my experience) have a hard time understanding what turns women on.
It might also be that they know what turns women on; they’re simply unable to provide it. For example, I know women find humor a turn-on, but I’m shy and anxious around people I don’t know, and consequently I’m just not that funny. Believe me, if I could hit the “be funny” button or the “stop being anxious around strangers” button in my brain, I would’ve hit them a long time ago; it holds me back personally and professionally. I’m not trying to segue into a sob story or a therapy session; I’m just saying I think that women sometimes expect men to provide things they can’t.
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Cannonball says:
First of all let me thank the ghost of violet and r68 for turning the usual verbal browl in an interesting discussion I followed with pleasure.
I think one point is missing in the whole discussion: an historical perspective. I mean, the freedom to make sexual choices is a rather recent conquest in all western societies (i don’t know about other societies). Until say 100 years ago, partnership choices were mostly done by families based on interested decisions. This applied mostly to women, and partially to men. It is just absurd to believe that any evolutionary force might have applied to “shape” women’s or men’s biologic brains. As a result, today’s behavior can only be deemed 100% culturally based.
Once this is clarified (I hope you both agree) then we can discuss what is the (cultural) basis for partnership decisions in our societies.
I think that gender roles change, and change quickly. If you watch a milestone movie like “American Graffiti”, that I happened to watch recently, you’ll be astonished to see how different the society was then.
I believe people (both men and women) make choices based on what they perceive something being a socially “successful” choice. And the perception of something being successful changes across the social classes, across the age classes, and obviously across gender groups. It even changes in the same person’s mind based on the objectives, as rightly indicated by ghost when saying that her choices might change when she looks for a one-night date or for a longer standing relation. -
Infidel says:
Okay, then you have ‘center of attention’ driving attraction of women to men and this selection process drives the access to mating and then the offspring of this mating tends to biologically have this ‘center of attention’ trait genetically imprinted on their tendency of behaviour and by the way the tendency of preference of attraction, which gives them the advantage and so selects them for the next generation. Wallah! Psychology Evolves!
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Kiuku says:
“I’m just saying I think that women sometimes expect men to provide things they can’t.”
Oohh the poor menz. hehehe
Dr. Violet, Great article. Evo-psych is the biggest, most craptastic pseudo-science since phrenology.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I think one point is missing in the whole discussion: an historical perspective.
Just to clarify, in my dialogue with r68 I have only been talking about modern American behavior, and I hope he has been doing the same.
Cannonball, you are absolutely right that the historical perspective is what ev-psych is missing. As I noted in this post and in every post about ev psych, these people consistently make the mistake of imagining that modern behavior in one culture reflects some biological urge that evolved in the Pleistocene. (Can you tell it drives me up the wall?) I get tired of pointing out that whatever we may determine about, say, modern American mate choice, there is no reason to assume that it reflects innate, universal human nature.
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Bill says:
This has been an interesting discussion. I’m curious about the thought here on the fact that humans are the only primates with concealed ovulation. What’s the advantage of that pysiological condition (and there must be an advantage, or it wouldn’t have evolved)? In other apes, mate choice is pretty straight forward - go for the female who is in estrus. Obviously there are many cultural aspects to human mate selection (as discussed here). This cultural variety didn’t cause the pysiological condition, did it? And what about female orgasm? Does it affect behavior? I’m not trying to advocate anything or argue here (really). I’m just curious about the feminist perspective. Thanks.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Concealed ovulation! Concealed ovulation Concealed ovulation!
Excuse my excitement, but that’s a topic I’ve been ruminating on for 20 years. I don’t know that there is a feminist perspective, since feminism is a political and theoretical stance. The only feminist perspective would be that to study the subject we must take care to set aside the pre-conceptions and stereotypes that are the product of our own cultural bias about sexuality and gender.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Oh, but as for concealed ovulation–
Actually, humans are not the only primates with concealed ovulation. We’re also not the only primates who practice monogamy. The problem is that there isn’t a perfect correspondence between ovulation styles and social systems when you look at all primates: concealed ovulation occurs with monogamous, promiscuous, and harem-style primates, and so does overt ovulation (as well as slightly-signalled ovulation).
The phylogenetic analysis (Sillen-Tullberg and Moller, 1993) suggests that humans derive from a promiscuous ancestor with concealed ovulation; possibly the concealed ovulation served to reduce infanticide (Hrdy’s many-fathers theory). But once our ancestors had evolved concealed ovulation, the function was available to be co-opted for other purposes, and at some point it may have shifted to encourage monogamy (the father-at-home theory).
But the sexual evolution of our species remains murky.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
One more thing I will add, and that’s that I’m uncomfortable with the father-at-home theory of how concealed ovulation promoted monogamy. The idea is that with females’ fertile periods concealed, males were inclined to engage in constant mate-guarding and less inclined to stray.
But personally I think what may be more important is that with the loss of estrus, a female’s sexual desire is relatively constant throughout her cycle (though apparently it does peak slightly during ovulation). This encourages constant sexual behavior, which may have served as the glue linking male and female hominids together in pair bonds. Gibbons evolved singing to link male and female together in a pair; perhaps constant sex served a similar purpose in humans.
Another issue with the father-at-home theory is that I think there is a tendency to overestimate the importance of male parental involvement. The standard assumption is that it’s because dad-hominid is needed to help care for the infants, but dad is only necessary if the social system involves isolated breeding pairs, as with gibbons. But humans seem to have always lived in groups, and all our closest relatives (chimps, bonobos, gorillas) also live in groups. Male parental care could still be very helpful, but there are also other females and youngsters around to help.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
And another thing I need to add, to be clear, and that’s that human sexual behavior is incredibly various. The plasticity of our behavior is a clear sign that we’re not just dealing with evolved biological strategies. Sexual mores vary widely among cultures, and the behavior of individual humans varies even more widely.
So when we look at the biological substrate of our behavior and make guesses about it, we need to bear in mind that we are talking about a substrate, not the whole story. There’s a substrate, and then there’s social conditioning, environment, individual preferences, deliberate choices, all kinds of stuff.
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Kit says:
How about the idea that some women avoid very attractive men because they assume they won’t be treated well by them? I don’t think sex is good the first few times with anyone, so I don’t even consider one night stands as an option.
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Leia says:
That’s true…but they also don’t necessarily have pictures of “hotties”. I dunno who girls put on their walls nowadays, but when I was a kid they had posters of the 5′ 7″ Kurt Cobain or the 5′ 9″ Axl Rose. And when I asked my most recent girlfriend who she thought were the sexiest men alive, she named Bruce Smith (she grew up in Buffalo) and Radu Lupu (she’s a classical pianist). Suffice it to say that neither is a “hottie”.
How do you know? The only reason you know that Smith and Lupu are not conventionally attractive is because WOMEN have strong and distinctive physical preferences that have nothing to do with checkbooks. Otherwise “hot” would have no real meaning.
Most teenage girls do put up pictures of hotties: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Ben Affleck, Denzel Washington…all of these are female lust objects because of their physical traits.
Also, if you sincerely believe that women don’t prefer rich guys, I encourage you to go on match.com and check what criteria women desire in their dates. Specifically, check how many women specify a minimum income, then check how many men specify a minimum income.
Right. Because women’s economic opportunities are constrained, what with discrimination and the wage gap and all. This has nothing to do with sexual desire and everything to do with economic options. This is where Violet’s cross-cultural research is helpful.
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Leia says:
Similarly, I’m sure lots of guys were attractive first and then became the center of attention because so many women were interested in them; I just think it’s much more common that being the center of attention draws women to you.
Well, think what you like, but where’s the evidence?
Also, center-of-attention goes along with attractiveness for females as well. The popular and powerful ruler of her high school clique is also going to be desired by men. There’s little to suggest that success is a desirable male trait rather than a desirable human trait.
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Infidel says:
It would never be “the only kind of guy that mates” anyway and even if it were, the chance of having that population subject to enlistment and exposure as soldiers in situations where significant percentages of them might be so affected by improvised exploding devices while driving around shifting ordinance or other logistics in a middle east country of sorts and then only presented upon return with mating choices they might decline because they experienced an elevated statistical prevalance of cancer due to levels of psytotoxins in the drinking water that exceeded seven hundred and twenty ppm, would result in no offspring and no continuance of genetic fitness for survival and therefore no evolution.
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cicely says:
A little off-centre maybe, but I read somewhere sometime in the long ago that people very often feel attracted to, or are more inclined to act on attractions to folk who they consider about as attractive as they consider themselves to be, on a scale from 1 - 10. This is not a conscious thing, apparently. This has a ring of potential truth - you think? (Other things - economics etc - being equal - or unknown.)
Also - something else I once saw in a psychology book…(I think). People were asked to look at apparently identical photographs of the same person, and pick the photo they preferred. They had to take a certain amount of time looking before making their selection. Can’t remember the exact percentage, but most people picked the same photo, and the indiscernable difference - at least at a conscious level - was that in the popular photo, the persons pupils were dilated.
These are my fluffy contributions.
As for this idea about women being a flock of predictable sheep re what attracts us - phooey - and financial security seeking or social climbing behaviour in selecting a mate is unheard of among men? I think not.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
A little off-centre maybe, but I read somewhere sometime in the long ago that people very often feel attracted to, or are more inclined to act on attractions to folk who they consider about as attractive as they consider themselves to be, on a scale from 1 - 10. This is not a conscious thing, apparently. This has a ring of potential truth - you think? (Other things - economics etc - being equal - or unknown.)
It’s not off-center at all. It’s called assortative mating or homogamy, which is the tendency for like to marry like. Humans do it, and it definitely includes economic factors as well as personal status and attractiveness. Rich people typically marry rich people, college-educated people typically marry college-educated people, 10s (in the looks department) typically marry 10s, etc., etc.
And high status people marry other high status people even when that status is measured by different variables, so a high status woman in our society is typically a very beautiful woman (because in our society, for a woman looks=status), while a high status male in our society is typically very rich and famous. They’re both high status, and so they end up together.
The value for humans in assortative mating, in terms of long-term relationships and raising children, is that people with similar backgrounds and so forth are more likely to stay together. But how much of it is conscious versus unconscious? I don’t know. Some of it is definitely conscious deliberation in terms of choosing who would be in one’s own ballpark, mate-wise (I’ve done it myself!). But there’s work also on exploring to what extent people are unconciously drawn to others similar to themselves.
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kamenin says:
I have some problems with the discussion here. I don’t even disagree with a lot that is said, I just think it’s more complicated.
For example, when you claim some qualitiy like ‘hotness’ that women would go after if not forced otherwise - isn’t that rather similar to evo-psychology? Tall, good built, young = good hunter = high status; good looking = healthy = able to stay a good hunter and gaining status? Isn’t your/our model of hotness built after high status men of the past, just like ev-psychos would guess?
I have a more disillusioned view of humans so I don’t really believe in people “following their hearts” but in subconscious calaculations telling the heart what’s worth to follow. So that women are calculating isn’t misogyny to me as men are too; only, that for sex women are more likely to be in a selecting position therefore their choices are more in the open. (Of course, misogyny enters the question again with male scientiest seeing male as normal and women as some aberration to explain)
As a scientist I give you that ev-psych is quite often very bad science if that good at all. Lot’s of studies and interpretations simply don’t hold up. I just disagree with the notion that the basic assumption is worthless or that 100% of our behaviour is cultural based (as Cannonball does).
My basic criticism of ev-psych that to my knowledge they still lack the tools to distingish between biological and cultural influenced outcomes so their results at this point are educated guesses, at best. -
The Ghost of Violet says:
For example, when you claim some qualitiy like ‘hotness’ that women would go after if not forced otherwise - isn’t that rather similar to evo-psychology?
First of all, I agree that mate choice is complex, and this thread has kind of gotten away from the simple point I wanted to make. I was responding to the suggestion –and this in a book about human evolution — that males have evolved to be attracted to good genes and females have evolved to be attracted to wealth/status. The dichotomy was in the original statement that I was objecting to. And I simply wished to point out that the evidence shows nothing of the kind — that females are quite attracted to good genes. And when females seek mates based on wealth/status it is clearly a socioeconomic decision. There is no reason to suppose that women have some module that evolved in the Pleistocene to make them look for the size of a man’s wallet.
Tall, good built, young = good hunter = high status; good looking = healthy = able to stay a good hunter and gaining status? Isn’t your/our model of hotness built after high status men of the past, just like ev-psychos would guess?
By “hotness” I just meant the kind of personal sex appeal that men are assumed to have evolved a preference for in women. As for your equation, you could just as well say a good looking female = healthy = good gatherer/hunter = high status.
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Kiuku says:
I’d also like to add that women, and girls especially learn very early on that it is -not- acceptable to comment on men’s bodies, and sometimes even to state preferences for men’s bodies. This has been my experience. Men are told they are visual and so it is alright for them to objectify women, while women are directly negatively reinforced from objectifying men’s bodies.
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kamenin says:
I see, and I agree. It’s very much interchangeable, anyway. Most people look for both, a providing, caring, and sexy partner, I think, with money only a small part of the equation and not nescessarily only on the female side.
For ev-pys, as it is indeed a socioeconomic decision, a reasonable ev-psy could ask how long the odds were that way and if we can see some bias therefore in the female/male tendency towards falling in love with ‘high-status’ men/women due to selection advantages of having the means to support more offspring and different chances of being the ‘provider’ not the ‘carer’. At the moment most of ev-psy seems more to bother with proving some behaviour as ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ which is a category error at best. I’m not sure how much of that perception is due to lazy/stupid scientists or just lazy/stupid science journalism.
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tobias says:
Ghost of Violet,
first off, thanks for this thread. Quite frankly, it’s one of the best thread on this issue (female mate choice) that I have read. That said, I’d like to note a couple of things -
But if you’re referring to the idea that some of our behaviors are grounded in our biology and the evolution of our minds, that’s not even a controversial idea.
I’m not so sure about this not being a controversial idea among the adherents of some 20th century “isms”, femin-ism included. Quite frankly, I’ve just read an introduction to a gender studies reader written by an MIT professor, and I did not get the impression that your assertion is uncontested… to the contrary, actually: I think one of the fundamental weaknesses of feminism/gender studies is to look at gender interaction with only ONE historical dimension (”power”/”oppression”) in mind while ignoring another one - the biological/evolutionary dimension. No one seems to be trying to make the complete argument. It would be, in my impression, easy to replace “biological” with “cultural” in your following statement without making it any less true -
So when we look at the biological substrate of our behavior and make guesses about it, we need to bear in mind that we are talking about a substrate, not the whole story.”
As for -
The phylogenetic analysis (Sillen-Tullberg and Moller, 1993) suggests that humans derive from a promiscuous ancestor with concealed ovulation; possibly the concealed ovulation served to reduce infanticide (Hrdy’s many-fathers theory). But once our ancestors had evolved concealed ovulation, the function was available to be co-opted for other purposes, and at some point it may have shifted to encourage monogamy (the father-at-home theory).
But the sexual evolution of our species remains murky.”
May I ask how this is NOT evolutionary psychology? Isn’t evolutionary psychology - at its root - simply assuming that mating practices (in evolutionary time frames) have an impact on evolution? Given that mating is the most important evolutionary act of any individual, how can evolutionary strategies hot have a profound impact? I’m sure there’s a lot of bad research, and I’m sure some of it is done / published with a particular agenda in mind - but does that invalidate the concept/the idea?
Abd finally, to return to the immediate subject of the post - as for women being less attracted by visual sexyness than men - which, of course does not mean that beauty may not be women’s most important selection criterion, just that men seem to be relatively less concerned with other criteria - have you heard of this paper? Would you consider neurological research a better approach to determine the cultually independent part of human “attraction patterns”?
This is a part of a report about the paper from the telegraph.uk
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Men find photos of the opposite sex much more ‘rewarding’ than women, new research claims today.
According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men.
The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan studies show that “reward centres” are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman’s face or body whereas they are not in females. It also shows men are more likely to make an effort to view pictures of the opposite sex and pay out money.
The findings shed light on why men are much greater consumers of pornography than women and why sales of Playboy have always exceeded those of Playgirl, according to Dr Benjamin Hayden at the Centre for Neuroeconomic Studies, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina.
‘One natural inference is that men are more willing to pay to see these images,” he told The Daily Telegraph. …’
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Damnit, I’m out here in a tent in the Himalayas on a lousy connection, but I’ll try anyway:
I’m not so sure about this not being a controversial idea among the adherents of some 20th century “isms”, femin-ism included.
It is an uncontroversial idea that we are animals, that we evolved from earlier primate ancestors, and that this informs our behavior. (I’m ignoring creationists who are about as relevant as Flat Earthers.) All feminist theorists and social scientists know that we are animals with a long evolutionary past. No one imagines that we were suddenly plopped here on earth with blank slates for minds (a silly straw argument, the kind of tendentious thing Steven Pinker specializes in). We eat, fuck, sweat, run, kill, get angry, get afraid, perceive objects, hear sounds, flap our mouths to communicate, etc., etc. We’re animals. Really, really not controversial.
What is difficult with human behavior is determining how much is innate and how much is cultural — nature versus nurture. It’s a mix, obviously, but figuring out what’s what is far more difficult than most people realize. For every human behavior, there are countless variations. Nothing is absolute. In fact, the only absolute things are those that are related to our physical bodies: women get pregnant, while men never do. But everything else is variable: for example, women usually take care of small children, but sometimes men do. In some cultures, in fact, men do most of the childcare after weaning. So nothing is set in stone. We’re animals, but we’re cultural animals. Our behavior is astoundingly variable.
May I ask how this is NOT evolutionary psychology?
It’s not evolutionary psychology. It’s just evolution.
Isn’t evolutionary psychology - at its root - simply assuming that mating practices (in evolutionary time frames) have an impact on evolution?
No. That’s just sexual selection at work in evolution.
Evolutionary psychology, as it’s practiced, is a set of very specific assumptions:
1. That the human mind is massively modular, comprised of hundreds or thousands of discrete modules (functions, programs) that determine our behavior.
2. That these modules evolved as adaptations in the Pleistocene to meet Pleistocene conditions and are hard-wired into our brains.
3. That these modules are discernible by examining the behavior of modern people, since humans share a universal set of modules unaffected by culture.
4. The the human mind has not evolved since the Pleistocene.Etc., etc. There is no reason to imagine that any of those assumptions are true; I could go into all the reasons this is nonsense, but I should save that for a post. But in brief, I’ll just note that scientists in all the relevant fields (evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neurobiology, anthropology, archaeology) consider the ev psych paradigm absurd.
Would you consider neurological research a better approach to determine the cultually independent part of human “attraction patterns”?
Why? If you’re doing neurological research on tiny infants who have been exposed as yet to minimal socialization, then you could hope to find innate behavior. Or if you found pattern that held true across all human beings, independent of culture or social setting, then you could be finding something innate. But otherwise, no. Our brains are plastic, and they change and grow and rewire themselves as we ourselves change and grow and have experiences. This is one of the key findings of neurobiology.
I can’t get to the links you posted, but it sounds to me that the study is just examining the behavior of modern men and women. In our culture, men are heavily conditioned to like and use pornography, while women are not. Of course that shows up in the brain. Where else would it show up? If a group of men were conditioned to associate baseball cards with blow jobs, I can guarantee you that every time they looked at baseball cards their “reward centers” would light up.
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Kiuku says:
oh god…honestly it is like when you flush the toilet, and no matter how many times you flush it, the water is still brown.
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tobias says:
Damnit, I’m out here in a tent in the Himalayas on a lousy connection, but I’ll try anyway:
Thanks for that! Enjoy the trip!
What is difficult with human behavior is determining how much is innate and how much is cultural — nature versus nurture. It’s a mix, obviously, but figuring out what’s what is far more difficult than most people realize.
Absolutely. I could not agree more. I just believe that “nature” has been discounted to an almost absurd degree in what I call the century of the sociological field tests. How many ideologies wanted to create “the new human” by pure socialisation? And, again referring to that gender studies MIT reader - I’m quoting Sally Haslanger, “Gender and Social construction: Who? What? When? Where? How?” (p. 22) - “One feminist hope is that we can become, through the construction of new and different practices, no longer men and women, but new sorts of beings.” That’s not a fringe sentiment… I wish there were more people attempting to see the whole picture, even if it’s difficult to see.
No. That’s just sexual selection at work in evolution.
I definitely need to brush up my knowledge here. I always thought “evolutionary psychology” was exactly what you described. Pre-cultural mating decisions/behavioral patterns (psychology) having some impact on today’s humans since they were successful strategies.
1. That the human mind is massively modular, comprised of hundreds or thousands of discrete modules (functions, programs) that determine our behavior.
Again, I definitely need to brush up my knowledge here. Why would modularity not be a useful model of the human brain?
4. The the human mind has not evolved since the Pleistocene.
Well, this begs the question what is considered an evolutionary relevant timespan.
Why? If you’re doing neurological research on tiny infants who have been exposed as yet to minimal socialization, then you could hope to find innate behavior. Or if you found pattern that held true across all human beings, independent of culture or social setting, then you could be finding something innate. But otherwise, no. Our brains are plastic, and they change and grow and rewire themselves as we ourselves change and grow and have experiences. This is one of the key findings of neurobiology.
Well, sure. But I doubt examining infants would reveal a lot about human attraction patterns. What would you consider a sufficiently cross-cultural survey, given the observation that behavior is so variable for a number of reasons. Sure our brains are plastic, but I remember a recent interview with a suisse neurobiologist, Lutz Jähnke, who claimed that mating seems to be one of the least culture-influenced human behaviors. (The interview was in German). He said that after stating that the male and female cerebral reactions to certain stimuli are apparently becoming more similar - except for mating).
I can’t get to the links you posted, but it sounds to me that the study is just examining the behavior of modern men and women. In our culture, men are heavily conditioned to like and use pornography, while women are not. Of course that shows up in the brain. Where else would it show up?
I don’t know. That’s sounds to me like a toned down version of “in the end, heterosexuality is just a fetish”. I’m sure socialisation is contributing in the way you say - but in my personal experience I can’t confirm that. I went to a Catholic school, at home sexuality wasn’t an issue at all. When I grew up, there wasn’t any porn on tv, and Tim Berners-Lee was still writing HTTP/HTML. I wasn’t indoctrinated to want to see anything. Yet I stole my mum’s women’s magazines when I was 12, so I could look at the lingerie models and paid an older guy at school some cash to see a picture of a naked woman. If I was, I must just fail to see how I was “heavily conditioned” to like to look at women…
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Kiuku says:
GOV, make it stop. Please.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I just believe that “nature” has been discounted to an almost absurd degree in what I call the century of the sociological field tests.
For the record, I disagree. I think nature still hasn’t been discounted enough, the popularity of ev-psych being evidence of same. People have an awful tendency to assume that their own culture is “natural,” and this assumption keeps getting in the way of actually seeing. As long as western anthropologists assumed that men and women in other cultures were exactly like Europeans, they couldn’t possibly see clearly. As long as archaeologists assumed that people in the deep past behaved exactly like middle-class westerners, they couldn’t possibly see clearly. Evolutionary psychologists are the most naive of modern researchers, still assuming that modern Western behavior is some kind of universal “natural” endowment. The reason their nonsense plays so well in public is because most of the public is equally naive.
Why would modularity not be a useful model of the human brain?
Whether it’s useful or not is no evidence that it evolved. It would be incredibly useful for us to have eyes in the back of our heads or to be able to fly, but we didn’t evolve those things.
Most cognitive scientists believe that the brain is modular to some extent in the lower processes, perception and so forth, but that higher reasoning is more likely domain-general (a general ability to think well). This matches the evidence of our mental processes from neurobiology and cog science, as well as the analysis of how our mental abilities evolved.
What would you consider a sufficiently cross-cultural survey, given the observation that behavior is so variable for a number of reasons.
A truly cross-cultural survey would include representation from extant matrilineal/matrifocal cultures, from cultures where women enjoy maximum sexual freedom, and from all class levels of the cultures studied. Nothing has ever been done like that.
Though I would note that even if you managed something like that, you still are not necessarily going to uncover ancient or innate behavior. That’s because of cultural evolution, and the fact that at this point in global history there is not a single human being on earth who isn’t somehow tied into the world system. Just look at the attrition in human cultural patterns from 500 years ago. There is no one on earth who doesn’t know about metal and T-shirts and probably Coca-Cola. But we sure as hell didn’t have metal and T-shirts and Coca-Cola in the Pleistocene.
I don’t know. That’s sounds to me like a toned down version of “in the end, heterosexuality is just a fetish”. I’m sure socialisation is contributing in the way you say - but in my personal experience I can’t confirm that.
First of all, allow me to note that you’re not clearly differentiating between being sexually attracted to women and responding to images of naked women. People don’t have to be conditioned to be attracted to the opposite sex (or whatever sex) — it just happens.
But you are vastly underestimating the effect of socialization on your life. Most people do. Fish can’t taste the water, and all that. If you grew up anywhere in the Western world (and most of the rest of the world now, for that matter), then you grew up in an environment where the eroticization of women’s bodies is everpresent, and where nudity is sexually exciting (since most people are clothed).
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Kiuku says:
I am quickly reminded of that article I posted about the men believing that whoever had sex with a woman within the first 6 months of her pregnancy (meaning she had many partners), gave some kind of biological contribution, therefore they would all give to that child in the case that it could be theirs, but the women didn’t need the men to provide.
You know I read an article a few years ago about a present day, matrilineal island society, perhaps one of the last. The women would choose who to marry by bringing the man they chose a fish, and the men could not refuse. The women built the homes and the men were always happy to marry who ever chose him. HOWEVER, Christian missionaries have been visiting this society and slowly making it a patriarchy.
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tobias says:
Ghost of Violet,
For the record, I disagree. I think nature still hasn’t been discounted enough, the popularity of ev-psych being evidence of same.
That’s fair enough. But also for the record, I noted you did not rebut my assertion about the social creation of “new sorts of beings”…
First of all, allow me to note that you’re not clearly differentiating between being sexually attracted to women and responding to images of naked women. People don’t have to be conditioned to be attracted to the opposite sex (or whatever sex) — it just happens.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that there is a way of being sexually attracted to women but not to images of women? Are you saying that I did not need to be conditioned for my interest in seeing pictures of women or that I am simply underestimating my exposure to social conditioning?
This is all so unsatisfying. We can’t test for biological behavior OR taste the water around us since we’re swimming in it. So, essentially, there’s no way we’re ever going to solve this question and science won’t help pacify the “battle of the sexes” at all.
One question though, since you’re saying that the importance of the nurture part of the nature/nurture relation is still not sufficiently understood - what part of sexual attraction / behavior do you believe to be independent from culture?
Kiuku,
I read that article as well. I bookmarked it, but it’s no longer in CNN’s system. I wonder if you would be so willing to assume happiness if someone made the reverse argument about women being “happy to marry whoever chose her” in the days gone by and claimed that women’s liberation had ruined all that happiness by changing the rules…
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Chris says:
Well, this begs the question what is considered an evolutionary relevant timespan.
One generation.
Next question?
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The Ghost of Violet says:
But also for the record, I noted you did not rebut my assertion about the social creation of “new sorts of beings”…
Sorry, I forgot.
You quoted Sally Haslanger, who is a philosopher, not a biologist. She works on (among other things) the sociology of categories, particularly the assumption that certain things (gender, race) are “natural” categories. She’s right that this is a culturally mediated assumption. Increasingly people understand that race is a cultural construct. And the more we learn about other cultures — particularly pre-Columbian American civilizations — the more we realize that the Western notion of there being two genders is also a cultural construct, not a universal truth.
When she writes about the hope that we can transcend this kind of thinking to become “new beings” — fully human in all our complexity, not constrained by stereotypes — surely you realize she’s not talking about biology.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that there is a way of being sexually attracted to women but not to images of women? Are you saying that I did not need to be conditioned for my interest in seeing pictures of women or that I am simply underestimating my exposure to social conditioning?
Do you think that your reaction to the sight of a woman’s naked breasts is the same as the reaction of a man in some tribe where all females go bare-chested all the time?
This is all so unsatisfying. We can’t test for biological behavior OR taste the water around us since we’re swimming in it. So, essentially, there’s no way we’re ever going to solve this question and science won’t help pacify the “battle of the sexes” at all.
I would suggest you not go into any of the fields dealing with human behavior, because yes, it is complex. If you’re looking for easy answers you won’t find them.
I don’t know exactly what you mean about solving the question (what question?) and as for science pacifying the “battle of the sexes”, I don’t even know what to say. What?
One question though, since you’re saying that the importance of the nurture part of the nature/nurture relation is still not sufficiently understood - what part of sexual attraction / behavior do you believe to be independent from culture?
Most people are sexually attracted to the opposite sex.
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tobias says:
surely you realize she’s not talking about biology.
Well, I like the analytical distinction of male/female vs. man/woman. But she is talking about social engineering of what’s considered “biological”, and - particularly given your detailed depiction of what we don’t know about human nature - I don’t think that’s something anyone should do.
Do you think that your reaction to the sight of a woman’s naked breasts is the same as the reaction of a man in some tribe where all females go bare-chested all the time?
No, but I’d say that some kind of desensitization effect is a biological reaction to any stimulus overload. You know, I lived next to a construction site once for three months. The first two weeks were horrible, thereafter, I did not even hear the noise consciously. So, no, my reaction would not be the same living in that tribe, but it would not be my being socially conditioned into not being aroused by seeing breasts rather than my brain reacting to constant arousal by increasing the necessary level of a stimulus. That would be my preferred explanation.
I would suggest you not go into any of the fields dealing with human behavior, because yes, it is complex. If you’re looking for easy answers you won’t find them.
Well, my point was not mere complexity, but the apparent logical impossibility to separate the effects of nature from those of nurture. I probably would not care that much (beyond mere curiosity and scientific interest) if I did not feel that this disagreement would not be central to a lot of political and philosophical issues - about differing concepts of indivdiual liberty and to which extent biology is or should be allowed to determine or predispose any individual’s decisions. So my sigh wasn’t directed against complexity, but rather against the political instrumentalisation of the prevalent ignorance. Pretty much what I think you’re assuming only the proponents of evolutionary psychology do, but what I think the “almost only nurture side” is just as engaged in…
Most people are sexually attracted to the opposite sex.
Yeah, sure. But what does that mean in this context? What is the biological element in said attraction? Only anatomy? What defines “the opposite sex” if behavior is so variable that we cannot say it is typical of anything? Do women really like to look at sexy men, as you assume here? Or is that possibly also cultural conditioning?
Thanks for the interesting discussion!
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The Ghost of Violet says:
But she is talking about social engineering of what’s considered “biological”
No, she isn’t. Gender and race are social constructs, not biological categories. She’s talking about political philosophy, about a culture of liberation and enlightenment.
So, no, my reaction would not be the same living in that tribe, but it would not be my being socially conditioned into not being aroused by seeing breasts rather than my brain reacting to constant arousal by increasing the necessary level of a stimulus. That would be my preferred explanation.
That would be your preferred explanation? Why? Clothes are a recent human invention; for most of our species’ history we have been naked. Yet you think that the modern western man’s strong arousal at the mere sight of naked breasts is the default setting for human males? That it’s not the result of living in a clothed society where the body is highly sexualized? I must say, that is exactly the kind of cultural myopia (”my cultural pattern is the natural one”) that has impeded real understanding of human nature.
So my sigh wasn’t directed against complexity, but rather against the political instrumentalisation of the prevalent ignorance.
I am unaware of any political instrumentalisation of the prevalent ignorance. What I am aware of is the tendentious claim by social conservatives that evil liberal scientists are just pretending that human nature is poorly understood so they can continue to advocate their pinko commie feminist radicalism. The racists and sexists have been singing that song for a few decades now, and it’s bullshit. The truth is that human nature is poorly understood, though everyone is keenly interested in sorting it out. And the only way we’ll sort it out is if we stop clogging up our thinking with bigotry and stereotypes and cultural assumptions about what’s “natural.”
The politicization in the debate over human nature is always on the conservative side; they are always the ones claiming that of course blacks are dumber than whites and of course women are dumber than men, etc., etc., it’s natural, it’s in the genes, yadeyadeyade. But they insulate their argument by claiming that the only reason anyone would quarrel with these “obvious truths” is for political reasons. They fool gullible people that way — people who know jackshit about any of the sciences involved, but read some crackpot nonsense that matches their own prejudice (”science has proven that men are smarter than women but it’s politically incorrect to say so because of the damn feminists”) and say “yup! I knew it!”
But what does that mean in this context? What is the biological element in said attraction? Only anatomy? What defines “the opposite sex” if behavior is so variable that we cannot say it is typical of anything?
Femaleness and maleness are universally recognized traits. So heterosexual men in all cultures are sexually attracted to female humans. But what is it about the females that is attractive? All you can really say for sure is, femaleness itself is what is attractive. Ideals about what constitutes female beauty (or male beauty, for that matter) vary considerably, both in terms of cultural norms as well as individual preferences. On a cultural level, beauty ideals are all over the map. Consider, for one example, the Trobriand Islanders’ ideal of small eyes, no eyebrows, black teeth, face as round as the moon, fleshy nose, all accentuated by tricolor facial tattoos and nose sticks. Modern western men like slender women, but many cultures (including our own in the past) have idealized a fleshier figure. Small breasts, large breasts, thick waists, thin waists, obesity, etc., etc., etc. In some cultures older, sexually experienced women are considered more desirable than younger women, and so forth.
And as for individual preference, that’s even more variable. I don’t know of any culture that has ever idealized open running sores as a sign of beauty, but I’m sure there’s somebody in this world who is turned on by that.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Do women really like to look at sexy men, as you assume here?
I was responding to the ev psych assumption that women are hard-wired to be sexually attracted to men’s status, not their bodies. I called bullshit, and offered an array of counter-examples.
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simply wondered says:
r68 says:
‘That’s the kind of inaccurate, uninformed gross generalization that is ev-psych’s stock-in-trade, which is why it’s junk science
OK, I’ve read your and Crys T’s personal insults of me, and I’d like you to answer one question for me:
Is there room in this discussion, on this blog, for people who disagree with you?
If you’re interested in my response to your post, I’ll give it. If not and you’re just looking for warm bodies to insult, say the word and I’ll vanish.’
r68 (if you’re still here - i’m kinda late at the party) i don’t think worse of you either but i do think you’re talking shite. amazing how many people come up wth something, get it labelled crap (quite often with reasons from vi - she’s clever like that) and claim they are being insulted.
(fortunately i am way hot! not rich)
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simply wondered says:
‘Rich people typically marry rich people, college-educated people typically marry college-educated people, 10s (in the looks department) typically marry 10s, etc., etc.’
which really doesn’t explain the number of fat ugly balding posh tory men with tall skinny blonde posh (but not necessarily independently wealthy) wives. it was (albeit in my looking around style of scientific research) true in the uk in the 80s and seems to be true here today.
however your fat ugly blue collar worker gets a similarly attractive mate.
the fact that most people end up with someone from their own social circle shouldn’t need anthropologists to explain - you can’t have a lifelong relationship with someone you never met without incurring restraining orders.
have i insulted everyone yet?
and -
simply wondered says:
err, no ‘and’ - that was it.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
But Richard, if you’d just read on to the next paragraph you’d have seen this:
And high status people marry other high status people even when that status is measured by different variables, so a high status woman in our society is typically a very beautiful woman (because in our society, for a woman looks=status), while a high status male in our society is typically very rich and famous. They’re both high status, and so they end up together.
See what you miss out on by having such a tiny attention span? Like a firefly you are.
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tobias says:
Ghost of Violet,
No, she isn’t. Gender and race are social constructs, not biological categories. She’s talking about political philosophy, about a culture of liberation and enlightenment.
Not what I’m reading. If I thought she was talking about giving individual freedom, I’d be in complete agreement. I’m thinking she’s talking about taking freedom by redefining “gendered normality”. Femin-ism may be free of direct violence, yet it is not an aggression free ideology, not even theoretically. What is your take of the Bruce Reimer case?
That it’s not the result of living in a clothed society where the body is highly sexualized? I must say, that is exactly the kind of cultural myopia (”my cultural pattern is the natural one”) that has impeded real understanding of human nature.
Careful, you’re implying things I did not say. The amount of breasts available to the male eye is obviously a cultural element. So, yes, me being aroused by breasts as much as I am is a consequence of the relative lack of bare breasts in my environment. Yet - there are lots of things you may cover up as much as you’d like and I’d still not be aroused by uncovering them. Yes, I think it’s possible to create a fetish in this way, but I think that’s one mental layer on top of being aroused by breasts. This doesn’t have anything to do with my assumed tendency to “normalise” by own environment. Take a guy from said tribe, send him to a culture with covered breasts, wait a bit then expose him to bare breasts and I’d say you’d see that he, too, would be aroused by breasts.
The racists and sexists have been singing that song for a few decades now, and it’s bullshit. The truth is that human nature is poorly understood, though everyone is keenly interested in sorting it out. And the only way we’ll sort it out is if we stop clogging up our thinking with bigotry and stereotypes and cultural assumptions about what’s “natural.”
The politicization in the debate over human nature is always on the conservative side;
I agree, although I don’t think that “everyone is keenly interested in sorting it out”, and that I think the debate is politicized by everyone involved (it doesn’t matter who started, it’s just not helping the “sorting out” to pile all kinds of political pressures on science)
All you can really say for sure is, femaleness itself is what is attractive.
Well, to me that sounds a lot like a tautology. By the way, I’m a little confused about your use of “female” instead of “woman” in this context - assuming that “woman” is the gender and “female” is the sex. Thus asking what is attractive about “females” is asking for the non-cultural elements of attraction - as an (assumed) example, hip-waist ratios that are considered attractive, which, as I’ve read, are remarkably consistent in a lot of cultures.
I’m assuming that evolution’s basic reproduction strategy for every individual is to look for a mate that seem like a good genetic fit to one’s own genes and, moreover, rank relatively highly in the available gene pool - people (subconsciously) do “strategize” to secure their offspring’s well-being, do we agree here?
Wouldn’t the “culture only” approach suggest that that’s impossible to do since “good genes” aren’t identifiable as such since they always come in a cultural wrapper? But cultural changes are common, fast and usually subject to changes in the economic regime a society is living in (agriculture, industrialisation, etc), and thus “short term” (compared to evolutionary time spans) reactions to governing incentives. So if “good cultural genes” are in fact the only way of strategical mate choice, and culture cannot be expected to consistently create an identical ranking scale of “good genes”/”good mates”, wouldn’t that essentially imply the end of biological evolution to the extent that strategic mate choice requires longer term consistency in incentives to move a particular gene pool in a specific direction? If the “culture only” thesis would be correct, wouldn’t one expect humans to visibly evolve in different directions?
I’m just realising I really need to read more here. Any suggestions?
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Okay, until your last comment I was bending over backwards to give you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that you were just a painfully uninformed person with no working knowledge of evolution, biology, sociology, cultural evolution, anthropology, feminism, or anything else under discussion. You sounded like a troll, but I was trying to be fair. But now — let’s see, according to you feminism is an aggressive ideology that opposes personal freedom and was (somehow!) responsible for the gender reassignment theories of the 50s and 60s that led to the Bruce Reimer tragedy (who knew that Hopkins in the 60s was controlled by radical feminists?). So I looked you up and found that you are an antifeminist and an ignoramus who has quite the little fetishistic fantasy going about the jackbooted feminazis and their evil plan to take over the world. This makes me think that I am wasting my time trying to explain and share information with you and educate you about some of these topics, and you know what? That pisses me off. I’m fucking BUSY, and my blog is not a forum for antifeminist trolls to dick around asking questions the answers to which they don’t really want to hear. I am on balance a pretty nice and good-hearted person and I am always happy to share knowledge with people, but I will be GODDAMNED if I will play foil to some antifeminist troll who’s just amusing himself.
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Infidel says:
Hear hear, and don’t let the jackboots kick you on the way out.
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tobias says:
Ghost of violet,
wow, this is unexpected. I’m sorry you feel this way, since I found this to be the best thread I’ve read about this subject I’ve read so far. And then I found the post about the anthropological origins of male dominance which I am still reading. What I’ve read no your blog so far, I find to be truly fascinating reading.
Certainly your replies to my questions have caused me to reflect on a couple of issues, not least my apparent and unfortunate lack of knowledge necessary for a truly informed discussion. I am sorry you feel that you are wasting your time be communicating with me, but I don’t think you are.
I would like to reply to your accusations, but since you would probably classify any further reply as trolling, I will not. Again, I find some of your posts to be fascinating reading, indeed enlightening, and I would not want you to feel you’re wasting your time. So I’ll refrain from commenting further, even though I’m sure I’ll have a lot of questions after finishing reading the “male dominance” thread.
Thanks a lot for these interesting posts and your reactions to my comments (and I do mean that).
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Kiuku says:
Kiuku,
I read that article as well. I bookmarked it, but it’s no longer in CNN’s system. I wonder if you would be so willing to assume happiness if someone made the reverse argument about women being “happy to marry whoever chose her” in the days gone by and claimed that women’s liberation had ruined all that happiness by changing the rules…
That sounds just like EvoPsych! And second, you have no idea what I’m so willing to assume. Because the point I was trying to make, is not whether or not the men really were happy, and I especially do not care about men’s happiness in any society, but that Christian missionaries were there already working on changing one of the last matrifocal, matrilineal cultures.
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Kiuku says:
Okay, until your last comment I was bending over backwards to give you the benefit of the doubt, assuming that you were just a painfully uninformed person with no working knowledge of evolution, biology, sociology, cultural evolution, anthropology, feminism, or anything else under discussion.
GOV, he/she wants you to think he/she is just uninformed and finds your blog oh so intellectually stimulating, meanwhile he/she just wants to “debate” he/she’s tired old arguments over and over under the pretense that he/she is being the “logical” “even headed” one. He/she is not here to learn anything. Trust me. It’s just another one of those “debate” people.
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Kiuku says:
“Do women really like to look at sexy men, as you assume here?”
The problem is you don’t know what a sexy man is until women have sexual freedom an freedom of expression.
Female monogamy is obviously not biologically wired if in cultures that permit it females are promiscuous.
Considering Patriarchal medicine didn’t even believe in or acknolwedge the existence of a female orgasm until a couple hundred years ago, I’m very skeptical about Patriarchal medicine’s ability to measure female sexual attraction.
I do know, from my experience growing up as a woman in western society, that I have been, from birth, socialized to not discuss men’s bodies/men’s attractiveness. Men don’t like it. And men certainly don’t spend any time trying to be attractive. Men and women are taught in rape porn, which is all porn, that a woman’s pleasure is simply an extension of the mans. This male concept extends to every other facet of life. We simply won’t know until women have economic equality/freedom, and the culture allows female sexual expression what women are attracted to.
Since sexiness is as much a product of culture as it is biological, since it changes over time and across cultures, it certainly does no good to show women pictures of what we could suppose a sexy male body is, when men aren’t allowed to be sexualized in the culture.
If I showed you a picture of a native aboriginal woman with neck extensions I wouldn’t imagine you’d get a hardon as much as when I showed you a naked Pamela Anderson.
That’s not science. That’s common sense.
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Kiuku says:
Sorry GOV I totally screwed up the block quotes again!!
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Kiuku says:
Tobias’s post about how “unexpected” it is makes me want to puke. Tobias you aren’t fooling anyone. I just read GOV’s post about how you’re an anti-feminist. You’re just some MRA dude who comes here to “debate” because someone told you in school that debating was cool. We don’t need delusional men coming around pretending to be rational and logical when all you want to do is post what you believe about feminism, your racisms, sexisms, personal ideologies, and your resentments dressed up as a “debate”.
You can erase my last post responding to “Tobias.”
In the meantime, it really is unfortunate that there are no longer matrilineal/matrifocal cultures to consult/study. It really is quite convenient for EvoPsych “researchers” to no longer have matrilineal societies so they can go
“ooh look we did this extensive cross-cultural study and we found this Patriarchal bullshit in each one of them. Patriarchal bullshit is natural!”
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Infidel says:
There is a departure from nest building, even foraging and gathering. Unless your “on vacation” hiking the Himalayas, your going to build your nest mostly by accumulating money and spending it, or taking on “risk” and paying it back with interest. Your forays for sustainance consist of gathering items in a basket or cart and exchanging accumulated money for those items. There are greater numbers of exceptions to this and there are even less exceptions to patriarchal societies- they exist but -ologies build conclusions on statistical leanings often and posit them as empirical fact. Just so, I’d like to depend on bridges shown to support my weight 9times out of ten rather then the ones that represent the one, if the ascetics aren’t too compelling.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Kiuku, I fixed the blockquotes. No prob.
In the meantime, it really is unfortunate that there are no longer matrilineal/matrifocal cultures to consult/study.
Actually there are, though none of them is free from contact with the male dominated world system. The Mosu are my favorite.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Infidel, if I knew what your last comment meant I would reply.
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simply wondered says:
‘But Richard, if you’d just read on to the next paragraph you’d have seen this:
And high status people marry other high status people even when that status is measured by different variables, so a high status woman in our society is typically a very beautiful woman (because in our society, for a woman looks=status), while a high status male in our society is typically very rich and famous. They’re both high status, and so they end up together.
See what you miss out on by having such a tiny attention span? Like a firefly you are.’
so i was right all along? Woohoo!!!! gotta go and think about errr something…swim round that bowl…
you mean tobias is ‘an antifeminist and an ignoramus’ - i’m sure you could have made that phrase shorter for us goldfish. save yourself a noun - you may need it when the rapture comes. (what will the ghosts do when the rapture comes? is it entirely irrelevant or have you just kinda pre-registered? has john smith been round lately? i got to like him and i sorta miss him) comments like that are about as helpful as saying i have a whatsit thing like you said earlier.
and infidel is being all beyond understanding again - *fails to collapse in bewilderment*
plus ca change
(note to self: read all of the post ya foo.
or some of it at least) -
Infidel says:
As per #72, I was thinkn’ bout how paleolithic man had no wallet, job, or government subsidies. Now I’m thinkn’ bout how I have no mental facilties, and if your hiking the Himilayas your closer to a paleolithic existence then my day job that’s all, just thinkn’.
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Infidel says:
The other thing, it occurs to me after rereading what I said in #72, or point I tried to make, or thought I had- I don’t like statistics. Violet, rest in peace, used to present tribes as evidence of whatever that must have represented about .00000000000000000001% of Humanity and so had very little statistical significance where expert sociologists are looking for support of their general human theories much bigger numbers are required.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Violet, rest in peace, used to present tribes as evidence of whatever that must have represented about .00000000000000000001% of Humanity and so had very little statistical significance where expert sociologists are looking for support of their general human theories much bigger numbers are required.
It doesn’t work like that. What percentage of modern humans are hunter-gatherers? Almost none. Yet everybody agrees that in the distant past, that was the life mode of all humans.
We know just from historical records that in the past, a large proportion of human societies were organized along matrilineal lines, very differently from the modern Eurasian patriarchal world system that has now crowded out almost everything. All the civilizations of the Americas are gone, all the African civilizations have been warped or destroyed by the world system, same with Australia, with Southeast Asia, etc. The handful of remnants still remaining are just the residue of what used to be.
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Infidel says:
“The handful of remnants still remaining are just the residue of what used to be.”
…those remnants may hold humanities future. When I see humans foraging through garbage cans, I think how little I would be able to survive like that and how valuable that knowledge of survival would be when the shit hits the fan. I never think America is above the fray and can’t ever possibly slip into the nightmare of war, and pestilance, not necessarily in an armageddon but in a slow agonizing decline, punctuated by horrific incidents. Is communication with the Ghost of Violet considered “praying” because she is spirit and infallable?
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Did you understand that in my second paragraph I was talking about remnants of matrilineal societies, not hunter-gatherers? Cause with the garbage can survival thing you got going there I’m not sure.
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Infidel says:
Modern surviving matrilineal societies-Yes, sort of. Pardon me while I google, and then peruse ReclusiveLeftist, you have cited these societies before. They are to the lay person obscure. I am lay(m).
“…life mode of all humans…”"…large proportion of human societies were organized along matrilineal lines…”
No, honestly I did think you were talking about hunter/gatherers. -
The Ghost of Violet says:
I don’t think I’m being clear. Not just matrilineal societies but other types as well.
Okay, let me start again.
There are/have been a number of different types of social organizations among various human populations. Probably the oldest is that which we see among modern hunter-gatherers: a small democratic egalitarian band. There is no room for a big hierarchy, and everybody in the group is pretty much equal. The status of women is also usually very high, but in modern hunter-gatherers this can vary depending on contact with surrounding cultures and on the economic resources. Many African hunter-gatherer groups are extremely gender-equal, but you see more male dominance with some Amazonian groups, for example.
Beyond the stage of the egalitarian band, all kinds of possibilites have been recorded. A few:
1. Men and women lead separate economic and social lives, and are equal but different (Australian foragers)
2. Matrilineal horticultural society where women farm and men handle the pasturing/trading — shared lives, but separate realms of power (very common pattern, all over the world)
3. Male dominated societies, with men exerting social control over women
4. Full-blown patriarchy (which is where we came from)
5. Near-matriarchy, with women holding the center and men acting as economic outliersAnd many other permutations.
If you could take a time machine back and survey human populations around the world a few thousand years ago, you’d find all these types of systems. That diversity has decreased steadily as the Borg ship of Eurasian civilization (which is patriarchal) has expanded over the globe. Just as untold thousands of human languages once spoken have now dwindled to a bare remnant of the former diversity, so with human cultures.
Patriarchy is ubiquitious today, but so is Coca-Cola. So are T-shirts. Didn’t used to be like that.
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Infidel says:
How would you take into account the matrilineal affects divorce must be presenting to our patriarchy beyond the knee jerk MRA panic in our courtrooms, woman by far are the constant in all childrens lives, won’t the greater isolation from separation from fathers and/or habitating with surrogate fathers enhance the rebuilding of an underlying matrilineal positive culture that may, in the future, be more prone to female social power structures and the dismantling of the inhumane, archaic and failed aspects of patriarchy?
