What Tomato Sauce Can Tell Us About Attraction
My wife turned up this post, in which a blogger goes on a bit of a rant in regards to attractiveness and weight. I’d like to throw my two cents into the pot and comment on two specific things she touches on briefly.
One of the comments she reproduces in her post says:
Society has not conditioned us, evolution has. Men are attracted to women that represent the best chance of bearing their young and caring for them. This means young and physically fit.... This is not opinion, it is fact.
The idiocy and wrongness of this comment astound me. Evolution actually selected for chunky woman. Who do you think took better care of an infant: a woman who had the fat reserves to produce a continuous supply of milk even if she wasn’t eating regularly herself, or a woman who had no fat reserves at all, and wasn’t able to produce milk on days when the hunters didn’t bring home any food? Furthermore, there is a reason woman’s hips, and hence their gait, differ from men’s. Evolution selected for wide hips that allowed for easy birth. Those women who died in childbirth, and took their babies with them, obviously didn’t get to contribute to the gene pool. In fact, its only because of modern science that this selection effect doesn’t continue. The human infants head is rather large compared to the birth canal. Until very recently, as in the last 100 years, a woman was more likely to die in child birth than any other circumstance.
I’m sure the person who posted this comment imagined in his head that a physically fit woman, when attacked, could grab her infant and run with it, leaving a fatter woman behind to get eaten. But its been a long time since humans have been a prey animal for any large predator, and that has been the case for thousands of years. When you exist in the context of a hunter gatherer society, being “physically fit” is no longer a pre-requisite for survival. On the other hand, easy child birth is damn useful, as is being able to survive lean times on fat reserves.
The other point I want to touch on is exemplified by this comment:
Are you really that naive? seriously. You KNOW what guys want, look around! They want that hot, sexy, body, a gal to make them look good too. MOST men do not prefer an overweight woman.
Its that last clause, that “MOST men do not prefer an overweight woman.” Well, duh. Most men don’t. And most men don’t prefer an underweight woman, for example Victoria Beckham.
Its like this. Overweight and underweight implicitly refer to an average weight that you are over/under in relation to. If MOST men preferred overweight woman, the average weight of woman in the population would shift towards the heavier side (over a few generations), and they would cease to be over weight. They would be the new average weight. Similarly, if most men preferred underweight woman, the average weight would shift towards the thinner side (again, over generations), and they would cease to be underweight. Obviously, this is a process that happens over generations (as I said), and it is possible that at this moment in time, we are shifting to a thinner standard. But only time will tell if that’s the case, and if so, we are moving away from a historical preference that held sway as recently as 100 years ago.
Here is an experiment that could be carried out. Take the weight of every woman in a region, and find the average. Take a photo of every woman in the same region, and ask the men of the region to rate the attractiveness of each. Find the average attractiveness of each woman. How do you think the average weight and the average attractiveness will be related to each other? I contend that the closer to the average weight a woman is, the higher her averaged attractiveness. Any other outcome would be surprising, and in need of an explanation. The reason they should closely correlate is that, contrary to some peoples opinion, weight is heavily influenced by genetics. As such, the most attractive weight has an evolutionary advantage in terms of reproduction, hence it should be represented in the population at a higher rate than other weights.
Now, obviously this is vastly simplified, as other factors do play into the genetics. For example, having blue eyes are a recessive trait. If one parent has brown eyes, and one blue, chances are that the offspring will have brown eyes. Something similar may happen with weight, i.e. the “thin” gene is dominate, and the “fat” gene is recessive. But the point remains: The average person in a society should be averagely attractive. Hence, the average weight should be the most commonly considered to be an attractive weight.
The fact is, sexual selection is a stupidly powerful force, and sometimes selects for things that most certainly DO NOT help the individual survive. Sexual selection only affects your chance to reproduce. Does anyone really think that the peacocks giant ass-feathers make it harder for its predators to find the males of the species? And there is a damn good reason the females don’t have them. The males just have to live long enough to have sex. The females have to live long enough to rear young. If you think of this in relation to humans… well,sexually selecting for females that are prone to die in childbirth seems like a recipe for disaster. Maybe modern medicine can make up for it. I don’t know.
I do know, however, that if only thin people reproduced, which would be the case if “most” men wanted a mate that looked like Victoria Beckham and wouldn’t settle for anything less, then most woman would look like her. If most woman wanted an Adonis and wouldn’t settle for anything less… well, then that’s what most men would look like. But that’s not what we see when we look at the world, hence we can infer that the “hypotheses” in the above comment is wrong.
None of this is to say that I think evolutionary psychology is a real scientific field. But people who argue as the commenter above did fail by their own standards.
Now this post has largely talked about some sort of “average” attractiveness. But the fact is, this is a crock of shit, and I’ve only used it to illustrate that claims like the above just don’t make sense. Attractiveness is not a hierarchy, with a well ordering. It exists on a horizontal spectrum, and we clump at various places along the spectrum, just like we do with tomato sauce. If everybody was attracted to the same thing, we should expect to find porn to be pretty homogeneous. This is most certainly not the case, as can be verified if you are brave enough to google for “free porn” and survey the results.
The laws of science are a harsh mistress, those people have been looking for the perfect Pepsi, they are wrong, and should be looking for the perfect Pepsis.