Warning, I’m playing “Internet anthropologist” again (to use Lustman’s term), so if that’s not your thing, click-through right now and save yourself some time.

If you’re still with me, you may find this as interesting as I did.  A friend of mine is a professor at a major So. Calif. University.  She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is an expert in Human Sexuality, both of which she teaches.  We were talking about the basis of sexual attraction and gender differences when she told me something really surprising.

She said researchers have found very little genetic evidence as to why men and women look so different physically.  Aside from the obvious difference in sex organs, there’s no real reason why women should be shorter than men, or so much lighter than men.  Also, no clear genetic reasons can be found to explain why women’s breasts are larger than they need to be to nurse a baby.  Similarly, no real reason can be found why women’s legs are placed further apart and hips wider, when the internal dimension of the pelvic opening (critical for childbirth) doesn’t necessarily correlate to the external width of the hips.  I always assumed these things are deeply imbedded in our genetic code, but apparently this isn’t the case.

The real shocker is the working theory that many researchers now believe to be the cause of the very real physical differences between the sexes:  Women look the way they do because that is the way men prefer them to look.

In other words, over many millennia, men have selectively chosen women as wives and mothers of their children based on possessing certain physical characteristics that are the key triggers of sexual attraction.  Over the generations, the male response to these female sexual cues has served to amplify them in each subsequent generation. These include a preferred hip/waist ratio, a certain breast size and shape, an overall height as a percentage of their own.  Similarly, a symmetrical facial shape and specific features are preferred in nearly every culture of the world that has been studied.  

It is believed that the net result of this slow and imprecise process of mate selection over time, is that women’s appearance has actually evolved to approach a shared male ideal as to what is most attractive.  So forget about love and marriage for a minute and remember the objective of all species in nature is to survive by first being selected to reproduce and that survival can only be assured by passing on one’s genes to another generation. Where lesser species need only rely on scent, man first responds to a complex set of visual sexual cues.  Developing a more curvaceous female figure is the perfect physical adaptation needed to attract a mate that would lead to children. More recently women have practiced and refined the art of sexual attraction, and men have faithfully responded for millennia. Before there were Wonderbras, women wore bustles and whalebone corsets to accentuate the female hip-to-waist ratio (in a socially acceptable manner, of course).  The exaggerated shape unconsciously communicating fertility and the cinched waist enhanced the appearance of the breasts- all very strong sexual visual cues.  

Now if you think an appearance change of this magnitude couldn’t take place in a reasonable timeframe, just remember that the negative effects of a small gene pool in the mountains of Appalachia were well documented by 1900, when the population was only 200 years old in that location.  There are many other examples of human behavior changing other species too.  Fishermen in Japan have changed the appearance of a type of crab by throwing back the ones that have the markings described in an old legend, and harvesting the others.  Over time, the entire population took on the markings described in the legend, because they were the ones allowed to survive and reproduce.  Similarly, almost all of today’s dog breeds aren’t natural, but rather have been created by man in the just last few hundred years (human years, not dog years).

So then the devious mind of G2 asked the Professor the following question- Is it a coincidence that the world’s oldest culture (Chinese) that has also practiced arranged marriages for the better part of 5000 years has arguably evolved the least difference between the male and female forms?  Do the Chinese women have smaller breasts and more slender hips because historically, they didn’t need them to attract a mate?  They are, after all, the living-proof that small works just fine for childbearing, so is the inverse the proof of the theory?  Hmmm, she replied, sounds like a good topic for a doctoral thesis.

So the next time you fill out a review form, remember that men have been “evaluating” women since before there was a word to describe it.  And now, as then, those evaluations have changed the appearance of the women being evaluated.  Good work, you guys!




-- Modified on 10/19/2001 6:13:16 PM

G2:
We need to discuss this over lunch, soon.
Get in touch with me through the usual channels.

Now I simply must share (again) my daughter's favorite
joke... she is 19 and away at college so I do this
because I miss her so...(maybe not just go with me here)

Question:  Why do women wear makeup and perfume?

Answer:  They are ugly and they smell bad!

OK... not flattering but those who know me, know how much
I love women... all women!  Have a great weekend friends!
Lustman

That if women only chose to hang with men that had huge penises that eventually ALL men on the earth will have huge penises and that men with small penises will die out completely? Or does this mean that a new continent of small penised men will form?

My mom was saying just last week that she noticed a great deal of miniature dogs of all breeds in the new city she moved to. "It's like people decided what they want and then they'd order the pup catered to their specifications." she indicated. Mail order brides are much the same. But you can't judge personality by looks and specifications and it's not likely we'll reproduce with those we are attracted to but despise so I think there's something to be said for compatibility but I'd probably put up with more shit from someone I was magnetically attracted to then someone who I wasn't.

East coasters are very different from west coasters. Italians often marry italians. Jewish, jewish. Not always but like upbringings, religions, bents often co-mingle. An Italian guy from Brooklyn is probably more likely to marry an Italian girl from Statin Island than a Jewish girl from Fort Lee but you never know. The Jewish girl from Fort Lee might want to go ski-ing at a resort in upstate NY with her boyfriend for fun. While the Italian couple might dig having their families together for a spaghetti fest. I know, I'm stereotyping but there are more ethnic matchings on the East coast then in LA. LA is more superficial and I don't like that much.

luv, me

An interesting book related to this area is "The Descent Of Woman". It seemed to be much more logical in this area than books like "The Descent Of Man" by Desmond Morris.

Hey, I thought all those studies said that women wanted a "sense of humor" in a man more than anything?  Well, we all knew that was a load of crap.

Huge penises are so 90's though, don't you think?  You're not looking far enough ahead.  In the future your manhood could be measured by how well you can post links on the internet, making Linkmeister the archetype for the man of the new millenium, and me sadly relegated to the junk-heap of time.  

But seriously (I'm sure Linkmeister wishes that was serious), any charactersitic that is considered attractive in a mate and leads to offspring will start to appear in greater percentages of the population over time, all else being equal.  Now that women select men as frequently as men have historically chosen women, we could start to see some changes..  

But  social values play a big role in this too, as you said, and we're in a period where a woman can have kids with anyone she wants, with or without marriage.  This tends to blur things a bit.  A woman could have children with three different men, based on what she found attractive at different times during her child-bearing years.  Also, in the past, a certain percentage of the population wouldn't be able to get married and have kids, perhaps because they weren't considered attractive enough.  

But we all know today you only have to be attractive enough to have sex on a dark night after many beers, a very different threshold for selection.  So this would probably lead to a significant coming together, or blurring, of characteristics that may have been growing more sharply defined in the past, reversing a long trend.

So let's see, if I have a big dick, learn how to post links, and can make a woman laugh I'm in.

I wish it were true that links get chicks, but I think we all know that size matters - of the wallet.

Unfortunately, I don't have my copy here and I'm going to have to go by memory.

Diamond says that relative size of male and female in primate species (and most other mammals) correlates strongly with promiscuity. Males and females are the same size in species that mate for life. Males are much larger than females in species in which males are highly polygamous. Human males are moderately larger than human females and he classifies us as moderately monogamous.

In reading about evolution you will read mostly about "natural selection" driving the process (in conjunction with mutation) but Diamond says the the idea of "sexual selection" goes clear back to Darwin (although if I remember correctly Darwin didn't quite have the nerve to explicitly state it). Many characteristics cannot be explained by natural selection (brown eyes don't have more survival value than blue eyes so far as anyone can determine) but appear to be the result of sexual selection. Diamond has at least one chapter on this. Some of the ramifications are fascinating.

Heather brought up penis size. Humans have HUGE penises relative to their body size compared to other primates. Diamond says that sociobiologists simply can't explain why. They even differ about whether it is to (a) attract females, or (b) intimidate other males. (He is inclined to think the later is closer to the truth.)

-- Modified on 10/22/2001 4:58:43 PM

It's a simple, and quite common biological mechanism, called "sexual selection." Although it can't be painstakingly documented across human history, a similar mechanism has been somewhat documented among captive lowland gorillas in the world's zoos. The "ugly" females (read: those not preferred by the males) tend to gain fewer fertilizations per fertility cycle, even when the males have never met one another, require no particular body type in order to ensure survival, or even have not met the female until she is in estrus because she was shipped in for the very purpose (gorilla providers!).

It makes sense. Don't have children with ugly women -- your daughters will hate you for it. They'll be less likely to get dates, regardless of what culture they change to. Providers, y'all should have lots of kids -- start donating those eggs now!

Unfortunately, the whole concept of "sexual selection" calls into question Darwinian evolution. It's plausible enough, that sexiness would be selected for in any occasion of relative safety and plenty; but in those occasions when large numbers of human infants are at significant risk of dying before reproductive maturity, it might be possible to prove that survivability would hold greater sway over genotype than would sexual desirability in phenotype alone.

That is to say, if you live with no risks, guys are free to reject ugly females; but if there are many risks, then that type of frivolous choice goes out the window, and males choose "hardier" women. Viz. early American settlers -- the lower classes tended to prefer women who could work a farm; the citified gentry tended to prefer skinny-boned women. And those preferences show in American phenotypes today ... we associate square-jawed, strong women with the midwestern lower classes (even if they don't necessarily look that way) and frail-boned, long, weaker women with the Eastern upper classes.

And furthermore, sexual selection is a circular argument. Men pick a certain variety of women. Therefore those women have more babies. Therefore men pick more of that variety of women. It proves nothing, it's just intelligent speculation, because the premise is yielded only by itself. That which is sexy, is that which we choose; or, that which we choose, turns out to be (gee what a surprise!) that which we define as sexy.

"Sexual selection." Basic Anthro 101 fare, look it up!

No it doesn't ...

Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that those women not reproduce with the men whose genes tend toward larger penises, because they enjoy big dicks so much that they don't want to cut down on their fucking by having to get pregnant and give birth. Furthermore, in some experiments only radiaclly deep-throated women could fully satisfy extremely large-penised men, to the extent that those females who were otherwise sexually undesirable were the only females those males selected (big adam's apples and very large frames being generally, today, considered unattractive on a woman). Consequently, those males with average-sized penises had GREATER access to women who were previously limiting their contact to well-hung men. Further furthermore, large penises during the Anthrax outbreak of early 2002 turned out to be biologically mal-adaptive, because the excess skin abrasions (produced by the latex of too many covered BJs) absorbed larger amounts of bio-toxin, and consequently the big-dicked male developed a stigma in urban legend status, of being an Anthrax carrier, and he tended to reproduce less often. Further further further furthermore, the question isn't who you "hang out" with, it's who you GET PREGNANT with and then RAISE THE CHILDREN TO REPRODUCTIVE MATURITY. In a presumably well-balanced enough household that the little boy can grow up to become a daddy himself. (One might argue that imbalanced households are the ones which create boys that grow into fathers of many children, but that's a different issue. The right kind of household, whatever it is.)

Genes aren't just a matter of picking a group of people to hang out with.

The reason women are smaller and weaker than men isn't because of our preference.  The reason is that as we humans evolved the sexes specialized in terms of their role in the propagation of the species.  Men are large and strong so that they can hunt for meat, which is an all-important resource containing fat, which is hard to come by for hunter-gatherers, and of course you need a chemistry book to get enough protein as a pure vegetarian, and they didn't have one.  The other reason men are strong is so that they can fight the wars and kill off the other humans competing for the same resources.  Women compete for the best most confident men because that tribe status they hold is a big part of determining how much meat she (and her kids) are going to get out of every successful hunt.  That's why they try so hard to pick a winner and want to bond for life.

The reason women are weaker and smaller is because muscle is *expensive.*  You don't realize it when you live in the modern West, because you can have all the food you want.  But I'm a very large northern European descent male with a lean body mass close to 200 pounds.  Even if I don't raise my lazy ass up out of this chair all day I burn 3000 calories of the most critical resource there is, the one thing that humans spent all of their time getting-- food.  one pound of muscle burns 50 calories in a day even if you don't move it once.  And the fact is, five men can impregnate 10 women and hunt for 10 women and fight to protect 10 women.  Men are expendable and women are not.  So they concentrate the starvation-risk and the violence-risk in one sex so that the childbearing sex can stay safe.

And it comes out in the psychology and capabilities too.  There is a reason that men are better at math and judging distance and mechanical things, and it comes down to evolution, and the same goes for the fact that women have bigger vocabularies than we do (teaching children, talking about where to find this or that tuber or berry or clean water supply, etc).  The fact is we evolved at the same time together generation by generation and what really happened was just taking the full range of behaviors men and women could do and specializing them slowly between the sexes to the greatest mutual (genetic) benefit.  A guy can die young as long as his genes get passed on.

I always thought it was because we women have been told all our lives that this
|-------------------------------------------------|
is nine inches.

Sorry to hear you've been lied to GND...any honest guy would admit that's much closer to 12 than 9.

"Unfortunately, the whole concept of "sexual selection" calls into question Darwinian evolution."

Not really. Darwinian evolution (natural selection) is not meant solely for humans. It is applied to all living things - animals, plants. At its very core natural selection is survival of the species which IS all about "sexual selection." Those things that have a better chance of reproducing will be the things that survive.

Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah....

I'm laughing so hard that my cats are looking at me like I'm crazy.

Good one, Girl Next Door.