I
was quite impressed with the pages I read on your website, and what
was often your flawless logic and common sense, until I came to your
"Men are ugly. Women are poor" page, and found it to be
the biggest bunch of crap I've read in a long time.
The
idea that women are better looking than men is just silly. Our particular
society views women as being more attractive than men, partly because
men are still running the society in many ways and express their viewpoint
more fully than women do, partly because women put much more effort
into trying to look attractive than men do. Men in our society certainly
do strongly find women to be more attractive than men, and put this
viewpoint forth constantly, and they're the ones writing and directing
all the movies, tv shows, controlling media in general, and so we
have a society where we're constantly bombarded with this viewpoint.
Your
article began with, "Why is it that guys always seem to go for
looks, no matter what a girl's personality might be like, whereas
chicks go for a guy with money, or a nice car or something like that."
I
think you just need to look at it from the viewpoint of evolutionary
psychology to answer this one. Men are attracted more to looks because
having sex with attractive women has been a good reproductive strategy
for some hundreds of thousands of years now. An attractive woman is
one who is young, physically healthy, able to bear children, and if
she will have sex with the man, great, he gets to pass on his DNA.
Women
are not so attracted to looks because having sex with a random attractive
man is a TERRIBLE reproductive strategy for her. Alright, being attractive
at least means he is probably healthy and has decent genes... which
will do her no good when he takes off and leaves her to raise the
child alone and she runs out of food and the kids starve. She needs
to find a man who will stick around and help her raise that child,
and to figure out if he will do that, she needs to look to personality
characteristics. Also, she needs to look to the male's status within
society, to see if he will have the resources to help her raise the
child, which is why today women are attracted to men with money.
Women
only have one workable reproductive strategy, which is Find a Good
Mate. Men have two: Find a Good Mate, and Have Sex with Any Fertile
Woman You Can. The second strategy is great, if the guy can pull it
off, he could theoretically go about having hundreds of children,
and probably the women would manage to raise many of them even if
he abandoned them completely. The second strategy requires only that
the man find a sexual partner who is a fertile woman, which he can
identify solely by looking to her body, which explains the major attraction
to women's bodies. Since women usually won't go along with this strategy,
men also have the first one.
The
first strategy, Find a Good Mate, is not the same for men as it is
for women, because even there men are still looking for attractiveness
more than women are. A woman can have a child with a man who is 20,
40, even 60 years old or older. A man must find a woman who is young
enough to still have children. Nature has to see to it that even the
most dimwitted ignorant caveman can successfully spot a fertile woman,
and it does so by focusing his interest once again on women's bodies.
Attractive = young = fertile = good mate. In addition, a man can pretty
much count on the fact that his potential mate is going to stick around
and try to raise her own children, since all women are following their
own Find a Good Mate strategy, so he doesn't have to worry quite so
much about her personality characteristics.
In
our society, men are so fixated on women's looks and communicate so
strongly their own viewpoint of the incredible attractiveness of women's
bodies that women themselves have accepted the male viewpoint that
women are attractive and men are not. There have been other societies
in the past, and I'm thinking of ancient greek and roman societies,
where men were considered more attractive than women.
Any
thoughts on this?
Of course I have
thoughts! I have thoughts on everything! Just about. And so we'll
address these vitally important topics relating to the ever-popular
sexes men and women by means of a) first spewing out some random thoughts
in a gentle yet charming manner; and then b) talking about sex, mating
strategies, evolution, men and women, and also sex. That will
be lots of fun! Let's get started.
Random Thought
#1: That
was an unusually coherent rant for a reader of prettyfedup.com. Are
you sure you're okay? Perhaps you're not surfing the web enough. Sufficient
exposure to the World Wide Web (as we like to call it here) usually
results in enough brain damage to make composing complete sentences
seem like a ridiculously difficult waste of time! If you are surfing
the web regularly and yet your brain is still not this damaged, may
I suggest you combine web-surfing with the intake of large quantities
of alcohol. That should solve your coherence problem in no time!
Random
Thought #2: I didn't think I'd get away with 'men ugly, women
poor' forever and lo and behold I didn't! I composed that answer for
the primary purpose of cracking myself the hell up and in that endeavor
I succeeded admirably. But I suspected that some alert reader would
take issue with it eventually. And now you have.
All right, that's
enough introductory random thoughts. Let's dive into the meat of your
comments.
Your Comments
#1 and My Random Thoughts #3 before Devoting this Page Wholeheartedly
to Just Talking About the Sexual Strategies of Humans:
"The
idea that women are better looking than men is just silly."
It isn't really.
And in spite of the fact that a great many jokes are devoted to the
subject of women, beauty, ugliness, and other hilarious shit, underneath
it all, nobody's laughing because it's serious business. I haven't
read a great deal of research on this subject, but I have devotedly
perused what I have found and it appears that -- normal
people think women are better looking than men. By normal
people in this case we mean people who are a) alive; b) have eyesight;
and c) live somewhere on the globe.
This includes
rich people and poor people, people with education and people who
have never even heard of education, people in modern fast-paced cultures
with lots of cell phones and people who live on remote islands who
refer to the 'evil spirits of the sea' and shit like
that. In fact, not only do people everywhere, in every culture, seem
to think that young women are better to look at than just about any
human thing except their own children, but they also think that men
get significantly better-looking the more they look like women!
This has to do
with things like eye size. Women have proportionally larger eyes than
men (hence eye shadow, mascara and other cues that women use to let
men know - hey I have big eyes! I'm a woman, you doofus!). Men
who have larger eyes than your average Joe are judged as more attractive
and handsome by people everywhere who can see. This is why
a fair number of you guys out there should be wearing eye liner (not
all of you), and it is in no way my fault that most of you aren't
and probably aren't going to. I'm dispensing this handy handsome-enhancing
advice for free and most of you aren't following it.
There are other
differences between men and women in the relative proportions of the
face and in skin texture and so on. Men who look more like
women in these proportions look better than guys who don't!
The standards of beauty at this point appear to be universal (and
perhaps hard-wired), not cultural, although the standards of fashion
are obviously another story altogether. You don't have to be sexually
attracted to a beautiful person to recognize that they are one; in
fact, you may very well not be. Hetereosexual men are not particularly
sexually attracted to good-looking guys but they recognize them. Heterosexual
women are not particularly attracted to good-looking women but they
can recognize them.
Even men recognize
that men who look too much like men don't look good. Some researchers
theorize that this is because a feminized male face gives onlookers
the impression that the person who has it is less likely to be suddenly
overcome by an excessively testosterone-fueled desire to beat the
living shit out of them until they're dead and then take all the stuff
they had managed to accumulate before they got the living shit beat
out of them and died. This is an important consideration in
choosing one's companions!
Now does this
actually have an effect on human life? Maybe. People of both sexes
around the world judge the looks of potential mates before they judge
anything else. This is not hard to understand since hey! it's
easy to do. As you note, it doesn't take a college degree to see whether
or not someone is good-looking, your brain apparently knows it automatically.
Women often devote a great deal of discussion to men's looks when
discussing attraction among themselves and most definitely consider
it a favorable characteristic. One of the words women use to describe
a good-looking man, particularly a young one is 'cute'. 'Cute'
is a diabolical code word for 'looks like he would not inflict harm.'
Really it is. So in real life, and casual conversation, women
do actually devote a fair amount of time to analyzing a man's facial
features to determine whether or not he looks scary or dangerous,
scouting the face of the man in question for potential clues that
he is not interested in beating the fuck out of them.
Male features
that swing heavily towards the male end of the Facial Proportion Scale
(such as a very heavy brow ridge and so on) seemingly tend to be associated
in onlookers' minds with things like 'aggression' and 'stupidity'.
The aggression/stupidity combo makes everyone wary. This
is the 'You look like a fucking Neanderthal for chrissakes, at least
fucking shave and get a haircut or something' Effect.
People don't necessarily
do this on purpose of course - almost no one gets out a ruler and
measures the facial proportions of the people they meet or see in
photographs. And they don't necessarily know they are doing it either.
But they do know they are doing it. People around the world make up
myths like Beauty and the Beast & Frankenstein because it's the
Universal Story Of That Poor Ugly Guy Who Looked Like A Fucking
Aggressive And Stupid Neanderthal But It Turns Out Inside He Wasn't
Really, At Least Not Totally. People know that facial proportions
and heavily male facial characteristics are not always necessarily
proof that you should be wary, suspicious, & uncomfortable around
such a person even if you are secretly convinced the person who has
them is aggressive and stupid - but they are anyway. Ugliness isn't
really fair - and people know this - but they're scared of it anyway.
Women whose facial
proportions are more like those of men - judged unattractive. Women
who look an awful lot like women - more attractive. The vote is in
- worldwide - women are better-looking than men! The reason this isn't
silly is because it has a big impact on people's lives and everyone
knows this. I'll repeat the obvious (again) - rich and good-looking
is more fun than poor and ugly!
If you want a
scientifically accurate rendering of a good-looking man, study a picture
of Johnny Depp. In fact, in the name of Serious Scientific
Research, I think I'll do that right now!
Okay, yup, close
observation confirms it. This particular man's facial proportions
come close to the feminine ideal. This means that this individual
can scowl, sneer, spit, or wear eyeliner and he will still be good-looking!
It's in the proportions. (Won't we all be surprised when he beats
the living shit out of us and takes our stuff anyway? Hah, hah, joke's
on us.) Now you can hate Mr. Depp for this if you like.
I suspect he hates himself for it. You can be furious at human nature
for this if you like. Some people are. Knock yourself out. But that's
the way it is. People who look like women look better.
Which
bring us, accidentally, to the Greeks. I'm not qualified
to comment on the Romans, thank goodness, which means I don't have
to. I'm not really qualified to comment on the ancient Greeks, either,
but what the hell. The artwork I've seen from that era (statues and
vases and shit like that) indicate that the ancient Greeks used the
same basic system.
Men who looked
like women were immortalized in stone (look at the pictures, mon),
had praises sung to their name, and apparently had the advantage (if
you choose to look at it that way) of being fucked by old ugly guys
who could afford to pay for it. In other words, the cultural practice
of honoring homosexual sex between ugly old guys (many of them bald
from the other artwork I've seen) and young men who looked a lot like
women had an effect on who had artwork and squirrely myths dedicated
to them. The default setting for sexual attractivenes is feminine
and if you are going to have sex with men, it's the feminized ones
who do the attracting.
It's possible,
I suppose, that the general ancient Greek population of men was better-looking
than average, and the general population of ancient Greek women was
uglier than average. It's possible. I'm not going to rule it out.
Maybe the men looked like women and the women looked like men. I suspect
however, that ugly old rich elite guys culled the good-looking male
people from the male population and left the average ugly ones alone.
Most people, most of the time, probably went with the basic default
setting of hey, you're a woman, I'm a man, let's reproduce!
And they did this under the radar of the whole 'Narcisssus,
you are such a good-looking man I could fall in love with you!' cultural
tradition.
Greeks certainly
understood that women could be beautiful since the face that launched
a thousand ships was female. And horny God of all horny Gods, Zeus,
was more than willing to get it on with just about every female he
spotted, apparently under the impression that they were damn good-looking
if the myths are to be believed. And the Greek goddess of beauty,
Aphrodite, was a goddess. And the Roman goddess of beauty, Venus,
was a goddess also. Apparently the Greeks were just willing
to scout out female beauty in men also! Chalk it up to broad-mindedness,
an over-concern with how people looked, utter gayness, or to whatever
the hell else you want to chalk it up to.
Now...all that
said...are the researchers really right? Is the underlying
fear of Neanderthals at least partly to blame for the apparently universal
human preference for feminized facial proportions? Do they have their
own cultural biases? Did they skew the results by slipping
in some pictures of Heidi Klum amongst the photos and computer-generated
renderings of regular people they were forcing poor Maori test subjects
to look at while giving biased social cues such 'hey, she's sure hot,
isn't she? Whaddaya think?' thereby hopelessly compromising the objectivity
of their research?
Well, sure, probably,
at least to a certain extent. It's probably wise not to take this
kind of shit at face value (hah! hah! face value, get it?
Get it? Oh all right, I'll settle down now.) But on the other hand,
it's really not fair, or even wise, to chalk this up entirely to pernicious
social and cultural programming. Our old friend, evolution, probably
is at work here. People probably do make unconscious judgments
on the basis of facial proportions. (I know I do! It's fun!) The
question isn't really whether women are better-looking than men (in
the eyes of humans anyway) - they just are. The question is how did
evolution convince them to get that way?
So
what has evolution been doing to make women so damn physically attractive....
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