When it comes to men looking at women it seems that beyond the waist–hip ratio the experimental multivariate evidence shows that average women’s torsos are most attractive. Got that?
Well that’s the scientific way of saying it according to this article which is behind the paywall. Not too much missed I fancy if you have this handy summary.
“The orthodoxy says that you will be attractive with a certain waist-hip ratio no matter how the rest of your body varies. Our study shows this is not the case,” says Brooks. His team asked 100 male students to judge the attractiveness of 201 line drawings of female torsos with different hip, waist and shoulder measurements. The men showed a preference for women with a waist-hip ratio of 0.7 – but only if they had an average-sized waist, hips and shoulders.
When compared with groups of real women, including Playboy centrefolds, Australian escorts advertising on the internet and average Australian women between the ages of 25 and 44, the latter group most closely matched the preferred body shape.
I didn’t know about the orthodoxy, so maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention.
Recently I heard a tall woman talking about her prospects for mating. She was about 6’3” and dated a bloke about a foot taller for a while. She just didn’t feel comfortable dating men where the main view was the top of their head. The problem was that this left her with about 3% or less of the male population. So far I gather she hadn’t mated.
And I’m reminded of our little poodle who was the runt of the litter and whose mother thought she just didn’t look right and kept taking her out into the back yard and burying her. She just didn’t conform to her mother’s idea of essential or rather allowable dogginess. I understand that kind of thing is common enough in the animal world.
So maybe the genetic maintenance of the species involves a preference for the average.
Our culture, which we all know determines how we provide the basic needs of shelter and sustenance (and not the other way around according to Zygmunt Bauman, and he’s always right), varies significantly in ways that are affected by circumstances, for example between people from the high country of Kenya and Ethiopia on the one hand and the island folk of the Pacific on the other. So maybe there is some genetic adaption to utility in providing for the basics of life.
There is something comforting in knowing that average looks best, but when you think about it those who are exactly average are a rather small group too. Average does not mean ordinary.
I wonder what the fashion industry would make of this research, if they care.
Finally, I’m sure we need further research to check out whether women see things the same way. It definitely can’t be taken for granted. It’s probably the women who run the show, determining who would be the best providers. Until we got civilisation, hierarchies and competition for individual property, perhaps.
Not sure it’s smart to post this, but here goes.
I am utterly, utterly baffled as to why there are so many studies aimed at determining with the greatest possible precision What Gets Dudes Off.
I’m also baffled by your last two sentences. It’s probably women who run the show? What show? The show that is actually a metaphor for the world, which is totally run by women and preferences the female gaze, as evidenced by the enormous number of studies into what women like to look at? That show?
Also, ‘mating’? Seriously?
Yeah, I’m finding it hard to type and *facepalm* at the same time over here…
Did you know there is an International Organization for Standardization? (ISO)
ISO exists so that products around the world can be created that;
? satisfy the customer’s quality requirements,
? comply with regulations, or
? meet environmental objectives.
It is so nice that some helpful scientists are calculating the exact quality parameters for the manufacturing of Beauty Y2K compliant women.
Brian, in case you haven’t seen this from Wikipedia:
And what about us?
Me, I like dudes with a sense of humour.
Just to add to what I said @4 – the research I’ve seen indicates that averageness being more attractive applies to both men and women. btw good point about average not being the same as common.
“I am utterly, utterly baffled as to why there are so many studies aimed at determining with the greatest possible precision What Gets Dudes Off.”
Possibly because its an interesting field, not to mention claims that real problems like anorexia and low self esteem are caused by perceptions of what’s attractive. I’m sure you could find studies which examined both genders, or women alone, Rainne, if you actually looked.
Here we report the results of a selection experiment in which we selected directly on female mating preference for attractive males and, independently, on male attractiveness in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata.
Don’t let 5 seconds on google get in the way your outrage though. Also the names for male genitalia are never used as insults.
rainne, I meant the last sentence. If we can’t discuss these things without raising the emotional temperature, and experience tells me we can’t, I’ll just make the whole thing vanish.
I tend to divide the history of homo sapiens into two phases. The first, before the invention of agriculture represents about 98.5% of our history, when we mostly lived in groups of about 100 with 30-40 adults. During that phase I suspect we were more cooperative and less individualistic, competitive and hierarchical in orientation.
During this phase I suspect that women had a lot more say than now and perhaps than men in who they partnered with and had children by. So it may well be their choices that had more to do how we develop genetically, but I don’t have any special knowledge and I wouldn’t really know.
By “mating” I simply meant finding a long term partner, but she herself was saying that the extremes in physical types have less chance of passing on their genes.
Possibly because its an interesting field, not to mention claims that real problems like anorexia and low self esteem are caused by perceptions of what’s attractive
Instead of attributing outrage to me, although obviously I am mad impressed with your ability to know what I’m thinking, try reading my post more literally I am genuinely perplexed; why is it an interesting field? Why is it a field at all?
And also, wouldn’t one way of combating low self esteem and eating disorders be, I don’t know, not saturating the media with articles about how to be attractive to men?
Here I will end my comment with a total non-sequitur about genitalia.
Maybe its me age, but I don’t think I really care. Its what’s in the mind that counts.
I like guys with senses of humour too.
Much larger than average senses of humour.
PC @ 6, I was wondering why physical looks are deemed so important.
Chris @ 4, I hadn’t seen that, but I’d heard stuff about the proportions of the face relating to mathematical proportions that are universally held to be pleasing.
Argh, I don’t mean to be flood posting, but in the time it took me to realise I didn’t blockquote, more comments happened! Addressed to me! Help!
Brian, I assure you my emotional temperature is appropriately tepid. I didn’t realise that your reference to ‘women who run the show’ was supposed to read in the past tense, thus my (genuine! again, with the genuineness!) bafflement. Because, with all due respect, it is ludicrous to claim that women currently run the show, present tense. But! If you meant ‘ran’ the show, I have exactly no knowledge with which to agree or disagree, and shall therefore do neither.
I do find it interesting, to get all meta about ‘emotional temperature’ and posts about gender, that Sean immediately characterised me as outraged, ill-researched and – no, I still don’t know what male genitalia and insults had to do with anything.
Okay! Shutting up now!
I like threads with chicks with guns.
“Why is it an interesting field?”
Well now we’re getting epistemological or something. I don’t really know but suspect that it’s due to our status as sexually reproducing creatures, and mammals (hence the boob thing). Love poetry, pop music, the career of Richard Branson. As that bloke said in that movie, “I subscribe to the opinion that everyone does everything to get laid.”
My closing comment was not really a non sequitur. I have seen that claim made against alot of very obvious evidence to the contrary. Similarly, your claim that the studies are about what gets dudes off, rather than dudettes, ignores the many studies of dudettes.
Although some work in evolutionary psychology backs modest claims with careful empirical research, the dominant strain, pop evolutionary psychology, or Pop EP, offers grand and encompassing claims about human nature for popular consumption.
It is intriguing how regularly this “interesting finding” has been reported in the media year after year after year ad nausea –since at least the 1930s,no doubt earlier in “recommended reading for ladies” – why? Obviously the fashion industry isn’t interested or it would have used the information years ago.
rainne @ 10, when communication doesn’t quite work there is usually some responsibility at both ends. I undoubtedly could have chosen my words better in the post.
But I’m not a fountain of knowledge on the subject and probably would have been better off saying less.
But the research does seem to call into question why thin body types are favoured in the fashion industry and whether that industry seriously does any research on consumer preferences. Here I’m conscious that women choose the clothes they buy and I get the impression that men dominate what goes in the fashion industry.
Liam:
Et voila
Brian & Rainne, I think the answer about the fashion/beauty industry is that it has very little to do with what straight men actually find physically attractive (in the statistical & therefore generalised sense).
It is more about commercially exploiting women’s supposed insecurities about what men find attractive (in the statistical & therefore generalised sense).
rainne
You are not being serious about not understanding why these sorts of studies are so interesting to people, are you? Try sex, love, attraction… What’s on YOUR reading list? I shudder to think.
For men, the two most important female metrics match natural and sexual selection motives: waist-hip ratio; symmetry of face.
For women, the two most important male metrics also match natural and sexual selection motives: shape of arse; wealth.
Second time I’ve used this line today:
Try saying it in Arnold Shwarzenegger’s voice.
Oh and a kind heart. I do like a kind heart in a dude.
I guess partly because, like art and beauty more generally, fashion isn’t just about “attractive” or “selling”. It’s a blend of: attractive, commerical, anti-commerce, rare, exclusive, sub-cultures, identifying with the group, standing out from the group, unusual, cutting-edge, unobtainable, sexy, weird. And that’s not taking into account the obvious point that fashion isn’t just what people see on the news during fashion week. There are thousands of people doing their own thing, riffing off other people’s things, being inspired by, doing knock-offs of, rebelling against everyone else.
“natural and sexual selection motives”
Is it just me, or does this phrase not quite make sense? Surely natural and sexual selection refers to a process, or processes, identified retrospectively and in part determined by motives, rather than being a property of said motives? Is this discipline-specific terminology?
OK. Stop. Mashup Time.
Okay, I think I understand now: they match motives that, it is hypothesised, are linked to the processes of natural and sexual selection, the outcomes and motivations of which are assumed in advance.
There’s also the highest common denominator theory for why almost everyone looks the same in porn (and some mainstream fashion). It points out that the average woman in a porn flick comes from knocking out those things that a sizable group find “ugly” to create an ideal that “offends” almost no-one.
Brian,
What happened to that poor little puppy of yours who didn’t look right? Did her mother accept her in the end? Did you find a good home for her? Don’t leave us in suspense!
[/dog lover]
Natural selection, Klaus: you don’t want to date a girl who’s going to, like, get eaten by a bear or an owl or something.
That’s never *ever* going to get old, Captain Blighsexual.
Sir Snigerlot, that was hysterical. Unfortunately I was so entranced by Kevin Kline in his Pirate King boots that I forgot to listen to most of the words.
Sense of humour, kind heart, pirate boots. Building up a profile here.
I’ve just never seen that particular concept or phrasing before, and it doesn’t come up in a google search. Wondering if it’s disciplinary terminology from one of the sciences. It seems odd that natural or sexual selection would be motives in themselves, or a property or category of motives. Surely there are motives behind the processes of natural or sexual selection, and the things aren’t themselves motives.
Or am I tying myself in synactical knots because I’ve been reading too many undergrad essays and can’t recognise a coherent sentence anymore?
I’ve always had a preference for everything being in proportion.
why is it an interesting field? Why is it a field at all?
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I’m not sure it’s a field. But all human beings are guaranteed to be interested i sex and death.
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And also, wouldn’t one way of combating low self esteem and eating disorders be, I don’t know, not saturating the media with articles about how to be attractive to men?
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I’d wager it had more to do with the saturation of images of unattainable perfection. These aren’t forced upon us. We want them.
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I think the answer about the fashion/beauty industry is that it has very little to do with what straight men actually find physically attractive
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It has everything to do with being human coathangers. Really skinny people look great in clothes. In the hyper-masculine places where pictures of women are hung on walls one doesn’t find fashion model types too much.
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I’ve heard all this before. There’s also an ideal male body as far as women are concerned: broad shoulders, narrow hips.
P Cat – Sense of humour, kind heart, pirate boots.
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Sorry. Johnny Depp’s taken.
“When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the “ideal” image and are perceived as more attractive”
Not necessarily – how’s this for sinister
Sorry, but deep skepticism coming from this quarter. I’ve actually scored quite high on the symmetrical-feature and waist-to-hip ratio things since I hit puberty and over the decades have seen none of the stampedes of which you speak, more’s the pity.
‘There’s also an ideal male body as far as women are concerned: broad shoulders, narrow hips.’
Really? Which women would those be? The sexiest man I’ve ever known was five foot three and and built like a koala. But did he have a kind heart and a truly exceptional sense of humour? You bet your well-shaped arse he did. (No word on the pirate boots.)
(Re J. Depp — well, exactly.)
Brian, I know you wrote the post in good faith, and I’m sorry I can’t take it seriously. The whole shopping-list approach to Ro-mance has always appalled me. It may well be true that most people regard other people as commodities, but if it is then I don’t want to think about it.
Paulus @ 30, the little bugger is a poodle, very much alive and giving plenty of cheek.
The situation was that my younger son was going to speech lessons with a woman who taught in her own home. Said speech teacher rescued the pup from her mum. We were in the market for a pet for our son, and as with some of his two-legged friends, he chose the one on the edge of the social group.
Poodles, you might know, are very intelligent and also very hard to train. She met her match with my wife, but only just and there is a constant streak of feistiness and rebellion there. But 10 years later, a much-loved family pet. She’s a great watch dog until the stranger actually arrives. Then it’s play time.
P Cat – Really? Which women would those be?
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Aw you know the dancers down at the place where the sad losers like me spend all our days.
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I didn’t mean to suggest that one needs conform to the ideal body type to be attractive. Just that there is an ideal body type. I can’t remember wherein I read this stuff it was a million years ago. I’m reasonably certain that there at least two reasons why it isn’t so much discussed. 1. Few men correspond to it and 2. Those that do are 90% wuckfits.
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Sorry about Johnny Depp. That there’s only one, provides evidence for the God is male and He’s a dick school of Theology.
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BTW I like hands. Hands are important to me. Any studies in that field? Does my gaze hit the size of your hands?
PC @ 38, I’m not sure I really was writing in “good faith”. To be honest I’d just finished the post on carbon labelling which, when I started it, looked easy, a real pushover, but didn’t turn out that way. And I was thinking about two or three others that have been bothering me and I need to finish.
So I was just looking for a bit of a change of pace. The rain looks as though it’s going to keep me here tomorrow, so it’s just one of those things. I thought I’d put it up and see what happened. I think I ended up mixing up the tone of it a bit, which has been reflected in the comments. Some serious and some not so.
i likes hoomanz that gives me fud and rubs my tum and haz good senses of humer (pirate bootz opshunal). my hooman mummy is longer than my hooman daddy, she can see if the speshul lotion that daddy rubs into the top of his head to make his fur gro back is working. my hoomanz met on the interwebz, they filled out mating profiles where thay sed how long thay are, daddy woz not tall enough for many of the hooman mummies there, they all sai they want to mate wif hooman daddies that r over six foots and dat is just natural selection. And the hooman daddies all want hooman mummies wif yellow head fur and no other fur and who arnt cuddly, i iz very cuddly. But Mummy sai that that diz pop pyschysology is LITTER TRAY and such hoomanz r just insecure and want to imprez other hoomanz liek thay do wif dere jobs and cloths and cars. And that its wots inside that counts (xcept after dark when i want to go out).
Thanks Winston. That really clears a lot of stuff up for me.
Warning: stream of consciousness follows. I think I’ll have to do that thing with the dots.
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So, ~100 ~22-year-old dudely types at a uni represent ‘men’, do they? If I was a feller, I’d be a little ticked. As a scientist, I’m a lot ticked. Crappy sample is crappy.
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I also have very little faith in the selection of imagery shown to the “sample” as being a) unbiased and b) unaffected by the squllion other aesthetic variables in the image, many of which are exaggerated or actually introduced by photography.
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Way to massively oversimplify the roots of anorexia, dude at #8. Although, that’s quite a cunning little trick, shutting down a critique by implying that the critiquer hates self-harming young females and secretly wants them all to fall down a mineshaft and get eaten by shrews. Mad props.
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Mort @3 kind of nails what raises my hackles about the reporting, as distinguished from the, ahem, “science”. The article quoted was actually a lot more subtle than another headline I saw this morning in the fairfax papers, which basically read as “hurr hurr women are idiots and out to kill each other”. At best, the coverage of this piece of “research” will be frequently patronising, and more commonly it will be gloating and icky.
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I’m really wholly unsurprised at the central conclusion of the research, which is basically that nice hips and a waist don’t compensate for, say, gorilla arms or Big-Bird legs. The problem is that the research doesn’t demonstrate that effectively, it just hints at a general trend, which as has been pointed out is already common knowledge. Its got a greek name and everything!
Well as everything has been said about the randy 12 year olds from New South whose preferences for line squiggles proves that average is ace, I will only quote Whoopi, who has been know to say:
Child, please.
But about Jurassic Park. I do feel for the blokes. Poor, poor blokes. No brains – all primal seed spreadings. Trapped they are. Trapped in a discourse where their only out is: But the raptors made me do it…
Like this evolutionary psychology gem:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200904/men-sexually-harass-women-because-they-are-not-sexist-i
Poor bastards.
klaus k
I am glad a light switched on for you, as I was going to comment that your post 26 was sooooooo GAY!
“PC @ 38, I’m not sure I really was writing in “good faith”.”
It looked like a troll post to me, if that’s any help. *shrugs*
2nd PC, Katz: sense humour. May correl with kind heart but not nec. Convers v. impt. 2nd PC detest shop list. Detest $$ criter. Non-smoker, 20-70, funny, friendship not marr; already marr. Cook, hsewk, sewing irrel. Pref toilet-trained. Shld have waist.
Yes Grumphy, it was I that first said that representations of body type in the media influenced eating disorders. That other claptrap you wrote is also an accurate and fair paraphrase. You also nailed my motive! I go around shutting down critique, I do.
Being attractive or being average or being anything in particular has nothing to do with natural selection. It’s who is reproducing that are winning any “race”.
ie. natural selection refers to those who reproduce, not who has won a beauty contest or who is judged attractive. I haven’t looked at the birth stats. in the country but the rates would probably show higher levels of reproduction amongst minorities like indigenous people, muslim and fundamentalist christians per population, than amongst any “average” population grouping by appearance.
Well, yes. You were. At least you’ve certainly cornered the market on petulant foot-stamping. Go, you!
For the record, I consider these “studies” largely pointless navel-gazing and/or exercises in how not to do research regardless of what gender is under the (vaseline-smeared) microscope. I’m an equal-opportunity hata’.
Most women are more attractive to blokes than they think they are. Women tend to be ridiculously self-critical.
I wouldn’t worry about being on the wrong side of one of those ratios – saying you’re a Liberal voter would be a bigger turn-off to many of us.
Finally, I’m sure we need further research to check out whether women see things the same way. It definitely can’t be taken for granted. It’s probably the women who run the show, determining who would be the best providers. Until we got civilisation, hierarchies and competition for individual property, perhaps.
Who’s this “we”, then? And who are these “women” that “we” need to research (their mating habits, burrows, etc). obviously the “we” that is being spoken to is only the Default Humans, so I’d better be off.
But at least now I’ve got an excuse to link to this – one of my favourites.
You’re very sweet, ginja @ 52, but I don’t think any of the women here have in fact expressed a worry that they’re not attractive to blokes. I think some of us* are saying that being attractive to blokes is not, in fact, the only thing we think about, and thus the endless studies explaining what blokes want aren’t actually that interesting.
*Well. Me.
Yes, women as objects of studies. Heavens, you could just ask a few. Brian this is an exceedingly odd post.
Hmm, or perhaps Grumph I was answering the question about why people do the research. Go you! Hata! Mad props! U have teh mad intellect!
hey Groke
“lecture the lion”
did you mean ‘lioness’? The one wot does the killing?
Adrien @ 35, I hope that ideal male shape also includes an impressive beer gut (otherwise I’m SOOL).
Helen @ 53, let’s just take that bit for now. I should have written “we’d” rather than “we”. All I intended was that if you are going to take two subgroups of the species and research how one group sees the other you can’t automatically that the results apply in reverse. Nothing more complicated than that.
FWIW, and I’m not sure it’s worth anything in this context, I saw an article a couple of years ago in the Scientific American, from memory, that identified physical differences between men’s and women’s brains. But the differences were statistical rather than essential. Seemed to make sense. And there were no conclusions about the reasons for the differences.
Fine @ 56, is there a problem with any particular subgroup as an object of study?
Helen @ 54, you’ll have to spell it out. Are you saying all evolutionary psychology is illegitimate or merely as practiced by some?
As practiced by most. And there are structural brain differences, but the brain still seems remarkably amenable to training, presumably finding slightly different paths to doing the same thing. There was a pretty nifty study a year or two back demonstrating that as little as ten hours playing tetris could remove the statistical differences between the genders as regards 3D-rotational tasks. Its been repeated a few times with other games since, IIRC. Its a neat little ‘normal person’ demo of the London Taxi Driver effect.
Suggesting that the differences, where they exist, are cultural.
preference for women with a waist-hip ratio of 0.7WTF? No seriously. I doubt that I qualify. Is it like 0:7? And where are the O and 7 measured from. Oh god I don’t really care. However. . . .
I’m very glad to read that the poodle has turned out to be a happy normal dog. That would be a harrowing, dilemma for me, in which I would (as obviously happened) be forced to keep intervening whilst simultaneously being concerned that I was somehow going against nature and doing the wrong thing. I’ve never heard of such thing, but that’s not saying much. Up until last night I didn’t know dog-dressage-that-could-make-you-weep-existed either. (thx Helen). What an ‘education’ this place has been in the last couple of days. Sheesh.
Caroline, on the dog. I recall Nick Natrasse(?) who used to do wildlife talkback here telling us about birds, I think, who expelled from the group one of their number which didn’t look the same. He said it was known in the animal kingdom as a way of keeping the species to type. I can remember exactly where I was when he said it.
I don’t care about the research much either and would rather they spent their time doing something else.
Now I’ll say this because it’s late and I probably wouldn’t in the light of day.
If I had my time over I’d definitely hit “delete” rather than ‘publish”. No question. I probably should have let it sit rather than do it when I was tired.
I have my own life and learning trajectory and work at the project. I can’t expect that everyone will be pleased with everything I do and say. On this thread I’ve learnt more than you are ever going to know.
If we are gentle with each other it’s easier and we learn more.
The human species appears very complex, to humans. There is complexity in other species, but it is more difficult for humans to notice this than for members of the species in question.
Thank you for the post. It was not – by a wide margin – the strangest ever seen hereabouts. Gentleness is not in the eye of the beholder. You are a good exponent of this fine quality Brian.
Okay, so Ally Kinsey is who I thought it was. Looking at it again this morning, the phrase in question seems to be a bit of a weasel phrase. I know what natural and sexual selection are, and I think that ‘sexual selection motive’ doesn’t make sense to me because, in the context offered, it really doesn’t correspond with my working definition of said process. Surely sexual selection doesn’t have any intrinsic or predetermined qualities, unless the reference is retrospective ie. it’s about what motivated sexual selection in the past. I need more information to evaluate your claims. Links and references would be good.
Mme. Pav @ #38:
Hang on…lemme guess…Tex Perkins, right?
Adrien @ #40:
You’re weird, dude. Hands are girl thing – everybody knows that. FFS, why can’t you man up and get a proper fetish, like feet or armpits?
Klaus K @ #33
Yes.
I wouldn’t be too concerned Brian about hitting the ‘post’ rather than ‘delete’ key, its not as though anyone is so aggrieved (as regards this post in particular.) It’s a fraught region where statistical unanimity/consensus is likely never to be found, and one in which a person of either gender risks being shot down in a hail of bullets. Its not only beauty to be found in the eye of the beholder.
I understand some animals do reject their weaker offspring at birth, but I’ve never heard of a dog trying to bury one of it’s pups. Gawd.
Yes, the burying is the only instance of that I’ve heard. The speech teacher was very experienced with animals and had no particular difficulty rescuing the poor little thing. I can’t recall whether she was successful in re-integrating it into the litter.
In part, this post has ended up occupying too much of my headspace and I didn’t sleep at all well last night. Not upset as such, just a racing mind. I cope with being under fire OK personally but I can’t pretend it makes no difference. So what was to be a busy productive day is now definitely a drag.
So one makes judgements about whether the effort/reward is what one wants and can cope with at any given time.
Hmmm. You’re hardly a dreadful person or whatever for wanting to talk about stuff like this, but I (and I’d say several others here) know from long, annoying experience how these threads tend to go. A few of us might have been quite snippy, but its mostly in an effort to head off the inevitable shuffling zombie hordes from Dude Nation lampooned in Chris Clarke’s linked post @54. Nuffin’ personal.
Thanks, Grumphy, appreciate that. “These threads” are not as problematic as the used to be, for sure.
‘Fine @ 56, is there a problem with any particular subgroup as an object of study?”
Brian. my problem is the idea that women are a subset. They’re about half the population. You’ve written this post as though you’re only speaking to men and not to men and women. You’ve successfully ‘othered’ women as objects to be studied. That’s what I find strange.
But I’m glad the poodle has done so well. Looking at animals does call many of our assumptions about people into question, I find.
Fine, if the study had been about women beholding men (in what is arguably equally pointless research) I probably would have ‘othered” them too.
In reflecting, I started out in tongue-in-cheek style, thought “that’s a bit thin for a post” and then threw in a few random loosely connected comments, not well thought out and not well written. That’s where I went most wrong, I think.
If I was going to post I should have stopped after the quote.
Just on dogs, and pace any anti evolutionary psychologists, I understand that they are the only animal on the planet that reacts to the facial expressions of humans. It has been contended that dogs and humans are in a sense co-evolutionary. It could be said that dog psychology developed through association over many generations of association with humans.
I have no idea whether that stands up to scrutiny but I’ve heard it more than once.
I’ve also heard that, Brian, and that it relates to quasi-domestication very early on, where wild dogs would find food from scraps and a certain amount of security around human camps and settlements. Obviously those that survived in this way were the ones that were better able to respond to human facial and other cues, and also in contexts where humans either found them useful or had other reasons not to kill or eat them. In this sense, dogs self-domesticate to a degree, without overtures being made by humans; after this process has run its course, the dogs so selected would then be more amenable to further domestication and could be bred for other qualities.
We can hypothesise some kind of similar situation with cats, though they aren’t necessarily good scavengers of human waste products, so this may have taken place later around established agricultural communities where the presence of cats was more obviously useful.
“my problem is the idea that women are a subset. They’re about half the population.”
Hi, fine. It’s nothing to do with being a slight majority or half. A subset is any set that exludes a few. A sub-set might be 95% of the whole group. Just sayin’
Mathematicians – for their own, sweet reasons – actually include the whole set as a possible sub-set.
The ‘sub’ in ‘sub-set’ doesn’t imply a lower status, or lesser importance. Not saying the study was of any value, BTW, or commenting on how thIS post was phrased.
“Sense of humour, kind heart, pirate boots. Building up a profile here.”
*blushes*
Taken, sorry.
“…Also the names for male genitalia are never used as insults. …”
*
Does that mean all those times I’ve been called a prick, it was a compliment?
*
One might also wonder about the use of the word “cock” as a term describing a person. It’s not generally favourable either, apart from the days when old-time English upper class chinless wonders were known to greet each other as “Old Cock.”
Greg – You’re weird, dude. Hands are girl thing – everybody knows that. FFS, why can’t you man up and get a proper fetish, like feet or armpits?
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I like feet too. And necks.
Rainne – I think some of us* are saying that being attractive to blokes is not, in fact, the only thing we think about, and thus the endless studies explaining what blokes want aren’t actually that interesting.
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Fine Brian. my problem is the idea that women are a subset. They’re about half the population. You’ve written this post as though you’re only speaking to men and not to men and women. You’ve successfully ‘othered’ women as objects to be studied. That’s what I find strange.
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I don’t think Brian is saying that being attractive is all women think about. The topic, at least for me, is interesting for both the same reason that, say, Simone de Beauvoir’s article viz Bardot in Cahiers du Cinema was and also for the popularization of various assertions that come from the direction of evolutionary psychology and neurobiology and the impact of these on the new sexual mores that are inevitable now that the old ones are a fragmented rubble. .
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To what extent are our patterns of attraction determined by nature?
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Given the vast spectrum of human sexual idiosyncracity I doubt we can attribute the whole business to nature. There is nuture (and of course rebellion and perversion). Neurobiology’s an infant field and evol psych is, like most psych, largely speculative. But still let’s consider… Maybe?
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I can think of one man whose patterns of attraction are not reducable to this hip/waist ratio. Most of his lovers were famously androgynous. They looked like boys from behind. He did end up with a curvy woman however. Freud would say he’d matured. He’d be wrong.
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Also, Fine, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Brian is ‘othering’ women. If the topic regarded the primal motivations of women’s attraction to men then would it be men that were ‘othered’? Well it wouldn’t be the same would it? After all society has not put as much emphasis on appearance as an evaluator of worth when it comes to men.
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Still I think it’s a good post Brian. Don’t be discouraged. Please continue to introduce the ‘N’ words to matters of gender/sex in future. Let’s boldly go where no-one has gone before. (Well no-one left of the AWU anyway.)
In the study a team of two men and a woman “asked 100 male students to judge the attractiveness of 201 line drawings of female torsos with different hip, waist and shoulder measurements”. Then they matched these with “real women” (I assume photos of) in several categories.
So the the study is about the judgements of a group of presumably young men. Without doubt it does “other” women, because for me without even photos of women’s faces they aren’t there.
So I’ve erred on two counts. Firstly, I read the article superficially. Secondly, I added some comments that some people found offensive. For which I’m sorry.
Now I’m saying that I find the basic study pointless and offensive.
But Adrien, I won’t be posting on these topics or if I can help it on anything remotely similar again, principally but not solely because of the potential for communication to get tangled in this medium. I hope that others won’t be deterred.
Is it a tangle in the medium or an ideological borderline that restricts you so?
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These issues here precipitate discussion that remind me, for some reason, of a stoush at the Cat once where I made the assertion that tariffs and industry policy were the economic instruments that helped create the Industrial Revolution and not the laissez-faire approach that libertarians have, imho falsely, writ into their ideas of history.
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Science often must compartmentalize phenomena in order to acquire results. I don’t think the sample of this study bears profound conclusions. But the objection to having a group consider that particular curve in particular on the basis that it objectifies, appears, to me, to be a little Lisenkoesque.
Don’t come at me with all the woman “othering” baloney.
I was more annoyed that you named Combet ahead of Wong in the article about the electricity market, but I admit I’ve been feeling particularly pedantic today.
Your anxiety and second-guessing of yourself over this article is probably more interesting than the article itself. If we let the potential for tangled communication dictate what we discuss the outcome is likely to kinda boring…either arguing over the extremes or being painfully agreeable. What’s wrong with messy?
BTW: You academic types do seem to worry a lot.
Hey whattaya doin’ Sat night.
“You academic types do seem to worry a lot.”
Not all of us, Mr Furious. Some of us are calm and steady.
Right, thanks for that. I was just going to say that I believe Adrien is correct.It’s all in the hands, natch.
And don’t come at me with all the ‘I don’t understand the concept, therefore I will trash it’ baloney, either.
furious, I think Combet is the one sorting it out, not Wong, so naming him first was the right thing to do.
Adrien, I can meet my own needs for dialogue in this general area by talking to people I know, where we can see each other’s faces, read the body language and in a context where we share a lot of values and understandings. Elsewhere I’d rather be a spectator.
I took a couple of torpedoes below the waterline back there so I’d be a goose if I put my head above the parapets again, if you don’t mind a mixed metaphor or two.
Also the post didn’t meet my own standards for posting, and it ended up hindering rather than helping what I’d really like to do.
I’m getting the feeling that cold luncheon meats are off the menu for the time being.
And finally from this photo I can’t tell what the hip-waist ratio is and, y’know, I really don’t care.
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Look at those lips. Did I mention lips?
Fair point, rainne.
I’ve deleted three comments I thought we could get along without and have closed comments for now. If you have anything earth-shatteringly intelligent to say then email us.