My "review" of
The Evolution of Desire continues. As you've no doubt noticed, this isn't really a review; it's more like a chronological term paper, analyzing and preserving and pretty much ripping out every bit of useful content from the book. Well, not every bit; my review is far shorter (believe it or not) than the book itself, and I'm only touching on maybe 10 or 15% of the points Buss covers. I just found so much of the book fascinating and elucidating that I wanted to go over it slowly and carefully enough to get most of the facts and concepts burned into my brain, and to do that I had to take notes and type it up as I went. And since I did that, I might as well post it here, for those of you thoughtful and psychologically-curious enough to read it.
It occurred to me a few days ago, while going through this book and several others on related subjects, that I could have made a career out of this. Since I grew old enough to appreciate the difference, nothing has ever interested me more in conversation that talking to women about their views on sex, relationships, what they like and don't like in men, etc. I find male psychology so boring and rudimentary, in comparison to women, that I never much care about the inner lives of men, at least not in regards to their sexual desires and hopes and dreams. You've probably all seen
the famous illustration of this. That's obviously an exagerration, but it's not grossly untrue when evaluating the way the genders deal with each other when sex is part of the equation. (And when is it not?) I used to think of that diagram as being drawn from the male POV, but upon reflection, I think it goes both ways. The obvious joke is that women are impossibly complicated, but the converse is true as well. Women wonder why men only seem to have one reaction to stimuli, and curse the fact that the male control panel is so lacking in finer calibration.
Men aren't just stupid animals about everything; I think the psychology of my gender can be quite complicated and interesting in many areas of their psychology; how men seek or flee power and authority, how men relate to authority figures and especially their own fathers, and more, but those aren't really my areas of interest in study. Also, since I'm a man I have a natural insight into and knowledge of the male mind, so many things that would interest or confuse a woman seem common sense to me.
I enjoy the subject area in general though, and as I said, I've lately read a fair number of books on male vs. female psychology and relationships, and I've also read about famous sex researchers (Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, etc.) and psychologists and doctors who studied gender and made breakthrough discoveries. It never occurred to me until recently, but that field is one I could have enjoyed a career in. I can't see going into that at this point, though. I'd enjoy the grad school and doctoral thesis aspect of it, but that would take another 5 or 6 years, cost a fortune, and then what? No one's going to pay me to research and write books about it. I might sell books on it, but I'd have to go into practice to gather the information and learn the field inside and out, and frankly, I don't want to deal with crazy people.
I enjoy studying them, like bugs in a box, but I don't want to put up with their bullshit, and I don't care about helping the sick. I just want to read about their problems and try to figure out what caused them and why, and hear the juicy stories of their madness. Making them better is hard. Well, it's getting easier, but that's because abnormal psych and sexology has become almost entirely pharmacological, and just writing prescriptions isn't any fun. Worse yet, when the lithium or prozac or other mood stabilizers work, the client isn't interesting anymore.
So, no psych career for me, but I do enjoy dabbling in the field with a layman's knowledge, and I enjoy good books on the subject. Thus continues my discussion of this one.
Chapter Three: Men Want Something ElseThis chapter starts off pondering why men are willing to marry. After all, casual sex is a far better solution, genetically. Implant sperm, move on to another woman, repeat. Buss speculates that some of the evolved male willingness to marry and invest many years in just one woman was created as a reciprocal desire by women requiring that of men.
Women's requirements for consenting to sex made it costly for most men to pursue short-term mating strategy exclusively. In the economics of reproductive effort, the costs of not pursuing a permanent mate may have been prohibitively high for most men... A further cost of failing to seek marriage was impairment of the survival and reproductive success of the man's children.
Children without a father must have had much lower survival rates, and biologically speaking, it's useless to get women pregnant if they die before giving birth, or their/your offspring die before reaching reproductive age. Buss also points out that by marriage, men were able to reproduce with much higher quality women, since the higher quality women were able to demand marriage as a prerequisite to sexual activity. This works both ways, though. Lower quality women (by whatever the criteria of the age/culture was, and Buss gets to what men find attractive soon enough) can obtain sex with very high quality men by lowering their relationship requirements. Marrying such a man was much more difficult than bearing his young, since highly-eligible men have marriage standards that exclude most women.
Since men, biologically speaking, want to have numerous children, and since men were largely forced into monogamous relationships, the trick, for the men, was/is to figure which women are more reproductively capable. This is difficult, Buss says, since there are few obvious signs of reproductive capability. It can't be seen in a woman's appearance, her family history, or her social status, and she doesn't even know herself. How can men judge it, then? "Two obvious cues; youth and health."
Youth. A woman's reproductive capacity declines rapidly with age. From puberty to about 20, it increases. After 20 it steadily decreases; it's very low at 40, and by 50 it's generally zero. "Thus, women's capacity for reproduction is compressed into a fraction of their lives."
In the US, men uniformly express a desire for mates who are younger than they are. In surveys on college campuses from 1939-1988, men wanted women who were about 2.5 years younger than them. Men who are 21 prefer, on average, women who are 18.5. This preference is not limited to the US. It's found in surveys of men all over the world, and in all sorts of cultures, from the most modern to the most primitive. Nigerian men at 23.5 prefer women who are 17. Yugoslavian men at 21.5 want 19 year old wives. Most of the surveys cited by Buss are of young men, but he includes some stats about older men, and as you might expect, the older a man gets, his ideal women gets more years younger. Hugh Hefner aside, most men at 40 and 50 don't still want twenty year olds, but men in their 30s want women who are about 5 years younger, and men in their 50s prefer women 10-20 years younger. (Or perhaps that's the youngest they can get, and if not limited by economic or cultural barriers, most 60 y/o men would shack up with teenagers, sultan-style?)
This stated preference is backed up by demographic studies; American men marry women progressively younger than them in second and third marriages. Men are around 3 years older than their first wives, 5 years older than the second, and 8 years older than the third, averaged across men/women of all ages. This isn't a new or American phenomena. Records from Sweden in the 1800s show that men married women an average of 10.6 years younger than them on their second marriages. The age difference is even wider in polygamous cultures, with men choosing (buying) wives two and three decades younger than themselves.
In short, contemporary men prefer young women because they have inherited from their male ancestors a preference that focused intently upon this cue to a woman's reproductive value. This psychologically based preference translates into everyday mating decisions.
Standards of Physical Beauty. Even more than youth, men seek beauty.
Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman's health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone -- and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute the ingredients of male standards of female beauty.
I'd never thought of some of those categories, but upon reading them I realized that I did in fact desire them. Malaya did a lot of those things, and the IG has a few habits that I find so charming, and several of them are darts into these bullseyes. She sometimes gives a little skipping hop to get moving towards a desired object, and she makes the most amazingly animated, dancing-eyed, excited faces when she's intrigued by something. I've always been enchanted by those maneuvers, but had never thought why. I just thought they were cute. Now I know that they're hitting me in my evolutionary psychology, as features of behavior that indicate her good health and high reproductive value. Helpful! (Not that there's any consideration, on either of our parts, of reproducing. But that's the whole point of this book; these things attract men and women without our realizing why, and they're just as attractive whether we're looking to have children, or doing all we can to avoid that eventuality.)
As with everything else in the book, there's no moral value attached to these human preferences, and their prevalence is judged population-wide. Individuals may have very different preferences, but as Buss points out, men who prefer gray-haired, wrinkled women might be very happy in their lives with a succession of elderly women, but they're likely to be a genetic dead end. Every man alive today is a descendant of thousands of generations of men who preferred young, healthy women, since the ones who didn't, didn't leave descendants.
Other researchers have surveyed populations across the world and found features that are almost universally considered repugnant. Most of these are cues to ill health, such as a poor complexion, ringworm, facial disfigurement, and filthiness. "Cleanliness and freedom from disease are universally attractive."
It's not just men who feel this way, either. Considering younger women prettier is universal among humans, both male and female.
When men and women rate a series of photographs of women differing in age, judgments of facial attractiveness decline with the increasing age of the woman. The decline in ratings of beauty occurs regardless of the age or sex of the judge. The value that men attach to women's faces, however, declines more rapidly than do women's ratings of other women's faces as the age of the women depicted in the photograph increases, highlight the importance to men of age as a cue to reproductive capacity.
These preferences seem to be inborn too; they are not all learned and conditioned. Various studies with infants have shown that babies from 12-24 months spend more time looking at photos of younger, more attractive (as judged by adults) women than they do of older women. Babies also play longer and more happily with people wearing youthful, attractive masks than those wearing ugly masks, and twelve-month old infants played longer with dolls that were attractive than they did with ugly ones. Preferences cross racial lines as well; whites and Asians agree strongly on which women, of either race, are the more attractive. (Asian girls. *cough*) Consensus has been found among many other racial and ethnic groups as well. (I thought the figures were a bit cherry-picked in this section of the book, since the people surveyed were adults, who might have genetic preferences, but who surely have been conditioned by culture as well.)
Body shape. Male preferences for female body shape differ widely, and seem to be culturally-conditioned. In cultures and times when food is scarce (such as among many modern day bush peoples and ancient Europe during periods of famine), plumper women are the most desired. In cultures where food is over-abundant (such as modern day America and Europe) slimmer women are more desired. From this Buss concludes that men do not have an evolved preference for a particular amount of body fat. Male preferences for breast size and shape vary widely as well, and many cultures have unique physical attributes such as tattoos, elongated necks, piercings, etc, are desired within those cultures, but not elsewhere.
One interesting finding about thinness preferences in modern Western culture is that women
think men want a thinner figure than men actually do. Experiments with adult men and women in the US have repeatedly shown that when presented with images of women of varying thinness, women prefer one of the thinnest models, while men pick a slim model, but one with more meat on her than the women do. "American women erroneously believe that men desire thinner women than is the case. These findings refute the belief that men desire women who are emaciated."
This is definitely true for me. I like a woman to be slim and athletic, but I do not find skinny, bony women attractive. I've never though the Olsen twins, or Nicole Ritchie, or Paris Hilton, or other famous anorexics, were attractive. Admittedly, I thought the whole Jennifer Loves Nougat "
I'm a size 2!" saga was quite amusing, but not because she was fat, but because she was delusional about her dress size. Was she just throwing out tiny numbers she might have fit into a decade earlier at the spur of the moment? Or better yet, was her stylist buying her clothing, ripping out the tags, and sewing in new ones with lower numbers just to feed her vanity?
A more universal preference is the waist-to-hip ratio. Buss explains this by detailing the changes in male and female bodies during puberty. Before puberty, boys and girls have similar body shapes. Afterwards, boys lose fat in their buttocks and thighs, while the release of estrogen causes women to deposit fat in their trunk, particularly the upper thighs and hips.
Healthy, reproductively capable women have a waist-to-hip ratio between 0.67 to 0.80, while healthy men have a ratio in the range of 0.85 to 0.95. Abundant evidence now shows that the waist-to-hip ratio is an accurate indicator of women's reproductive status...
Singh discovered that waist-to-hip ratio is a powerful cue to women's attractiveness. In a dozen studies conducted by Singh, men rated the attractiveness of female figures, which varied in both their waist-to-hip ratio and their total amount of fat. Men find the average figure to be more attractive than a thin or fat figure. Regardless of the total amount of fat, however, men find women with a low waist-to-hip ratio to be the most attractive... Studies with line drawings and with computer-generated photographic images produced the same results. Finally, Singh's analysis of Playboy centerfolds and the winners of beauty contests within the United States over the last thirty years confirmed the invariance of this cue. Although both centerfolds and beauty contest winners got thinner over that period, their waist-to-hip ratio remained exactly the same at 0.70.
Importance of Physical Appearance. Unsurprisingly, men want women to be beautiful. In a survey of 5000 male and female college students in the 1950s, men ranked physical attractiveness at or near the top of their desired characteristics to a far greater extent than did women. Other surveys, conducted at least every decade since the 1930s, have had men and women rank 18 traits in order of preference. Men have always placed beauty at or near the top, and have always put more importance on it than on women do. It's grown more important, too. All during the 1900s, the values assigned to attractiveness increased for both men and women, though men always ranked it much higher on their desired traits.
The values and increases (or not) vary around the world, but in every culture surveyed, men highly value beauty, and always value attractiveness higher than do women. As Mass concludes, "Men's preference for physically attractive mates is a species-wide psychological mechanism that transcends culture."
Men's Status and Women's Beauty. Humans advertise their status with possessions. Gold chains, expensive cars, designer clothing... and trophy wives. Men want a beautiful woman, they are willing to go through terrible trials to obtain one, and will put up with a great deal to keep one. Buss gives an example of a man who wants to divorce his beautiful wife since he's unhappy with her, but is swayed to put it off by friends telling him how good she looks on his arm when they enter a party.
Possessing a beautiful woman enhances a man's status in the eyes of other men, and women. We've all heard the joke, "He must be rich or have a big dick." when an ugly man is seen with a gorgeous woman, and this isn't just vernacular anecdote. When people are surveyed, they judge men, even unattractive men, much more favorably when they are accompanied by beautiful women. Furthermore, men gain more perceived status when judged with a beautiful woman, and lose more perceived status when judged with an ugly one, than women do. This gives men further motivation to find an attractive mate and avoid an unattractive one. In the eyes of others, women are much less boosted by a gorgeous boyfriend, and much less penalized for an ugly one. These trends hold true all over the world. Buss cites surveys his team carried out in China, Poland, Guam, and Germany, as well as the US.
Homosexual Mate Preferences. Buss holds these results as very important:
The issues are whether homosexual men show preferences more or less like those of other men, different in only the sex of the person they desire; whether they show preferences similar to those of women; or whether they have unique preferences unlike the typical preferences of either sex.
Buss points out what Kinsey was the first to demonstrate; there are few pure-homo or heterosexuals. Most people are primarily heterosexual, but substantial percentages of people, men more than women, engage in occasional homosexual acts, often without considering themselves other than heterosexual. (And no, not all of them are white male elected Republicans, though recent news headlines might lead you to think otherwise.)
Buss talks about the biological origin and continuation of homosexuality, which are still a mystery. Theories about kin selection (good to have a gay brother/sister since they'll help with your kids without consuming resources to support their own) and parental manipulation of lesser children to boost the importance of others are considered, and rejected for lack of evidence.
Homosexual mate preferences are less difficult to discern. Homosexual men and women are essentially identical to heterosexuals in their rankings of the attractiveness of men and women, and men of both persuasions place much more importance on the youthfulness of their desired gender than gay or straight women do. Homosexual men are quite similar to heterosexual men in desiring youthful, attractive partners. Lesbians, like straight women, place much less importance on age.
Studying this further, two psychologists sampled thousands of personal ads placed by gay/straight men/women all across the US. Some bullet points derived from the book.
Percent of personal ads stating a preference for an attractive partner:
By lesbians: 18%
By straight women: 19.5%
By gay men: 29%.
By straight men: 48%
Percent of personal ads in which people mention their own physical attractiveness:
By lesbians: 30%
By straight women: 69.5%
By gay men: 53.5%
By straight men: 42.5%
Ads in which a photograph is requested of respondents:
By lesbians: 16%
By straight women: 35%
By gay men: 34.5%
By straight men: 37%.
Ads that specify physical characteristics such as weight, height, eye color, height, or body build:
By lesbians: 7%
By straight women: 20%
By gay men: 38%
By straight men: 30%
From these and other figures, it seems clear that gay men and straight men are quite similar in their preferences, with only the gender differing. Buss doesn't analyze this further, but it seems to cry out for an attempted explanation. Obviously gay men do not desire young, healthy partners for their reproductive capability. So is the theory that genetics drive men to pick young, healthy baby making machines, and that these same genetic drives push gay men to want youthful, attractive partners even though reproduction is not a possibility?
It would be interesting to see survey results for what gay men want in cultures where mate preferences are different. Youth and beauty are desired worldwide, but do the body shape desires vary; would gay men want plumper men in countries where food is scarce, just as straight men want plumper women in those cultures? There's no data for this for obvious reasons (gays have never been tolerated enough to discern their preferences in any such cultures), but it's a thought exercise.
Men who achieve their desires. Looking at historical records informs us about male desires through time. They're as would be expected. Richer men have always married younger women than poorer men, and kings and sheiks who were able to maintain harems invariably stocked them with young, beautiful women. The Moroccan emperor Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty is credited with 888 children and a harem of up to 500 women, none of whom were over the age of 30. When they got that old (if not sooner) they were kicked out and replaced by a younger woman. The same preferences in women were seen in Roman, Babylonian, Egyptian, Incan, Indian, and Chinese emperors.
In a recent study of German computer dating services, men requested younger women as their incomes increased. Men earning over 10,000 deutsche marks advertised for women from 5-15 years younger. Men earning only 1000 deutsche marks only asked for women up to 5 years younger.
Media Effects on Standards. Buss discusses the popular perception that mass media and advertising are responsible for establishing standards of beauty, and tries to refute it. As he's pointed out throughout the book, humans have preferences that cross culture, age, gender, sexual preference, and more. The images sold in advertising are not arbitrarily selected.Advertisers perch a clear-skinned, regular-featured, young woman on the hood of the latest model car because the image exploits men's evolved psychological mechanisms and therefore sells cars, not because they want to promulgate a single standard of beauty.
That being said, Buss does cite some studies that found pernicious effects from mass media beauty. People who viewed photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex reported feeling less satisfied with their current romantic partner. Also men lowered the score of their gf/wife after looking at models, compared to the score they gave before eyeballing superior goods. The same men even reported feeling less satisfied, serious about, and close to their partners after scoping out the eye candy. This is obviously not a good thing, and Buss points out how misleading those photos are; that we're seeing the best few shots out of hundreds of images, that they're perfectly lit and costumed and made up and then the photos are airbrushed and Photoshopped, etc. We carry the same evaluative mechanisms that evolved in ancient times. Now, however, these mechanisms are artificially stimulated by dozens of attractive women we witness daily in our visually-saturated culture in magazines, billboards, televisions and movies. These images do not represent real women in our actual social environment. Rather, they exploit mechanisms designed for a different environment. But they may create sources of unhappiness by interfering with existing real-life relationships.
Besides screwing with men's heads, these media images affect women, making them feel that they must compete with impossible standards of beauty. However, as Buss points out several times, these images are not creating the vision of beauty; they are manipulating male evolutionary urges and forcing females to react by triggering their competitive mating mechanisms.
Chastity and Fidelity. This section addresses the human oddity of cryptic ovulation. Most female mammals only enter estrus occasionally, and when they do it's obvious to males and other females. There are visual cues, behavioral changes, strong odors, and so forth. Human females, in contrast, exhibit no such obvious cues, and women may consent to sexual relations at all times (theoretically), rather than only when they are ovulating. As a result, men don't know when a woman is fertile, and don't even know if she's capable of becoming pregnant if there sexual intercourse occurs. This has created a situation in which women are attractive to men at all times, not just during some periodic mating cycle, and in which a man must guard his woman, or take other steps to ensure her fidelity, if he wishes to be sure her offspring are his own children.
Marriage provided one solution. This greatly increased the odds that a man was the father of his partner's offspring, and the proximity of marriage enabled a man to get to know a woman better, thus giving him a good idea if she were deceiving him about her fidelity. Men had to become sensitive to their partner's needs to ensure that she was happy with him. Ensuring their partner's fidelity is of utmost importance to most men, and this desire often begins even before marriage. Virgin brides have been highly prized throughout human history, to the point that women known to have had children, or sexual relations, became unmarriageable in some societies. This was not simply a male vanity; chaste behavior was seen as a predictor of fidelity in marriage; if she couldn't even wait to be married, what are the odds she'll stay faithful in the future?
The importance placed on virginity in a bride has steadily declined in the US over the past 60 years, largely thanks to the advent of birth control and various cultural changes. In the 1930s, men ranked chastity 10th on a list of 18 requirements for a new bride. By 1988 it was down to 17th. Men value chastity more than women (more than women value it in men) in every country, but its importance varies widely by culture. In China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Taiwan, and Palestine, men attach a very high value to it. In Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France, it's largely irrelevant in potential mate selection.
Buss speculates that the importance of virginity is tied largely to the economic independence of women in a given culture. This is not a male choice, but a female decision. If a woman doesn't feel she must have a husband to survive, then she's got little incentive to "save herself." Hence women in Western nations with good social care networks, such as Sweden, feel free to experiment sexually, knowing the consequences of unwanted pregnancy will not be crippling. Swedish men place very little importance on virginity in a bride, but it's not clear if this is because they legitimately don't care if she's a virgin, or if they realize they'll never get one in Sweden, so there's no point in worrying about it.
While most men these days are less interested in virginity, men still view a lack of sexual experience as desirable in a spouse. I'd cynically suggest this is because guys don't want their wife to know 1) how small their penis is, or 2) how lousy they are in bed, but I'm sure Buss' evolutionary logic is more sound. He says this is also due to the utmost importance men place on fidelity. On many surveys, men regard unfaithfulness as the least desirable characteristic in a wife, and a lot of sexual experience before marriage is apparently seen as an indication that such behavior may continue.
Evolutionary Bases of Men's Desires. Men's desires for young, healthy, sexually faithful mates are in no way universal in the animal kingdom. Many primates prefer older, more experienced (at child-raising) females, and in many animals the females make the ultimate choice, and place far more importance on appearance (such as peahens picking peacocks by their plumage) or strength (does picking the elk with the largest rack of antlers). But, as Mass says:...human males have faced a unique set of adaptive problems and so have evolved a unique sexual psychology. They prefer youth because of the centrality of marriage in human mating. Their desires are designed to gauge a woman's future reproductive potential, not just immediate impregnation. They place a premium on physical appearance because of the abundance of reliable cues it provides to the reproductive potential of a potential mate.
Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them until death. These preferences cannot be attributed to Western culture, to capitalism, to white Anglo-Saxon bigotry, to the media, or to incessant brainwashing by advertisers. They are universal across cultures and are absent in none. They are deeply ingrained, evolved psychological mechanisms that drive our mating decisions just as our evolved taste preferences drive our decisions on food consumption.
The chapter closes with some fact-based lecturing from Buss. He talks about how these findings are considered controversial by some, and how women have said he should repress his results since they're unfair to people born ugly, and especially to women, who naturally can't stop aging. Buss admits the truth of this, but holds strongly to our genetic legacy. He says men can't help being attracted to young, beautiful women, since their evolved preferences are driving them. "Telling men not to become aroused by signs of youth and health is like telling them not to experience sugar as sweet." In Buss' judgment, there's no changing nature. It can be fought, of course, and men do not have to give into their desires anymore than women have to fantasize about a tall, handsome doctor, while being courted by short, fat garbage collectors. But what really happens in life?
Next: Chapter Four: Casual Sex.Labels: dating, psychology, sex, the evolution of desire
