In a fascinating recent study, Winnifred Cutler and her colleagues at
the Athena Institute for Women's Wellness in Chester Springs,
Pennsylvania, tested whether a synthesized version of a human male
pheromone would affect men's ability to sexually arouse women, as
reflected in increased rates of sexual intercourse. Participants in
the study wore an aftershave that either contained the possible
pheromone or a placebo that could not affect sexual responsiveness of
the men's romantic partners. Participants did not know which they were
getting. For most of the men wearing the pheromone there was no change
in frequency of sexual intercourse, but eight of seventeen in the
group reported an increased frequency of intercourse. This was not
simply due to the expectation that being in the study would enhance
their sex lives, because only two of the twenty-one men in the placebo
group had an increased frequency of intercourse over their regular
(baseline) level. The difference between the two groups was
statistically significant. allowing the researchers to conclude that
secretions produced in men's armpits can affect sexual desire in
women. They do not appear to have affected sexual desire of the male
subjects because, for example, their frequency of masturbation did not
change. It is possible, however, that the effects were produced by
increased self-confidence of the male subjects. The results are
preliminary and they involved a small number of people, so that
replication is necessary before they can be taken seriously.
The Science of Romance - by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573929700/
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
by Jared M. Diamond
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Chimpanzee/dp/0099913801/
http://svonz.lenin.ru/books/Jared_Diamond-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third_Chimpanzee...
How WE PICK OUR MATES AND SEX PARTNERS
Most humans are choosier about their sex partners than are the (other
two) chimpanzees. By what criteria do we select our spouse or bedmate,
and how does each of us develop our individual standard of beauty?
One evening, while I was camping with some New Guinea men of the Fore
tribe, the conversation turned to women and sex, and my Fore friends
proceeded to explain to me their tastes:
The most beautiful women are Fore women. They have gorgeous black
skin, thick, dark frizzy hair, full lips, broad noses, small eyes, a
nice smell, and perfectly shaped breasts and nipples. Women of other
New Guinea tribes are less attractive, and white women are unspeakably
hideous. Just compare your white women with our women to see why -
white skin like a sick albino's, straight hair like strings, sometimes
even hair coloured yellow like dead grass or red like a poisonous
snail, thin lips and narrow noses like axe blades, big eyes like a
cow's, a repulsive smell when they sweat, and breasts and nipples of
the wrong shape. When you get ready to buy a wife, find a Fore if you
want someone beautiful.
Among the reasons I did not follow that advice was that I happen to
find those 'unspeakably hideous' women attractive. But then I was
conditioned by my own society's ideals, just as my Fore friends were
by theirs. Darwin commented that every people he knew about - Chinese,
Hottentots, black Africans, Fijians, and others - measure beauty by
their own appearance. Are there really no universal rules of human
beauty and sex appeal? If not, do we inherit our particular taste in
marriage partner through our genes, or do we learn it by looking at
other members of our society? How, really, do we pick our sex partners
and spouse?
It may be surprising to realize that this problem is one that arose
anew during the evolution of the human species - or at least became
much more important for us than for the other two chimpanzees. As we
saw in Chapter Three, our familiar human mating-system, based ideally
on couples maintaining on-going involvement, is a human innovation.
Pygmy chimps are the opposite of sexually selective; females mate in
sequence with many males, and there is much sexual activity between
females and between males as well. Common chimps are not so completely
promiscuous - a male and female may sometimes go off and 'consort'
with each other for a few days - but they still rank as promiscuous by
human standards. However, humans are much more selective sexually,
since rearing a human child is difficult (at least for hunter-
gatherers) without a father's help, and since sex becomes part of the
cement that differentiates co-parents from other men and women
frequently encountered. Choosing a mate or sex partner is not so much
a human invention as a reinvention of something practised by many
other (nominally) monogamous animals with lasting pair-bonds, and lost
by our chimpanzee-like ancestors. Those choosy animals include many
bird species, plus our distant ape relatives, the gibbons.
We saw in Chapter Four that this ideal depiction of a human society
based on monogamous couples coexists with a good deal of extramarital
sex. That activity also involves selection of sex partners, with
adulterous women tending to be more selective than adulterous men.
Thus, selection of spouses and sex partners is another important piece
of what defines humanity. It is as basic to our rise from chimpanzee
status as is the remodelled pelvis discussed in detail in physical
anthropology texts. We shall see in the next chapter that our sexual
choosiness may be central to the origin of the most conspicuous
visible variability in modern humans. That is, much of what we think
of as human racial variation may have arisen as a by-product of the
beauty standards by which we choose our sex partners.
In addition to this theoretical interest, the question of how we
select our mates and sex partners is of much personal interest. It
preoccupies most of us for much of our lives. Those of us who are
still unattached spend daily hours dreaming about whom we will consort
with or marry. The question becomes more intriguing when we compare
what turns on different people within the same culture. Think of the
men or women that you find sexually attractive. If you are a man, for
instance, do you prefer women who are blonde or brunette, flat-chested
or buxom, and with big or small eyes? If you are a woman, do you like
men who are bearded or smooth-shaven, tall or short, and smiling or
scowling? Probably you do not go for just anyone, only certain types
attract you. Everyone can name friends who got divorced, then chose a
second spouse who was the spitting image of the first. A colleague of
mine went through a long series of plain, slim, brown-haired, round-
faced girlfriends, until he finally found one he got along with and
married her. Whatever your own preference, you will have noticed that
some of your friends have completely different tastes.
The particular ideal that each of us pursues is an example of what are
called 'search images'. (A search image is a mental picture against
which we compare objects and people around us in order to be able to
recognize something quickly, like a Perrier bottle amidst all the
other bottled waters on the supermarket shelf, or one's child at a
playground with other kids.) How do we develop our private search
image for a mate? Do we seek someone familiar and similar to us, or
are we more turned on by someone exotic? Would most European men
really marry a Polynesian woman if given the chance? Do we seek
someone complementary to us so as to fulfil our needs? For instance,
there undoubtedly are some dependent men who marry a mothering woman,
but how typical are such pairings? Psychologists have tackled this
question by examining many married couples, measuring everything
conceivable about their physical appearance and other characteristics,
and then trying to make sense out of who married whom. A simple
numerical way of describing the result is by means of a statistical
index called the correlation coefficient. If you line up 100 husbands
in order of their ranking for some characteristic (say, their height),
and if you also line up their 100 wives with respect to the same
characteristic, the correlation coefficient describes whether a man
tends to be at the same position in the husbands' line-up as his wife
is in the line-up of wives. A correlation coefficient of plus one
would mean perfect correspondence: the tallest man marries the tallest
woman, the thirty-seventh tallest man marries the thirty-seventh
tallest woman, and so on. A correlation coefficient of minus one would
mean perfect matching by opposites: the tallest man marries the
shortest woman, the thirty-seventh tallest man marries the thirty-
seventh shortest woman, and so on. Finally, a correlation coefficient
of zero would mean that husbands and wives assort completely randomly
by height: a tall man is as likely to marry a short woman as a tall
woman. These examples are for height, but correlation coefficients can
also be calculated for anything else, such as income and IQ.
If you measure enough things about enough couples, here is what you
will find. Not surprisingly, the highest correlation coefficients -
typically around +0.9 - are for religion, ethnic background, race,
socioeconomic status, age, and political views. That is, most husbands
and wives prove to be of the same religion, ethnic background, and so
on. Perhaps you also will not be surprised that the next highest
correlation coefficients, usually around +0.4, are for measures of
personality and intelligence, such as extroversion, neatness, and IQ.
Slobs tend to marry slobs, though the chances of a slob marrying a
compulsively neat person are not as low as the chances of a political
reactionary marrying a left-winger.
What about matching of husbands and wives for physical
characteristics? The answer is not one that would leap out at you
immediately if you just looked at a few married couples. That is
because we do not select our own mates for their bodies as carefully
as we select the mates of our show dogs, racehorses, and beef cattle.
But we select nevertheless. If you measure enough couples, the answer
that finally emerges is unexpectedly simple. On the average, spouses
resemble each other slightly but significantly in almost every
physical feature examined.
That is true of all the obvious traits you would first think of when
asked to design your ideal beloved — his or her height, weight, hair
colour, eye colour, and skin colour — but it is also true of an
astonishing variety of other traits that you probably would not have
mentioned in your description of the perfect sex partner. Those other
traits include ones as diverse as breadth of nose, length of ear lobe
or middle finger, circumference of wrist, distance between eyes, and
lung volume! Experimenters have made this finding for people as
diverse as Poles in Poland, Americans in Michigan, and Africans in
Chad. If you do not believe it, try noting eye colours (or measuring
ear lobes) the next time you are at a dinner party with many couples,
and then get your pocket calculator to give you the correlation
coefficient.
Coefficients for physical traits are on the average +0.2- not so high
as for personality traits (+0.4) or religion (+0.9), but still
significantly higher than zero. For a few physical traits the
correlation is even higher than 0.2-for instance, an astonishing 0.61
for length of middle finger. At least unconsciously people care more
about their spouse's middle finger length than about his or her hair
colour and intelligence!
Thus, like tends to marry like. Among the obvious explanations that
contribute to these results is propinquity: we tend to live in
neighbourhoods defined by socioeconomic status, religion, and ethnic
background. For instance, in large American cities one can point to
the rich neighbourhoods and the poor neighbourhoods, and also to the
Jewish section, Chinese section, Italian section, black section, and
so on. We meet people of the same religion when we go to church, and
we tend to meet people of similar socioeconomic status or political
views in many of our daily activities. Since we thus have far more
opportunities to meet people like us than unlike us in these respects,
of course we are more likely to marry someone of our religion,
socioeconomic status, and so on. But we don't live in neighbourhoods
grouped by length of ear lobe, so there must be some other reason why
spouses tend to be matched in that respect as well.
Another obvious reason why like tends to marry like is that marriage
is not just a choice; it is a negotiation. We do not go out searching
until we find a person with the right eye colour and length of middle
finger, then announce to that person, 'You are marrying me'. For most
of us, marriage results from a proposal rather than a unilateral
announcement, and the proposal is the culmination of some sort of
negotiation. The more similar a man and woman are in political views,
religion, and personality, the smoother will be the negotiation. Hence
the match in personality traits is on the average closer for married
couples than for dating couples, closer for happily than unhappily
married couples, and closer for couples who stay married than for
those who get divorced. But this still does not explain spousal
resemblance in ear lobe length, which is only rarely cited as a factor
in divorce.
The remaining factor deciding whom you will marry, besides propinquity
and smoothness of negotiation, is surely sexual attraction based on
physical appearance. That in itself is no surprise. Most of us are
aware of our preferences in obvious visible features like height,
build, and hair colour. What is initially surprising is the importance
of so many other physical traits that we usually do not consciously
notice, such as ear lobes, middle fingers, and interocular distances.
Nevertheless, all those other traits contribute unconsciously to the
snap decisions we make when we are introduced to someone and a voice
inside tells us, 'She's my type!'
Here is an example. When my wife and I were introduced to each other,
I instantly found Marie attractive and vice versa. In retrospect, I
can understand why: we are both brown-eyed, similar in height and
build and hair colour, and so on. But, on the other hand, I also had a
sense that there was something about Marie that did not quite match my
ideal, even though I could not figure out what exactly it was. Not
until Marie and I first went to a ballet together did I solve the
puzzle. I lent Marie my opera glasses, and when she passed them back
to me, I found that she had pushed the eye-pieces so close together
that I could not see through them until I had spread them apart again.
I then realized that Marie has more close-set eyes than I do, and that
most women whom I had pursued before had wide-set eyes like my own.
Thanks to Marie's ear lobes and other merits, I have been able to make
peace with my and her mismatched interocular distances. Nevertheless,
the episode with the opera glasses made me appreciate for the first
time that I have always found wide-set eyes a turn-on, even though I
had not been explicitly aware of it.
So, we tend to marry someone who looks like us. But - wait a minute.
The men who look most similar to a woman are the men who share half of
her genes - her father or brother! Similarly, the best-matched mate
for a man would be his mother or sister! Yet most of us obey the
incest taboo and certainly do not marry our parent or sibling of the
opposite sex. Instead, I am saying that people tend to marry a person
who looks like the parent or sibling of the opposite sex. Our actual
behaviour is summed up by a popular song of the 1920s.
I want a girl
Just like the girl
That married dear old Dad . . .
The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are
looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the
opposite sex, who in turn resembles us. As children, we already begin
to develop our search image of a future sex partner, and that image is
heavily influenced by the people of the opposite sex whom we see most
often. For most of us that is our mother (or father) and sister (or
brother), plus close childhood friends.
At this point, you are probably turning to your spouse or Significant
Other, pulling out your tape measure, and discovering a gross mismatch
between your and his (or her) ear lobes. Or perhaps you have pulled
out a photo of your mother or sister, and you detect not the faintest
resemblance when you hold it beside your spouse. You may be about to
throw away this book as patent nonsense. But if your wife is not a
dead ringer for your mother, don't stop reading, and conversely don't
get worried that you should see a psychiatrist about your pathological
search image. After all, remember:
|. Studies consistently show that factors like religion and personally
influence our choice of spouse much more strongly than physical
appearance. All I am making is the obvious point that physical traits
have some influence. In fact, I would predict much higher correlation
coefficients for physical traits between casual sex partners than
between spouses. That is because we can select casual sex partners
solely on the basis of physical attraction, without regard to religion
or political views. This prediction awaits testing.
2. Remember also that your search image could have been influenced by
any of the people of the opposite sex that you regularly saw around
you as you were growing up. That includes playmates and siblings as
well as parents. Perhaps your spouse resembles the little girl next
door, rather than Mother.
3. Finally, remember that lots of independent physical traits enter
into our search image, so most of us end up with a mild average
resemblance to our spouses in many traits, rather than with a very
close resemblance in a few traits. This idea is known as the 'buxom
redhead theory'. If a man's mother and sister were both buxom
redheads, he might grow up to consider buxom redheads very exciting,
but redheads are relatively rare, and buxom redheads still rarer.
Furthermore, the man's preference even in a casual sex partner is
likely to depend on some other physical traits as well, and his
preference in a wife will certainly depend on her views about
children, politics, and money. Hence, in a group of sons of buxom
redheads, a few lucky ones will find a girl like Mother in those two
respects, some will have to settle for buxom non-redheads, others for
non-buxom redheads, and most for run-of-the-mill non-buxom brunettes.
You may also be objecting at this point that my argument applies only
to societies where spouses pick each other. As friends from India and
China are quick to remind me, that is a peculiar custom of the
twentieth-century US and Europe. It was not true of the US and Europe
in the past, and it is still not true of most of the world today,
where marriages are instead arranged by the families involved. The
bride and groom often are not even introduced until the wedding day.
How could my argument possibly apply to such marriages?
Of course it couldn't, if one is talking just about legal marriages.
But my argument would still apply to the choice of extramarital sex
partners, who may father a non-trivial fraction of children, just as
blood-group studies proved for American and British children (Chapter
Four). In fact, I would expect that if extramarital fathering is
frequent even in societies where a woman already exercises her sexual
preferences in choosing a husband, it may be even more frequent in
societies with arranged marriages, where a woman's choice can only be
expressed extramaritally.
It is not just the case, then, that Fore men prefer Fore women over
Californian women, and vice versa: our search images are much more
specific. However, these insights still leave questions unanswered.
Did I inherit or learn my search image for someone like Mother? If I
were offered the choice of sex with my sister or a strange woman, I
would certainly reject the offer of my sister and probably my first
cousin, but would I prefer my second cousin over a strange woman
(because the cousin probably resembles me more)? There are some
crucial experiments that would settle these questions — for instance,
keeping a man in a large cage with his female first, second, third,
fourth, and fifth cousins, counting how many times he had sex with
each, and repeating the experiment with many men (or women) and their
cousins. Alas, such experiments are hard to do with humans, but they
have been done for several animal species, with instructive results. I
shall give just three examples, the cousin-loving quail, and the
perfumed mice and rats. (We cannot use our closest relatives the
chimpanzees for these examples, since they are so unselective.)
Consider first the case of Japanese quail, which are either brown or
white. Quail normally grow up with their biological parents and
siblings. However, it is also possible to 'cross-foster' quail by
switching eggs between quail mothers and their nests before the eggs
hatch. In that way, a baby quail may be reared by foster-parents and
grow up with 'pseudo-siblings' — that is, littermates among whom the
baby hatched but to whom the baby is not genetically related.
The preferences of male quail have been tested by putting a male in a
cage with two females and observing with which female the male spent
more time or copulated. It turns out that males preferred whichever
colour of female they grew up with. Furthermore, when a brown-loving
male was given a choice between brown females that he had never seen
before (although some were his relatives from whom he had been
separated before hatching), he preferred his first cousin to his third
cousin or an unrelated female, but he also preferred his first cousin
to his sister. Evidently, male quail as they grow up learn the
appearance of their sisters (or mother) with whom they are reared,
then seek a mate that is very similar but not too similar. In fancy
technical language, biologists term this the Principle of Optimal
Intermediate Similarity. Like other things in life, inbreeding seems
to be good in moderation - a little inbreeding, but not too much. For
instance, among unrelated brown females a male prefers an unfamiliar
one over a familiar one with whom he grew up (a pseudo-sister', who
pushes the male's not-too-much-incest button).
Mice and rats similarly learn in childhood what to look for in a mate,
but they choose by smell more than by appearance. When infant female
mice were reared by parents sprayed repeatedly with Parma Violet
perfume, the females on reaching adulthood sought out Parma-Violet-
scented males in preference to unscented males. ('I want a boy, just
like the boy, that smells like dear old Dad'.) In another experiment,
infant male rats were reared by mother rats whose nipples and vagina
were sprayed with lemon odour, then the male on reaching adulthood was
put in a cage with a lemon-smelling or unscented female rat. Each such
encounter was videotaped and played back to note the times of key
events. It turned out that males with scented mothers mounted and
ejaculated more quickly when placed with a scented female than with an
unscented one, while the reverse was true for males with unscented
mothers. For example, sons of scented mother rats were so excited by a
scented sex partner that they ejaculated in only eleven-and-a-half
minutes, while they took over seventeen minutes to ejaculate with an
unscented female. But sons of unscented mother rats took over
seventeen minutes with the scented partner and only twelve minutes
with the unscented partner. Obviously, the males had learned to be
sexually excited by their mother's smell (or lack of smell); they did
not inherit the knowledge.
What do these experiments on quail, mice, and rats show? The message
is clear. Animals of those species learn to recognize their parents
and siblings as they grow up, then are programmed to seek out an
individual fairly similar to the parent or sibling of the opposite sex
- but not Mother or Sister herself. They may inherit some search image
of what constitutes a rat, but they evidently learn their search image
of who in particular is a beautiful, eligible rat.
We can immediately appreciate what experiments are needed to get
unequivocal proof of this theory for humans. We should take an average
happy family, spray Father every day with Parma Violet, spray Mother's
nipples daily with lemon oil while she is nursing, and then wait
twenty years to seejvhom the sons and daughters marry. Alas, we would
be frustrated by the many obstacles to establishing Scientific Truth
for humans. But some observations and accidental experiments still let
us tip-toe towards the truth.
Take the incest taboo. Scientists debate whether the taboo itself in
humans is instinctive or learned. However, this chapter is concerned
with a separate question: given that we somehow acquire an incest
taboo, do we learn to whom to apply it, or do we inherit that
information in our genes? Normally we grow up with our closest
relatives (parents and siblings), so our subsequent avoidance of them
as sex partners could equally well be genetic or learned, but adoptive
brothers and sisters also tend to avoid incest, suggesting learned
avoidance.
This conclusion is strengthened by an interesting set of observations
made in Israeli kibbutzim - the collective settlements whose members
house, school, and care for all their children together as a large
group. Thus, kibbutz children live from birth until young adulthood in
intimate association with each other, like a gigantic family of
brothers and sisters. If propinquity were the main factor influencing
whom we marry, most kibbutz children should marry within the kibbutz.
In fact, a study of 2,769 marriages contracted by kibbutz-reared
children turned up only thirteen between children from the same
kibbutz. All the other children married outside the kibbutz on
reaching maturity.
Even those thirteen cases turned out to be the exceptions that proved
the rule: all involved couples of whom one had moved into that kibbutz
only after the age of six! Among children reared in the same peer
group since birth, there were not only no marriages, but also no
adolescent or adult heterosexual activity at all. This is astonishing
restraint on the part of nearly 3,000 young men and women who enjoyed
daily opportunities for sexual involvement with each other, and who
had far fewer opportunities for involvement with outsiders. It
illustrates dramatically that the period between birth and the age of
six is a critical time for formation of our sexual preferences. We
learn, however unconsciously, that our intimate associates from that
period are ineligible as sex partners when we become mature.
We also appear to learn the part of our search image that tells us
whom to seek, not just the part that tells us whom to avoid. For
instance, a friend of mine who is 100%% Chinese herself happened to
grow up in a community in which every other family was white.
Eventually she moved as an adult to an area with many Chinese men, and
for some time she dated both Chinese and white men, but came to
realize that it was the whites who attracted her. She has been married
twice, both times to white men. Her own experiences led her to ask her
Chinese women friends about their backgrounds. It turned out that most
of her friends reared in white enclaves also ended up marrying white
men, while those reared in Chinese neighbourhoods married Chinese men
- although all had plenty of men of both types from whom to choose
during their young adult years. Hence those who surround us as we grow
up, though ineligible themselves as eventual mates, nevertheless shape
our standards of beauty and search image.
I Think to yourself: what sort of men or women do you find physically
attractive, and where did you develop that taste? I would guess that
most people, like myself, can trace their preference to the appearance
of parents °r siblings or childhood friends. So do not be discouraged
by all those old generalizations about sex appeal — 'Gentlemen prefer
blondes,' 'Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,' etc.
Each such 'rule' applies only to some of us, and there are plenty of
men out there whose mothers were myopic brunettes. Fortunately for my
wife and me - both of us brulettes raring glasses, born of brunette
glass-wearing parents - beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
by Jared M. Diamond
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Chimpanzee/dp/0099913801/
http://svonz.lenin.ru/books/Jared_Diamond-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third_Chimpanzee...
