Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
In the early 1990s, there was a flurry of interest that a “gay gene” had been found on the X chromosome. The excitement faded as it proved hard to replicate the original study. But twin studies show that homosexuality is heritable, and one day the genes that can cause a man to be gay—perhaps in response to maternal genes expressed in his mother’s womb—will be found.
The first implication will be political. Although it raises the possibility of selective abortion by mothers who do not wish to have gay sons, the theory of the gay gene has been largely welcomed in recent years by homosexual activists. The reason is that they find it will convince their more stubborn detractors that homosexuality is a condition into which they were born rather than a choice they made. In the eyes of disapproving heterosexuals, it exculpates them, their parents, and their education for their sexual proclivity. It also relieves parents of any anxiety they might have that their son might be led into homosexuality simply because his favorite rock group consists of homosexuals or because he has been seduced by a homosexual during adolescence.
The second implication is moral. The gay gene would at last demolish the myth that there is something “better” and less evil about theories that ascribe conditions to nurture or environment than theories that ascribe them to innate nature. In the name of Freudian nurture theories, gays were once treated with aversion therapy—electric shocks and emetics accompanied by homoerotic images. The most compelling of the new evidence for the gay gene is that fraternal twins, carried in the same womb and reared in the same household, have only a one-in-four chance of being gay. Identical twins, on the other hand, with the same nurture and the same nature, have a one-in-two chance of being gay. If one identical twin is gay, the chances that his brother is also gay are 50 percent. There is also good evidence that the gene is inherited from the mother and not from the father.1
How could such a gene survive, given that gay men generally do not have children? There are two possible answers. One is that the gene is good for female fertility when in women, to the same extent that it is bad for male fertility when in men. The second possibility is more intriguing. Laurence Hurst and David Haig of Oxford University believe that the gene might not be on the X chromosome after all. X genes are not the only genes inherited through the female line. So are the genes of mitochondria, described in chapter 4, and the evidence linking the gene to a region of the X chromosome is still very shaky statistically. If the gay gene is in the mitochondria, then a conspiracy theory springs to the devious minds of Hurst and Haig. Perhaps the gay gene is like those “male killer” genes found in many insects. It effectively sterilizes males, causing the diversion of inherited wealth to female relatives. That would (until recently at least) have enhanced the breeding success of the descendants of those female relatives, which would have caused the gay gene to spread. If the sexual preferences of gay men are greatly influenced (not wholly determined) by a gene, then it is probable that so are the sexual preferences of heterosexuals. And if our sexual instincts are heavily determined by our genes, then they have evolved by natural and sexual selection, and that means they bear the imprint of design. They are adaptive. There is a reason that beautiful people are attractive. They are attractive because others have genes that cause them to find beautiful people attractive. People have such genes because those that employed criteria of beauty left more descendants than those that did not. Beauty is not arbitrary. The insights of evolutionary biologists are transforming our view of sexual attraction, for they have begun at last to suggest why we find some features beautiful and others ugly.
BEAUTY AS A UNIVERSAL
Botticelli’s Venus is beautiful. Michelangelo’s David is handsome. But were they always thus? Would a Neolithic hunter-gatherer have agreed? Do Japanese or Eskimo people agree? Will our great-grandchildren agree? Is sexual attraction fashionable and evanescent or permanent and inflexible?
We all know how dated and frankly unattractive the fashions and the beauties of a decade ago look now, let alone those of a century ago. Men in doublet and hose may still seem sexy to some, but men in frock coats surely do not. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a person’s sense of what is beautiful and sexy is subtly educated to prefer the prevailing norms of fashion. Rubens would not have chosen Twiggy as a model. Moreover, beauty is plainly relative, as any prisoner who has spent months without seeing a member of the opposite sex can testify.
And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty were considered “sexier” than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches were ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones. It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been “in fashion”? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The famous sculpture of Nefertiti’s head and neck, 3,300 years old, is as stunning today as when Akhenaten first courted the real thing.
Incidentally, in this chapter on what makes people sexually attractive to one another, I am going to take almost all my examples from white Europeans, and from northern Europeans at that. By this I am not implying that white European standards of beauty are absolute and superior but merely that they are the only ones I know enough about to describe. There is no room for a separate investigation into the standards of beauty that black, Asian, or other people employ. But the problem that I am principally concerned with is universal to all people: Are standards of beauty cultural whims or innate drives? What is flexible and what endures? I will argue in this chapter that only by understanding how sexual attraction evolved is it possible to make sense of the mixture of culture and instinct, and understand why some features flow with the fashion while others resist. The first clue comes from the study of incest.
FREUD AND INCEST TABOOS
Very few men have sex with their sisters. Caligula and Cesare Borgia were notorious because they were (rumored to be) such exceptions. Even fewer men have sex with their mothers, in spite of what Freud tells us is an intense longing to do so. Sexual abuse by fathers of daughters is far more common. But it is still rare.
Compare two explanations of these facts. First, that people secretly desire incest but are able to overcome these desires with the help of social taboos and rules; second, that people do not find their very close relatives sexually arousing, that the taboo is in the mind. The first explanation is Sigmund Freud’s. He argued that our first and most intense sexual attraction is toward our opposite-sex parent. That is why, he went on to say, all human societies impose on their subjects strict and specific taboos against incest. Since the taboo “is not to be found in the psychology of the individual,” there is a “necessity for stern prohibitions.” Without those taboos, he implied, we would all be dreadfully inbred and suffer from genetic abnormalities.2
Freud made three unjustified assumptions. First, he equated attraction with sexual attraction. A two-year-old girl may love her father, but that does not mean she lusts after him. Second, he assumed without proof that people have incestuous desires. Freudians say the reason very few people express these desires is that they have “repressed” them—which makes Freud’s argument irrefutable. Third, he assumed that social rules about cousins marrying were “incest taboos.” Until very recently scientists and laymen alike followed Freud in believing that laws forbidding marriages between cousins were enacted to prevent incest and inbreeding. They may not have been.
Freud’s rival in this field was Edward Westermarck; in 1891 he suggested that men do not mate with their mothers and sisters not because of social rules but because they are simply not turned on by those they were reared with. Westermarck’s idea was simple. Men and women cannot recognize their relatives as relatives, so they have no way of preventing inbreeding as such. (Curiously, quail are different; they can recognize their brothers and sisters even when reared apart.) But they can use a simple psychological rule that works ninety-nine times out of a hundred to avert an incestuous match. They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one’s closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it. (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with strangers.) Westermarck did not know that, of course, but it strengthens his argument, for it suggests that the only incestuous relations a human being should avoid are the ones between brother and sister, and parent and child.3
Westermarck’s theory leads to several simple predictions: Stepsiblings would generally not be found to marry unless they were brought up apart. Very close childhood friends would also generally not be found to marry. Here the best evidence comes from two sources: Israeli kibbutzim and an old Chinese marriage custom. In kibbutzim, children are reared in crèches with unrelated companions. Lifelong friendships are formed, but marriages between fellow kibbutz children are very rare. In Taiwan some families practice “shimpua marriage” in which an infant daughter is brought up by the family of the man she will marry. She is therefore effectively married to her stepbrother. Such marriages are often infertile, largely because the two partners find each other sexually unattractive. Conversely, two siblings reared apart are surprisingly likely to fall in love with each other if they meet at the right age.4
All of this adds up to a picture of sexual inhibition between people who saw a great deal of each other during childhood; fraternal incest, as Westermarck suggested, is therefore prevented by this instinctive aversion that siblings have for each other. But Westermarck’s theory would also predict that if incest does occur, it will prove to be between parent and child, and specifically between father and daughter, because a father is past the age at which familiarity breeds aversion and because men usually initiate sex. That, of course, is the most common form of incest.5
This contradicts Freud’s idea that incest taboos are there because people need to be told not to commit incest. Indeed, Freud’s theory requires that evolutionary pressures have not just failed to generate some mechanism to avoid incest but have actually encouraged maladaptive incestuous instincts, which the taboos repress. Freudians have often criticized the Westermarck theory on the grounds that it would obviate the need for incest taboos at all. But in fact incest taboos that outlaw marriage within the nuclear family are rare. The taboos that Freud observed are nearly always concerned with outlawing marriage between cousins. In most societies there is no need to outlaw incest within the nuclear family because there is little risk of its happening.6
So why are the taboos there? Claude Lévi-Strauss invented a different theory called the “alliance theory,” which stressed the importance of using women as bargaining chips between tribes and therefore not letting them marry within the tribe, but since no two anthropologists can agree on exactly what Levi-Strauss meant, it is hard to test his idea. Nancy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has argued that the so-called incest taboos are actually rules about marriage customs invented by powerful men to prevent rivals from accumulating wealth by marrying their own cousins. They are not about incest at all but about power.7
TEACHING OLD CHAFFINCHES NEW TRICKS
The incest story neatly demonstrates the interdependence of nature and nurture. The incest avoidance mechanism is socially induced: You become sexually averse to your siblings during your childhood. In that sense there is nothing genetic about it. And yet it is genetic, for it is not taught: It just develops within the brain. The instinct not to mate with childhood companions is nature, but the features by which you recognize them are nurture.
It is critical to Westermarck’s argument that this aversion to mating with familiar people wear off for new acquaintances in later life. Otherwise, people would become averse to mating with their spouses within weeks of marrying them, which they plainly do not. Biologically, this is not hard to arrange. One of the most striking features of animal brains is the “critical period” of youth during which something can be learned and after which the learning is not erased or superseded. Konrad Lorenz discovered that chicks and goslings “imprint” on the first moving thing they meet, which is usually their mother and rarely an Austrian zoologist, and thereafter they prefer to follow that object. But chicks a few hours old will not imprint, nor will those two days old. They are at their most sensitive to imprinting at thirteen to sixteen hours old. During that sensitive period they will fix their preferred image of a parent in their heads.
The same is true of a chaffinch learning to sing. Unless it hears another chaffinch, it never learns the species’s typical song. If it hears no chaffinch until it is fully grown, it never learns the right song but produces a feeble half-song. Nor will it learn the song if it hears another chaffinch only when it is a few days old. It must hear a chaffinch during a critical period in between—from two weeks to two months of age—and then it will learn to sing correctly; after that period it never modifies its song by imitation.8
It is not hard to find examples of critical-period learning in people. Few people change their accents after the age of about twenty-five, even if they move from, say, the United States to Britain. But if they move at ten or fifteen, they quickly adopt a British accent. They are just like white-crowned sparrows, which sing with the dialect of the place where they lived at two months old.9 Likewise, children are remarkably good at picking up foreign languages just by exposure to them, whereas adults must laboriously learn them. We are not chicks or chaffinches, but we still have critical periods during which we acquire preferences and habits that are fairly hard to change.
This concept of the critical period is presumably what lies behind the Westermarck incest-avoiding instinct: We become sexually indifferent to those with whom we were reared during a critical period. Nobody is certain exactly what constitutes the critical period, but it is a plausible guess that it lasts from, say, eight to fourteen, the years before puberty. Common sense dictates that sexual orientation must be decided in such a fashion: A genetic predisposition meets examples during a critical period. Recall the fate of the baby chaffinch. For six weeks it is sensitive to learning chaffinch song. But during those six weeks of sensitivity, it hears all sorts of things: cars, telephones, lawn mowers, thunder, crows, dogs, sparrows, starlings. Yet it only imitates the song of chaffinches. It has a predilection to learn chaffinch song. (If it were a thrush or a starling, it could indeed imitate some of the other things. One bird in Britain learned the call of a telephone, causing havoc among backyard sunbathers.)10 This is often the case with learning. Ever since the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Peter Marler in the 1960s, it has been well known that animals do not learn anything and everything; they learn what their brains “want” to learn. Men are instinctively attracted to women thanks to the interaction of their genes and hormones, but that tendency is much influenced in a critical period by role models, peer pressure, and free will. There is learning, but there are predispositions.
A heterosexual man emerges from puberty with more than a general sexual preference for all women. He emerges with a distinct notion of beauty and ugliness. He is “stunned” by some women, indifferent to others, and finds others sexually repulsive. Is this, too, something that he acquired by a mixture of genes, hormones, and social pressure? It must be, but the interesting question is how much of each. If social pressure is everything, then the images and lessons we give to the youth of both sexes, through films, books, advertisements, and by example, are crucially important. If not, then the fact that men prefer, say, thin women is fixed by the genes and hormones and not a passing fad.
Suppose you were a Martian interested in studying people as William Thorpe studied chaffinches. You want to know how men learn their standards of beauty, so you keep boys in cages. Some you expose to endless films of plump men admiring and being admired by plump women, while thin men and thin women are reviled; others you keep in total ignorance of womanhood so that their existence comes as a shock at the age of twenty.
It is revealing to speculate on what you think the outcome of the Martian’s experiment would be because what follows is an attempt to piece together from much inferior experiments and facts the same result. What kind of woman would the men who had never seen women prefer once they got over the shock of seeing women for the first time? Old ones or young ones, fat ones or thin ones? And would the men reared to believe that fat was beautiful really prefer plump women to skinny models?
Bear in mind the reason we are concentrating on male preferences. As we saw in the last chapter, men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa, and for good reason: Youth and health are better clues to women’s value as a mate and potential mother than to a man’s. Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.
SKINNY WOMEN
But fashions change. If beauty is subject to fashion, however despotic, it can change. Consider a case where the definition of beauty does seem to have changed drastically in recent years: thinness. Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, is credited with the remark that a woman “can never be too rich or too thin,” but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern model. In the words of Roberta Seid, thinness became a “prejudice” in the 1950s, a “myth” in the 1960s, an “obsession” in the 1970s, and a “religion” in the 1980s.11 Tom Wolfe coined the term “social X rays” for New York society women who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas falls steadily year after year. So does that of Playboy centerfolds. Both categories of women are 15 percent lighter than the average for their ages.12 Slimming diets fill the newspapers and the wallets of charlatans. Anorexia and bulimia, diseases brought on by excessive dieting, maim and kill young women.
One thing is painfully obvious: There is no preference for the average. Even allowing for the fact that abundant, cheap, refined food makes the average woman much plumper than was normal a millennium or two ago, women must go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the fashionable reedlike shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available. Today, as in the Pleistocene period, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: A woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only 10-15 percent below normal. Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family. But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive.13
If the male preference for thinness is paradoxical, how much more puzzling is the fact that it seems to be new. There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin, and from sculpture and painting as far back as the Renaissance that beautiful women were plump women. There are exceptions. Nefertiti’s neck was that of a thin, elegant woman. Botticelli’s Venus was not exactly overweight. And for a time, Victorians worshiped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that some women allegedly removed a pair of ribs to make their waists slimmer. Lillie Langtry could enclose her eighteen-inch waist with two hands, but even the slimmest of today’s models are twenty-two inches around the waist. And it is implausible that a Renaissance man would have found them ugly. Yet we need not rely only on our own culture for evidence that plump women can be more attractive than thin ones. There is a willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned.
As Robert Smuts of the University of Michigan has argued, thinness was once all too common and was a sign of relative poverty. Nowadays, poverty-induced thinness is confined to the Third World. But in the industrialized nations, wealthy women are able to afford a diet low in fat and spend their money on dieting and exercise. Thinness has become what fatness was: a sign of status.
Smuts argues that male preferences, keying in on whatever signs of status prevailed, simply switched. They did this presumably by a switch of association. A young man growing up today is bombarded with correlations between thinness and wealth, from the fashion industry in particular. His unconscious mind begins to make the connection during his critical period, and when he is forming his idealized mental preference for a woman, he accordingly makes her slim.14
STATUS CONSCIOUSNESS
Unfortunately, this theory conflicts directly with the conclusions of the last chapter, so something has to give. It is women, not men, who are supposed to be especially sensitive to the social status of their potential spouses. Sociobiologists argue that the reason men notice women’s looks is not as a proxy for their wealth but as a clue to their reproductive potential. Yet here we have men supposedly using women’s waists as clues to their bank balances and positively panting after infertile emaciates.
Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa. In one study the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than her own socioeconomic status, intelligence, or education—a rather surprising fact when you consider how often people marry within their profession, class, and education brackets.15 If men are using appearance as a proxy for status, why do they not use knowledge of status itself?
Unlike female thinness, male status symbols are generally “honest.” If they were not, they would not remain status symbols. Only the very best con man can fake conspicuous consumption or get away for long with boasts about his prowess or rank. Thinness is altogether trickier because poor, low-status women once found it easier to be thin than rich, high-status women. Even today when poor women can afford only junk food while rich women eat lettuce, it is hard to argue that every thin woman is rich and every fat one poor.16
So the argument that links status with skinniness is not persuasive. Skinniness is a very poor clue to wealth, and in any case men are not much interested in women’s status or wealth. Indeed, the argument is circular: Social status and thinness are correlated because of a male preference for thinness. I find the explanation that men have cued in on a woman’s thinness as a clue to her status unconvincing.
The trouble is, I am not sure what to suggest in place of it. Suppose it is true that in the days of Rubens men preferred plump women and that today they prefer thin women. Suppose between the plump matrons of Rubens’s paintings and the “no woman can be too thin” days of Wallis Simpson, men stopped preferring the fattest or some half-plump ideal and started preferring the thinnest women available. Ronald Fisher’s sexual selection theory suggests one way in which it may have been adaptive for men to like thin women. By preferring a thin female, a human male may have had thin daughters who would have attracted the attention of high-status males because other males also preferred thinness. In other words, even if a thin wife could bear fewer children than a fat one, her daughters would be more likely to marry well, and having married well, to be wealthy enough to rear more of the children they bore. So the man who marries a thin woman may have more grandchildren than the man who marries a fat one. Now imagine that a cultural sexual preference spreads by imitation and that young men learn the equation thin equals beautiful by watching others behave. That in itself would be adaptive because it would be one way for males to ensure that they did not flout the prevailing fashion (just as females copying each other in mate choice is adaptive in black grouse). Were they to ignore the cultural preference for plump or for thin women, they would risk having spinster daughters as surely as a peahen would risk having bachelor sons by choosing a short-tailed mate. In other words, as long as the preference is cultural and the preferred trait is genetic, Fisher’s insight that fashion is despotic still stands.17
I confess, however, that these ideas do not really convince me. If fashions are despotic, they cannot easily be changed. The puzzle is how men stopped liking plump women without depriving themselves of eligible offspring by doing so. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the fashion in men’s preferences for women’s fatness cannot have changed adaptively. Either men’s preferences shifted spontaneously and for no good reason or men always preferred some ideal shape that was always quite thin.
WHY WAISTS MATTER
The solution to this puzzle may lie in the work of an ingenious Indian psychologist named Dev Singh, who now works at the University of Texas in Austin. He observed that women’s bodies, unlike men’s, go through two remarkable transitions between puberty and middle age. At ten a girl has a figure not unlike what she will have at forty. Then suddenly her vital statistics are transformed: The ratio of her waist to her chest measurement and to her hips shrinks rapidly. By thirty it is rising again as her breasts lose their firmness and her waist its narrowness. That ratio, of waist to breasts and hips, is not only known as the vital statistic but it is also the feature that, with a few brief exceptions, fashion has always emphasized above all else. Bodices, corsets, hoops, bustles, and crinolines existed to make waists look smaller relative to bosom and bottom. Bras, breast implants, shoulder pads (which make the waist look smaller), and tight belts do the same today.
Singh noticed that however much the weight of Playboy centerfolds changed, one feature did not: the ratio of their waist width to their hip width. Recall that Bobbi Low at the University of Michigan argued that fat on the buttocks and breasts mimics broad hip bones and high mammary tissue content, while thin waists seem to indicate that these features could not be caused by fat. Singh’s theory is slightly different but intriguingly parallel. He argues that, within reason, a man will find almost any weight of a woman attractive as long as her waist is much thinner than her hips.18
If that sounds foolish, consider the results of Singh’s experiments. First, he showed men four versions of the same picture of the midriff of a young woman in shorts. Each picture was subtly touched up to alter slightly the waist-to-hip ratio: 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9. Unerringly, men chose the thinnest-waist version as the most attractive. This was no great surprise, but he found a remarkable consistency among his subjects. Next he showed his subjects a range of drawings of female forms, which varied according to their weight and according to their waist-to-hip ratio. He found that a heavy woman with a low ratio of waist to hips was usually preferred to a thin woman with a high ratio. The ideal figure was the one with the lowest ratio, not the one with the thinnest torso.
Singh’s interest is in anorexics, bulimics, and women obsessed with losing weight even when thin. He believes that because dieting in fairly thin women has no effect on the waist-to-hip ratio—if anything, it makes it larger by shrinking the hips—they are doomed never to feel more attractive.
Why does the waist-to-hip ratio matter? Singh observes that a “gynoid” fat distribution—more fat on the hips, less on the torso—is necessary for the hormonal changes associated with female fertility. An “android” fat distribution—fat on the belly, thin hips—is associated with the symptoms of male disabilities such as heart disease, even in women. But which is cause and which effect? It seems to me more likely that both the shape and the hormonal effects of it are sexually selected by generations of males rather than males preferring the shape because it is the only way the hormones can be made to work. The relatively brief period during which women have hourglass bodies—from fifteen to thirty-five, say—is a sexually selected phenomenon. It owes more to competition to attract men than to any other biological need. Men have been unconsciously acting as selective breeders of women.
Low provides one possible reason for the male preference for a low ratio—choosing broad-hipped women more able to give birth. Most apes give birth to babies whose brain is half-grown; human babies’ brains are one-third grown at birth, and they spend far less time in the womb than is normal for a mammal, given the longevity of man. The reason is obvious: Were the hole in the pelvis through which we are born (the birth canal) commensurately larger, our mothers would be unable to walk at all. The width of human hips reached a certain point and could go no further; as brains continued to grow bigger, earlier birth was the only option left to the species. Imagine the evolutionary pressure of this process on female hip size. It was always wise for a man to choose the biggest-hipped woman he could find, generation after generation, for millions of years. At a certain point hips could get no bigger but men still had the preference, so women with slender waists who appeared to have larger hips by contrast were preferred instead.19
I do not know if I believe this tale or not. I cannot find the logical flaw in it (though on first reading there will seem to be many), nor can I quite match it to the male passion for thinness. I also have a nagging doubt about our assumptions that fashions have changed in the admiration of thinness. Suppose our assumptions are at fault, as in the story of the king and the goldfish. Suppose men always preferred slim women to fat ones because slimness meant youth and virginity. After all, as every cosmetic company and plastic surgeon knows, youth has always been the most reliable key to beauty. Perhaps men do not use slimness as a clue to status or childbearing ability but to youth.
YOUTH EQUALS BEAUTY?
A man cannot tell the age of a woman directly. He must infer it from her physical appearance, her behavior, and her reputation. It is intriguing to note that many of the most noticed features of female beauty decay rapidly with age: unblemished skin, full lips, clear eyes, upright breasts, narrow waists, slender legs, even blond hair, which, without chemical intervention, rarely lasts beyond the twenties except among the most Viking of people. These things are, in the sense developed in chapter 5, honest handicaps. They tell a tale of age that cannot be easily disguised without surgery, makeup, or veils.
That blond hair on a woman has been considered by Europeans more beautiful than brown or black has long been noted. In ancient Rome women dyed their hair blond. In medieval Italy fair hair and great beauty were inseparable. In Britain the words fair and beautiful were synonymous.20 Blond adult hair may be a sexually selected honest handicap, just like a swallow’s tail streamers. Blond hair in children is a fairly common gene among Europeans (and, curiously, Australian aborigines). So when a mutation arose in the not-so-distant past, somewhere near Stockholm, say, for that blondness to last into adulthood but not beyond the early twenties, any men with a genetic preference for blond women would have found themselves marrying only young women, which—in a heavily clothed civilization—others might not have done. They would therefore have left more descendants, and a preference for blond hair would have spread. This in turn would have increased the spread of the trait itself because it was indeed an honest indicator of female reproductive value. Hence, gentlemen prefer blondes.21
Of course, the part about the male genetic preference is optional or, if you like, a parable. It is more probable that the preference for blond hair among northern European men, if it exists, is a cultural trait instilled in them unconsciously by the association between blondness and youth—an association, incidentally, that the cosmetic industry is rapidly undermining. But the effect is the same: a genetic change brought about by a sexual preference. The alternative theory is to suggest some natural reason for blond hair’s being advantageous—for example, that it goes with fair skin, and fair skin allows the absorption of ultraviolet light to help stave off vitamin D deficiency. But the skin is not much fairer in blond than in dark Swedes; truly fair skin goes with red hair, not blond.
Until recently, sexual selection was an argument of last resort, when appeals to natural selection by the “environment” had failed. But why should it be? Why is it more plausible to suggest that blond hair in Baltic people was selected by vitamin D deficiency than to suggest it was selected by sexual preferences? The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye color—variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor. In the common pheasant, every one of forty-six isolated wild populations in central Asia has a different combination of male plumage ornaments: white collars, green heads, blue rumps, orange breasts. Likewise, in mankind, sexual selection is at work.22
The male obsession with youth is characteristically human. There is no other animal yet studied that shares this obsession quite as strongly. Male chimpanzees find middle-aged females almost as attractive as young ones as long as they are in season. This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a potentially long reproductive life ahead of her. If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life, it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men.23
THE LEGS THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS
That many of the components of female beauty are clues to age, every woman and every cosmetic company well knows. But there is more to beauty than youth. The reasons that many youthful women are not beautiful are generally twofold: They are overweight or underweight, or their facial features do not fit our image of beauty. Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure, and face.
A pop song from the 1970s included the cruelly sexist line “nice legs, shame about the face.” The importance of regular, symmetrical facial features is somewhat puzzling. Why should a man throw away a chance at mating with a young and fertile woman simply because she has a long nose or a double chin?
It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development.24 “The face is the most information-dense part of the body” is how Don Symons put it to me one day. And the less symmetrical a face, the less attractive. But asymmetry is not a common reason for ugliness; many people have perfectly symmetrical faces and yet are still ugly. The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme. In 1883, Francis Galton discovered that merging the photographs of several women’s faces produced a composite that is usually judged to be better looking than any of the individual faces that went into making it.25 The experiment has been repeated recently with computer-merged photographs of female undergraduates: The more faces that go into the image, the more beautiful the woman appears.26 Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable. Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable. Faces that are “full of character” are almost by definition nonaverage faces. The more average and unblemished the face, the more beautiful, but the less it tells you about its owner’s character.
This attraction to the average—to a nose that is neither too long nor too short, to eyes that are not too close together nor too far apart, to a chin that is neither prominent nor receding, to lips that are full but not too full, to cheekbones that are prominent but not absurdly so, to a face that is the average, oval shape, neither too long nor too broad—crops up throughout literature as a theme of female beauty. It suggests to me that a Fisherian sexy-son—or rather, in this case, sexy-daughter—effect is at work. Given the importance of facial beauty, a man who chooses an ugly-faced mate will probably have daughters that marry late or marry second-rate husbands. Throughout human history men have fulfilled their ambitions through their daughters’ looks. In societies with few other opportunities for social mobility, a great beauty could always marry above her station.27 Of course women inherit their looks from their fathers as well as their mothers, so a woman should also prefer regular features in a man—and women mostly do.
All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face, and runaway selection will take over. Any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average. It is a cruel, despotic fashion, one that enforces its pitiless logic at the expense of many a brilliant, kind, and accomplished woman who happens to be plain, and one that has ironically been made worse by the demographic transition to prescribed monogamy. In medieval Europe and in ancient Rome, powerful men took all the beauties into their harems, leaving a general shortage of women for the other men, so an ugly woman stood a better chance of eventually finding some man desperate enough to marry her. That may not sound very just, but justice is rarely the consequence of sexual selection.
PERSONALITIES
So much for what in women attracts men. What draws women to certain men? Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty—face, youth, and figure. But in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men.28
The single exception is height. Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men. In the world of dating agencies, the principle that a man must be taller than his date is so universal that it has been called “the cardinal principle of date selection.” Out of 720 applications by couples for bank accounts, only one was from a couple in which the woman was taller than the man, and yet couples chosen at random from the population would show scores of such cases. People mate “assortatively” for height. Men seek shorter wives, and women seek taller husbands. This cannot be due only to the men. When shown drawings of men and women together and asked to write stories to go with them, even women who stated adamantly that the size of a man made no difference to them wrote stories about anxious or weak men more often when the man depicted was shorter than the woman. The laudatory metaphor “he’s a big man” is found in many cultures. It has been calculated that every inch is worth $6,000 a year in salary in modern America.29
Bruce Ellis has summarized the evidence that personality is critical in men. In a monogamous society a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a “chief,” and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions. And not coincidentally, these are the things women find attractive. They are clues to future status. In one test of this truism, three scientists told their subjects stories about two different people of undefined gender taking part in a tennis match and doing equally well. One was portrayed as strong, competitive, dominant, and determined, the other as consistent, playing for fun rather than to win, easily intimidated by a stronger opponent, and uncompetitive. When asked to summarize the characters of these two people, women and men came up with similar descriptions. But whereas women said that the dominant one was more sexually attractive (if male), men did not find the dominant one more attractive (if female).30
Likewise, the same scientists videotaped an actor in two simulated interviews; in one he sat meekly in a chair near the door, with his head bowed, nodding at the interviewer, while in the other he was relaxed, leaning back and gesturing confidently. When shown the videos, women found the more dominant actor more desirable as a date and more sexually attractive, whereas men did not when the actor was female. Body language matters for male sexiness.31
If women select mates on the basis of personality more than men do, this correlates with the fact noted in chapter 8, and well known to many couples, that women are better judges of character. Good female judges of character left more descendants than bad. Good male judges did no better than bad male judges.
The importance of character may explain why Hollywood directors believe that the perfect box-office draw is a familiar, popular male star and a little-known female beauty (and pay them accordingly). Male stars, such as Sean Connery and Mel Gibson, build their reputations gradually. Female stars, such as Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone, rocket to fame in a single movie. The recipe of the James Bond films was perfect: a new girl every time but the same old Bond. (Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the “Coolidge effect”: a new female refreshes his libido. The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being shown around a farm. Learning that a cockerel could have sex dozens of times a day, Mrs. Coolidge said: “Please tell that to the president.” On being told, Mr. Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” “Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time.” The president continued: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”)32
The evidence that women do use direct clues of male status is overwhelming. American men who marry in a given year earn about one and a half times as much as men of the same age who do not. In a survey of two hundred tribal societies, two scientists confirmed that the handsomeness of a man depends on his skills and prowess rather than on his appearance. Dominance in a man is universally considered attractive by women. In Buss’s study of thirty-seven societies, women put more value on men’s financial prospects than vice versa. All in all, as Bruce Ellis put it in a recent review, “status and economic achievement are highly relevant barometers of male attractiveness, more so than physical attributes.”33
What are the clues to status? Ellis suggests that clothes and ornaments provide one set of clues: an Armani suit, a Rolex watch, and a BMW are as blatantly revealing of rank as any admiral’s sleeve stripes or Sioux chief’s headdress. In a book that chronicled how fashion has always been, until recently, a matter of class emulation, Quentin Bell wrote: “The history of fashionable dress is tied to the competition between classes, in the first place the emulation of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie and then the more extended competition which results from the ability of the proletariat to compete with the middle classes…. Implicit in the whole is a system of sartorial morality dependent upon pecuniary standards of value.”34
Bobbi Low has surveyed hundreds of societies and come to the conclusion that male ornaments almost always relate to rank and status—maturity, seniority, physical prowess, ferocity, or ability to indulge in conspicuous consumption—whereas female ornaments tend to signal marital or pubertal status and sometimes husband’s wealth. Certainly a Victorian duchess was emphasizing not her own wealth but her husband’s in the class distinctions of her clothes. This applies as plainly in modern urban societies as it did in ancient tribal ones. Tom Wolfe was the first to comment on how the circular ornaments on the hoods of Mercedes-Benzes had become status symbols among Harlem drug dealers.
At this point some evolutionists seem dangerously close to arguing that women have evolved the ability to be impressed by BMWs. Yet BMWs have existed for only about one human generation. Either evolution is working absurdly fast, or there is something wrong. There are two ways to avoid this difficulty, one of which is popular at the University of Michigan, the other at Santa Barbara. The Michigan scientists say something like this: Women do not have an evolved ability to be impressed by BMWs, but they have an evolved ability to be flexible and to adapt to the social pressures of the society in which they grew up. The Santa Barbara scientists say: Behavior itself is rarely what has evolved; it is the underlying psychological attitude that evolves, and modern women possess a mental mechanism, evolved during the Pleistocene period, that enables them to read what correlates to status among men and find such clues desirable.
In a sense, both are saying the same thing. Women are impressed by signals of status, whatever those specific symbols are. Presumably at some point they learn the association between BMWs and wealth; it is not a difficult equation to solve.35
THE FASHION BUSINESS
We are back at a familiar paradox. Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about status. In their dress, women follow fashion more than men do. Yet women seek clues to status, which change with fashion, and men seek clues to fertility, which do not. Men should not care less what women wear as long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy, and generally nubile. Women should care greatly about what men wear because it tells them a good deal about their background, their wealth, their social status, even their ambitions. So why do women follow clothes fashions more avidly than men?
I can think of several answers to this question. First, the theory is simply wrong, and men prefer status symbols, whereas women prefer bodies. Perhaps, but that flies in the face of an awful lot of robust evidence. Second, women’s fashion is not about status after all. Third, modern Western societies have been in a two-century aberration from which they are just emerging. In Regency England, Louis XIV’s France, medieval Christendom, ancient Greece, or among modern Yanomamö, men followed fashion as avidly as women. Men wore bright colors, flowing robes, jewels, rich materials, gorgeous uniforms, and gleaming, decorated armor. The damsels that knights rescued were no more fashionably attired than their paramours. Only in Victorian times did the deadly uniformity of the black frock coat and its dismal modern descendant, the gray suit, infect the male sex, and only in this century have women’s hemlines gone up and down like yo-yos.
This suggests the fourth and most intriguing explanation, which is that women do care more about clothes and men do care less, but instead of influencing the other sex with their concerns, they influence their own. Each gender uses its own preferences to guide its own behavior. Experiments show that men think women care about physique much more than they actually do; women think men care about status cues much more than they actually do. So perhaps each sex simply acts out its instincts in the conviction that the other sex likes the same things as they do.
One experiment seems to support the idea that men and women mistake their own preferences for those of the opposite sex. April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates. In each case the figures differed only in thinness. They asked the subjects to indicate their current figure, their ideal figure, the figure that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex, and the figure they thought most attractive in the opposite sex. Men’s current, ideal, and attractive figures were almost identical; men are, on average, content with their figures. Women, as expected, were far heavier than what they thought most attractive to men, which was heavier still than their own ideal. But intriguingly, both sexes erred in their estimation of what the other sex most likes. Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do.36
However, such confusions cannot be the whole explanation of why women follow fashion because it does not work for other features of attraction. Women are far more concerned with their own youth than men despite the fact that they mostly do not themselves seek younger partners.
And yet the notion that fashion is about status revolts us in a democratic age. We pretend instead that fashion is actually about showing off a body to best advantage. New fashions are worn by gorgeous models, and perhaps women buy them because they subconsciously credit the beauty to the dress and not the model. Surveys reveal what everybody knows: Men are attracted by women in revealing, tight, or skimpy clothing; women are less attracted by such clothing on men. Most female fashions are more or less explicitly designed to enhance beauty; for example, a gigantic crinoline made a waist look small simply by contrast. A woman is careful to choose clothes that “suit” her particular figure or hair color. Moreover, since most men grow up seeing women dressed and spend their critical periods seeing clothed women, their ideals of beauty include images of clothed women as well as naked ones. Havelock Ellis recounted the story of a boy who, standing before a painting of the Judgment of Paris, was asked which goddess he thought was the most beautiful. He replied; “I can’t tell because they haven’t their clothes on.”37
But the most characteristic feature of fashion, today at least, is its obsession with novelty. We have already seen how Bell thinks this comes about, as the trendsetters try to escape their vulgar imitators. Low thinks the key to women’s fashion is novelty. “Any conspicuous display which signals the ability to read fashion trends” is a clue to a woman’s status.38 Being the first in fashion is certainly a status symbol among women. Without the ability to induce constant obsolescence, fashion designers would be a lot less rich than they are.
This brings us back to the shifting sands of cultural standards of beauty. Beauty cannot be commonplace in a monogamous species like man; it must stand out. Men are discriminating because they will get the chance to marry only one or perhaps two women, so they are always interested in the best they can get, never in the ordinary. In a crowd of women all wearing black, the single one in red would surely catch the eye of a man, whatever her figure or face was like.
The very word fashion used to mean something between conformity and custom, where now it means novelty and modernity. Remarking on painful corsets and the hypocrisy of low necklines in a puritanical society, Quentin Bell observed: “The case against the fashion is always a strong one; why is it then that it never results in an effective verdict? Why is it that both public opinion and formal regulations are invariably set at nought, while sartorial custom, which consists in laws that are imposed without formal sanctions, is obeyed with wonderful docility, and this despite the fact that its laws are unreasonable, arbitrary, and not infrequently cruel.”39
I am left feeling that this puzzle is, in the present state of evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity. Fashion is about status, and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status.
THE FOLLY OF SEXUAL PERFECTIONISM
Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work. If for most of human history beautiful women and dominant men had more children than their rivals—which they surely did because the dominant men chose beautiful wives, and together they lived off the toil of their rivals—then in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant. But their rivals did, too, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too. A beautiful woman needed to shine still more brightly to stand out in the new firmament. And a dominant man needed to bully or scheme still more mercilessly to get his way. Our senses are easily dulled by the commonplace, however exceptional it may seem elsewhere or at other times. As Charles Darwin put it, “If all our women were to become as beautiful as the Venus de Medici, we should for a time be charmed; but we should soon wish for variety; and as soon as we had obtained variety, we should wish to see certain characters in our women a little exaggerated beyond the then existing common standard.”40 This, incidentally, is as concise a statement as could be made for why eugenics would never work. A page later Darwin describes the Jollof tribe of West Africa, famous for the beauty of its women; it deliberately sold its ugly women into slavery. Such Nazi eugenics would indeed gradually raise the level of beauty in the tribe, but the men’s subjective standards of beauty would rise as fast. Since beauty is an entirely subjective concept, the Jollofs were doomed to perpetual disappointment.
The depressing part of Darwin’s insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness. Sexual selection, Red Queen-style, is inevitably a cause of dissatisfaction, vain striving, and misery to individuals. All people are always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them. This brings up yet another paradox. It is all very well to say that men want to marry beautiful women and women want to marry rich and powerful men, but most of us never get the chance. Modern society is monogamous, so most of the beautiful women are married to dominant men already. What happens to Mr. and Ms. Average? They do not remain celibate; they settle for something second best. In black grouse the females are perfectionist, the males indiscriminate. In a monogamous human society, neither sex can afford to be either perfectionist or indiscriminate. Mr. Average chooses a plain woman, and Ms. Average chooses a wimp. They temper their idealist preferences with realism. People end up married to their equals in attractiveness: The homecoming queen marries the football hero; the nerd marries the girl in glasses; the man with mediocre prospects marries the woman with mediocre looks. So pervasive is this habit that exceptions stand out a mile: “What on earth can she see in him?” we ask of a model’s dull and unsuccessful husband, as if there must be some hidden clue to his worth that the rest of us have missed. “How did she manage to catch him?” we ask of a highflying man married to an ugly woman.
The answer is that we each instinctively know our relative worth as surely as in Jane Austen’s day people knew their place in the class system. Bruce Ellis showed how we manage this “assortative mating” pattern. He gave each of thirty students a numbered card to stick on their foreheads. Each could now see the others’ numbers, but nobody knew his or her own. He told them to pair up with the highest number they could find. Immediately the person with 30 on her forehead was surrounded by a buzzing crowd, so she adjusted her expectations upward and refused to pair up with just anybody, settling eventually for somebody with a number in the high twenties. The person with number I, meanwhile, after trying to persuade number 30 of his worth, then lowered his sights and went progressively down the scale, steadily discovering his low status, until he ended up taking the first person who would accept him, probably number 2.41
The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others’ reactions to us. Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher. But it is worth it to get off the Red Queen’s treadmill before you drop.