This might end up being moved to GQ, but I’m betting that there is no clear answer.
It seems to me that people take some cues about what is sexually attractive from society. I assume that a group of redheads, raised in isolation, would not develop a spontaneous craving for blondes. Given that, why is blonde hair considered attractive? Is it attractive in areas that have statistically smaller numbers of blondes?
If we “learn” what to be sexually attracted to, would it be possible to re-educate pedophiles? If it is genetic, do people who share the same sexual preferences have similar genetic codes that the uninterested lack?
I think you’re mixing up two different things.
On the one hand, there’s what our orientation is. As an adult hetero female, my orientation is toward adult males. On the other hand, there’s the minor aspects of appearence that cause me, personally, to find one adult male more attractive then another.
I would say that our ideas of what make one person a more attractive prospect then another are indeed based in culture. We tend to find attractive those traits that our culture taught us were attractive, as we were growing up.
I suppose one could learn to find different traits attractive. This probably happens occasionally. Someone who always found fat people unattractive finds that somehow, he’s fallen in love with a fat person. Even if the relationship does not last, he may find that his attitude has changed, and he now does consider fat people “dateable” wheras he did not formerly. Or someone who moves to a different country may, after living there for years, find that his concept of attractiveness has shifted away from the norm of his original county and toward the norm for his adopted country. What this amounts to, IMO, is that yes, it can happen – but so what?
Sexual orientation is another matter. I don’t think we know what causes a person to have whatever orientation he or she has, but I doubt very much that it can be changed. In most cases, there would be no reason to want to bring about such a change. The one exception would be pedophiles.
I would say that a pedophile might be able to learn to “make do” with adult sexual partners, and one might be able to learn to “do without” having sex at all, but I don’t think there’s any way that they can actually change their orientation.
P.S. Make that “I don’t think there’s any way that they can change their orientation, any more then anyone else can.”
You are talking about sexual orientation. Let me hijack with just a small observation. My 2 year old daughter was born and raised here in China. She has a definate prejudice against obese people. She has had close contact with about 5 obese people in her life, and never really warmed up to any of them despite several days of close contact. This included my father and step-mother. I don’t think I’ve given her any clues, but this is the way she reacts. Only just figured this cause out recently.
One of the TV news magazine shows did a report on this topic a couple of years ago. They showed a study in which they they would bring a 6-month old baby into a room and would simultaneously show two slides of different people. They then recorded how long the children would look at each photo. The babies spent much more time and were more interested in looking at the pictures of what adults consider to be “attractive” people. Since 6-month old children haven’t spent much time interacting with society, the researchers concluded that much of our ideas of attractiveness is hard-wired into our brains.
There are general features that we associate with attractiveness that may not be learned. For instance, facial symmetry–or body symmetry in general–is something that many animals key in on when they are finding mates. Animals will also pick up on sexual cues that are exaggerated. For instance, if large, colorful beaks are attractive to female birds, then a male with a huge, dayglo beak will attract a lot of females.
But I think much of how we define “good-looking” is subjective.
Blond-hair is probably considered more attractive than darker hair because its rarer and thus more “special”. But redheads are also rare and those poor folks get castigated all the time. So I don’t know the answer, particularly since I’m one of those people who don’t see the attractiveness of yellow hair.
And not always in a good way, I gotta tell ya.
robertliguori,
When you say, “It seems to me that people take some cues about what is sexually attractive from society” the next question would be:
"If society does play a role in what is deemed attractive, isn’t that in and of itself genetically influenced?”
Society is nothing more than an array of individual tastes; the more popular the taste amongst trend setters and general public, the more prevalent it becomes. No cabal of admen, marketers, pollsters and the like could influence likes and dislikes unless there was an inherent preference to the subject at hand.
I wish I could find a cite for this PBS factoid:
The human female is the only mammal that has breasts throughout her whole adult life. All other female mammals only have breasts when lactating. It’s supposedly Mother Nature’s way of keeping the male of the species interested and close to the female and family unit.
Many features commonly associated with sexual attractiveness in human women also correspond to fertility cues. F’rinstance, a flat stomach indicates that a woman probably isn’t pregnant, a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio indicates that she has good chances of being able to carry a fetus to term and deliver a baby, and features associated with youth indicate that she might be closer to the beginning of her child-bearing years than to the end of them (thus increasing both her fertility and her chances of surviving a pregnancy).
Here’s a somewhat racy online article I dug up a while ago on the subject:
http://www.phact.org/e/skeptic/why.htm
It think it’s both - some sexual preferences can be learned, while some are obviously instinctual. I agree with monstro and tracer that there seem to be biological reasons for a lot of what we consider attractive. Heterosexual men are always going to be attracted to women with ample bosom and hips that are equipped for childbirth, even in spite of the fashion industry’s preference for androgynous stick-figure models.
Unfortunately I don’t have any sources, but I have heard that sort of thing becomes “hard-wired” in the brain at an early age, and is therefore difficult to change. For example, a person who is molested as a child may become a child-molester themself. So although the preference is “learned” in a sense, it becomes a part of the person, and is not as easy to unlearn. Then again, I may be listening to too much pop-psychology drivel on the radio.
I’m going to quibble slightly with the study, but the idea some aspects of “beautiful” are hardwired is also supported by another study which took 100s of pictures, and blended them into a “typical” face. The more pictures were used, and therefore the more “average” a face was, the more people found it attractive.
I can think of other reasons babies found “attractive” people interesting, for example the “attractive” women were probably wearing makeup.
It’s hard to say whether this experience of mine suggests a genetic influence, but it seems that way. I once returned to the “land of my ancestors” and was surprised at how attractive I found people. More than just looks, it was as though everybody around me was suddenly “family”. That’s always seemed significant to me, since none of my Significant Others came from racial backgrounds particularly similar to mine. So maybe there’s more to attraction than attractiveness? 
First, I don’t buy the notion that we’re “taught” what to find desirable in the opposite sex. But even if that WERE true, I suspect it wouldn’t be of any value in treating pedophiles.
In a weird, sense, MOST of us were “pedophiles” once upon a time. That is, when I was 13, I was constantly turned on by 13 year old girls in my class, while 40 year old women held no interest for me. Most males will acknowledge feeling the same way at that age. To that extent, it’s “normal” to lust after 12 or 13 year old girls. But by the time I was, oh, 16 or 17, I had absolutely no interest in 12 and 13 year olds. And as I got closer to 40 myself (I’m 41 now), I found that women my own age were highly desirable after all! Again, I suspect most males would nod at this, since it reflects pretty much how their own sexual interests developed.
Nobody (let alone “society”) had to “teach” me to like girls my own age when I was 12 or 13. It just happened. And nobody “taught” me to lust after 40 year old women as I got older. Again, it just happened.
A pedophile’s problem PROBABLY isn’t that he was “taught” anywhere to like little girls. More likely, he started out liking little girls (as most males once did), but never grew OUT of that phase, the way most of us did. And showing a pedophile a barrage of sleek, glossy advertisements showing gorgeous adult women isn’t going to cure him.
Ah, but the problematic pedophiles, the ones we use the label “pedophile” with the most strongly, are attracted not to girls (or boys) in early puberty but to **pre-**pubescent children.
Yes, I remember starting to lust after 12 and 13 year old girls when I was in early puberty myself, but I never lusted after 8-year-old girls. When I was an 8-year-old boy, I knew (as all 8-year-old boys know) that girls had cooties.
Have there been any studies done as to what age pedophiles attain before they typically start being attracted to children?
I am afraid I am a comprimised sample: I had an adequete supply of porn before the puberty thing really took off. Assume that a guy was raised in an all male community. Would he know automatically what a woman was supposed to look like?
She would look different! And smell different
(you know, like she bathed and stuff…)
And he would suddenly see his “community” as a bunch of assholes who were in the way.
Hey! Some men bathe too, you know. Er, sometimes, anyway.
Most kids have a natural fear of “big people,” and to them, the obese are “really big people.” I myself used to freak out over stuff more trivial than that. I’m not sure what you’re describing (unless she’s somehow described it as such) can really be called a genetically determined dislike of the obese; perhaps one of the unusual, alien, or unfamiliar.
I’m unsure of what you mean. Why can ‘trend setters’ help determine prevalence of a trait being attractive, but yet marketing, ads, etc. cannot?
Trends of beauty (ie the popular standards) certainly change over time, as do the relative prevalence of being attracted to a certain trait over another. I suppose you could say that no trait can become prevalent if there are not some individuals ‘inherently’ like it, but then why are there genetic differences within populations? Are you arguing that the changes over time that occur because of changes to the gene pool rather than cultural changes?
No, we weren’t, we weren’t adults at 13 years old.
ped·o·phile
Pronunciation Key (pd-fl, pd-)
n.
An adult who is sexually attracted to a child or children.
I think that’s why s/he placed the word in quotes: to indicate a non-standard usage.