It’s generally well established that too much of a good thing can be bad. Polishing off an entire pizza will make most of us wish we had used a little more restraint. Too much time at leisure and some people beg for a productive task to work at. The accumulation material wealth can grow tiresome without the occasional pause for non-pecuniary pursuits. Even the most hardcore enthusiast of sex, drugs, and rock and roll probably feels like just sitting around in his underwear and watching the boob tube every now and again.
There is one thing, I believe, that never gets old: a pretty girl. As far as I can tell there has never been a time when I said, “Boy, I just can’t see one more attractive woman today.” It just never gets old.
You could get too much of them too. Could you imagine being stuck in a house with about 10 women all day every day? It’d probably drive you crazy. It may be worth it, but still…
I’m a woman and call me naive, but…why is it nice to look at a pretty woman?
For an analog: I like chocolate cake. A lot. But just looking at chocolate cake all day is more frustrating then satisfying. At a certain point, you just want a heaped plate of the stuff and dig in, you know? Why is looking at pretty women different?
I can’t say I like looking at pretty guys all that much either, and for the same reason.
There is some old joke referencing the relative value of beauty stating that even if you were able to identify the most gorgeous woman in the world it is virtually guaranteed that nearby is a man who is fed up with her shit.
There is a storage repository in the male mind that can be used for later gratification. IOW, hot chicks go in the spank bank. There can never be too much footage there.
As a secondary reference it’s kind of unnatural for nature to contain too many pretty girls in one concentrated area. The notion of being pretty is directly related to the fact that other girls might be more plain than you, and pretty girls tend not to run with women even prettier than themselves except in rare circumstances.
Too much competitive pretty in one contained area is like shaking a a bag of cats. Bad things will happen.
But the reason you like chocolate cake is the way it tastes, not the way it looks, right? The analogy doesn’t quite run true, because the appeal of a pretty woman can be just her looks. Maybe I’m strange, but I can appreciate a pretty woman even knowing that looking at her is all I’ll be able to do, just as I can appreciate a work of art.
Of course, if the opportunity to do more than look arises, I’d be happy to take advantage of it. But alas, I fear those days are gone now.
I think it’s the boner factor. Seriously. Men are more visual than women (or so I hear) and looking is a bigger deal for them than it is for women. My dad is pushing 80 and he still has to remark about the pretty girls on TV.
Men like pretty girls for the same reasons they like fast cars; we are, as Kalhoun pointed out, visual creatures. We enjoy the sleek curves of a supercar for, generally speaking, its premuim aesthetic value. Even though we would never spend $200k on a car, our little-boy brains will always wonder what it’s like to get in the saddle, mash the gas, roast the rear tires and disappear in a cloud of blue smoke. Same goes for pretty girls, sans the mashing, roasting and disappearing, of course. Also, what SSG Schwartz said.
My boss once said, “Women will put up flowers at the office to have something nice and pretty that cheers them up. Men like to have women around the office for the same reason.”
You all, women, are our flowers.
And if you wear a white t-shirt, we’ll be happy to water you down.
NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” radio program just recently cited a serious study that claimed, well, what a lot of people have suspected for a very long time. Their conclusion was that while men got aroused at seeing things like naked people, women got aroused by what the people were doing, and whether that was attractive. I think I’ve got it close enough.
So I don’t know that it’s explainable. It does strike most guys as a little weird that teenage girls will positively swoon over dozens of boys, but if you mentioned something like, “Oh, he likes to go to the beach in a Speedo”, they’d get disgusted.
