Why are men attracted to 'attractive' women?

Factual Questions
41

Humans being thinking animals, we can override our instincts and sometime act in contradiction to them. However, the characteristics men find attractive, generally, are those indicative of fertility - wider hips than waist (the classic 2:3 ratio), youth, a healthy appearance, etc.

While a man might be programmed to “spread the seed”, there is an equally strong programming to ensure the survival of his offspring. Despite deadbeats, most men want to support their children. Similarly, a pregnancy is a major “investment” for a woman, it ties up important resources for a woman and is a ride she generally can’t get off until the end; failed pregnancies can have serious health consequences. A man supporting a partner will want one who shows serious promise of being able to carry to term. Also, men are programmed to prevent other men from carrying on with their womenfolk, a trait that can get downright nasty with bar fights and when it collides with modern women’s rights.

You can read about a lot of reproduction strategies in the animal kingdom, and many have analogies in human behaviour. The “sow the wild oats” strategy, scattering seed far and wide and letting someone else support the offspring - that historically did not work too well. Folklore is replete with stories of orphans and step-children mistreated and hard done by.

Read Jared Diamond’s “the World Until Yesterday”, and most tribal arrangements did not include excessive polygamy, as most tribes did not have an imbalance of men and women. Presumably the risks of warfare balanced the risks of childbirth to keep the balance. I assume anyone who tried to be too sneaky would trigger the jealousy gene in other males and tend not to survive.

So generally, the male has one shot (at a time) at reproducing, and must select the “right” mate whom he will successfully help raise his offspring. So women put on the show for men, because they need to attract the male who may choose them. Meanwhile, women decide who to compete for. So neither sex has a monopoly on “choice”, the way a herd of does ends up “belonging” by default to the buck with the biggest… rack. Both sides are selective, but for different motives.

(Many of these varied reproduction strategies work in parallel. The cuckold strategy works as long as not too many practice it, so has not to trigger widespread jealousy. The polygamy strategy obviously has resource limits, will work for the grand poohbah, but taken to extremes will produce an army of bachelors intent on trouble… and so on…)

42

Bingo, Broomstick.

This is actually the key answer to the OP in a nutshell. We can make some scientific comment on why those men left more surviving offspring, but in the end the one certainty is that they did, resulting in those men passing on their taste in female attractiveness disproportionately, resulting over time in a substantial consensus in what men find attractive in women.

Some in this thread (Shalmanese, panache45, probably others) have pointed out that there are men who are not attracted to stereotypically attractive women. Liberal society tends to celebrate and chatter about such differences (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Nonetheless, the actual facts are that there is remarkable conformity in what men find attractive. That there are outliers does not make it any the less true that the vast majority of men are attracted to women with certain characteristics.

Nor does the fact that men who are attracted to the unconventional have not been bred out of the gene pool indicate anything: that’s not how gene pools work. Gene pools don’t start out as a mess and slowly work towards complete conformity. Outliers arise in them afresh all the time.

43

md2000: I’d heard that quote was from Damon Runyon.

44

Your assumption is that evolution’s end result is a population of identical twins. That’s simply not the case. Evolution works precisely because there is variation. No variation, no evolution.

45

The attraction = genetic fitness theory is such an elegant and powerful theory that I can understand it’s appeal but I simply don’t buy it as anywhere close to the complete answer.

For a start, it utterly fails to explain the existence of homosexuality. Being attracted to only people you cannot produce offspring with is the diametric opposite of attraction = genetic fitness.

Given that we have strong evidence that it’s both innate and also common in non-human animals, it’s unlikely that it’s an evolutionarily maladaptive trait. We still don’t have a very good idea why evolutionarily, homosexuality exists. We have a couple of different theories but, IMHO, none of them are anywhere close to being definitive.

On top of that, why do homosexuals have aesthetic preferences? If you’re a gay man, then two different men will have the exact same potential for reproduction yet you can be intensely attracted to one and repulsed by another. In many ways, the homosexual community values attractiveness far more than the heterosexual community, diametrically opposite to what this theory proposes.

If you accept that a sizeable fraction of the population is attracted to non-reproduction for evolutionarily adaptive purposes, it’s not then too far of a stretch to group other paraphilias under the same label. We know, for example, that there’s no gene for making someone exclusively attracted to having sex with cars, yet there’s a group of people who are intensely attracted to having sex with cars. Why is that?

Now, the common interpretation under the attractive = genetically fit model is that those people are just aberrations and just a tiny percentage of the population that evolution made a mistake on for some reason but I don’t think that’s true at all. I think there’s something far more complicated going on. I don’t have a good understanding of exactly what it is but it seems way more complicated than the simple reductive models proposed.

Obviously evolution relies on variation but, for most other traits, variation resides within a narrow acceptable band. For example, we don’t have any people who love the taste of cyanide but hate the taste of sugar. Or people whose natural temperature preference is 180F or 20F. Such traits are evolutionarily maladaptive and have been bred out of the gene pool. However, the various paraphilias and non-hetero sexual preferences, despite seeming equally evolutionarily maladaptive have not.

A good analogy might be our preference for spicy food. Capsaicin originally evolved to keep mammals away from seeds and yet, we as a culture have somehow developed this evolutionarily maladaptive trait. The percentage of calories we get from spicy foods is negligible and the amount of pain caused is considerable yet a large proportion of humans intensely enjoy eating spicy food. If you adopt the hypothesis that our diet choices came about to maximize our fitness and thus, reproductive success, then spicy food is a hugely aberrant outlier that can’t be explained.

46

I was going to respond to your remarks on homosexuality, but this was even weirder to me. Eating peppers isn’t maladaptive. It’s not poison. Even if you disconnect it from masochistic showmanship, we’re exploiting a readily available food source that most other mammals don’t.

47

This doesn’t work. At all. Eating spicy food simply isn’t maladaptive. Reproductive fitness is not affected one iota by eating spicy food. I think you are confusing “maladaptive” with “not positively adaptive”. There is no doubt that life evolves to have some random traits that are not specifically adaptive, but don’t get bred out because they are not maladaptive.

You may well be right (I’d go so far as to say my guess is that you are right) that the attraction = genetic fitness theory doesn’t explain the whole of human behaviour in this area. That theory may well be an explanation for only a some part of the issue. Attraction could well be based on a mix of attraction = genetic fitness and random sexual selection and some other stuff we don’t understand.

You seem however to be dismissive of the attraction = genetic fitness theory to a degree inversely proportional to its explanatory power.

48

It is a poison. The LD50 of capsaicin is ~100mg/kg which makes it more poisonous than bleach, pyrethrin and borax. It’s also not a good source of calories. 100g of Jalapenos is only 28 calories, barely more than iceberg lettuce. It would be virtually impossible for chilli peppers to make up a significant portion of anyone’s diet.

Our reason for eating chilli peppers has nothing to do with their caloric value. Instead, it’s likely due to them creating certain pleasure based chemicals in our brain, similar to bungee jumping or skydiving (two other evolutionarily maladaptive behaviors btw).

49

Or their offspring were able to have more offspring … because they (males and females alike) were more attractive. Don’t attractive females tend to contribute features that make for attractive sons as well as daughters who then would have more reproductive success?
Of course why males are attracted to the attractive is a tautology. OTOH IF there are certain features that are generally (the existence of exceptions being immaterial) attractive to males in females across cultures, or consistently across cultures according to some other circumstance with evolutionary explanatory power, then evolutionary explanations are … attractive. :slight_smile:

Features like lower than relative average female waist to hip ratio seem to be pretty universally held to be attractive by males across cultures and appear to be “a reliable indicator of a female’s reproductive age, sex hormone profile, parity and risk for various diseases”

50

Your point being what? And don’t throw around the word “poison” as if it means anything on its own: water is “poison” by some definitions. It’s not that what you’ve just said isn’t correct, but what does it matter in the context of this debate?

51

Only if one takes a very simplistic one pass view of fitness impact and do not take into account how impact on gene transmissal via kin (both by compensatory resource sharing to nieces and nephews or by “genes for gayness bring reproductive advantage to those who have them but are not actually gay themselves”) plays into analyses. Not saying the linked analysis is correct, but the statement “utterly fails” is clearly incorrect.

“Maladaptive”? Maladaptive would mean that in the doses consumed it decreases reproductive fitness. Clearly not the case.

Now does it have fitness advantage? Well there are some small health benefits and maybe, when dosed right, just making bland food more palatable, is an advantage. But it may just be a neutral side effect of other aspects of our brain function that have positive fitness impact. Yes it only begs the question … our brains enjoy the experience of faux danger, or of danger perceived, even real danger, that did not turn out to harm us. Scary movies, roller coasters … believing our mouths are on fire when they are not actually being harmed. Does that directly have some positive fitness impact (the act of demonstrating willingness to experience danger serving as a signal to of health, strength, and other desirable resources … i.e. showing off) or is it just a relatively neutral side effect of other selected for aspects of our brain function?

52

Next question. Why are people attracted to good jobs instead of dirty ones?