• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 989 0

in personal ads openly search out men. Etcoff quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick as describing normal situation in the lobby of a hotel where an NBA basketball team staying as “resembling the waiting room of a modeling agency,” with lithe beauties practically auditioning themselves for the players. Brian Hansen has shown that Euro pean royal portraiture tends systematically exaggerate height by distorting normal head-to-torso ratios. The on the above-average heights of American presidents reflect situation of both tribal societies and corporation boardrooms. (I know from personal experience growing up around the film industry Southern California that one of the most common remarks made people who encounter a movie star on the street is “I was surprised how short he is.” We tend involuntarily to envision high-status people as tall.)

Men are on average taller than women, so you would expect by that alone that most marriages would be of a woman to a taller husband: but in fact, marriages that reverse this norm are far less frequent than random statistical distribution would predict. A conventional feminist interpretation of the “male taller rule” is that it stems from the desire men. (This does not surprise the critic Daniel Nettle, who argues since males are more interested in assessing fertility than females, moderate height is a cue for both sexual maturity and fertility, should be expected to be much less averse to feminine height women are to male shortness. Indeed, it seems that for many short, a tall, beautiful wife is a trophy.)

Both sexes, however, agree on one of the most salient features that mark personal attractiveness: symmetry. Taking up with an unhealthy mate was a bad strategy for survival in the Pleistocene. Left-right symmetry is a statistical indicator of physiological and psychological health so-called developmental stability, defined as an individual’s capacity grow in a normal way despite mutations and environmental deficits, such as poor nutrition, parasites, or injuries. Part of what makes it such powerful indicator of fitness is that it is so easy to see, parpaticularly face. We tend to take symmetry for granted and notice its absence more than its presence. While left-right symmetry in a face or a body does not guarantee beauty, marked asymmetries—a withered arm, a droops down one side—will severely diminish it.

III

Visible physical traits form an innate bedrock for the countless transformations and fashions of how the body has come to be altered, made decorated, and clothed. Our initial impulse to “think physical” about opposite sex is, however, still a long way from the actual criteria that women use in mate choice. While physical features will cause heads if we examine a list of the top seven most-desired traits appealed both sexes for establishing relationships, we find that it includes bodily traits: physical health and physical attractiveness (which come nearly the same thing). On the serious question of choosing a mate, men and women on average place kindness first on their respective with both naming intelligence as number two. Men will then choose physical attractiveness, including the qualities mentioned earlier, as well other factors such as clear, smooth skin and bright eyes, while women dependability, industriousness, creativity, and a sense of humor. These personal characteristics—Aristotle would have numbered some of them among the prime human excellences, and religions worldwide identify many of them as basic moral qualities—are also bedrock features of humanity. Religions may claim credit for bestowing these moral qualities human race, and philosophers may seek to justify them rationally demonstrate their logical necessity, but the fact that far-flung shamans, priests, and philosophers so often agree on what they are in the first place itself decisive evidence of their ancient, prereligious, prerational origins. The ensemble of mental qualities included in the mating criteria as much as bodily features, the result of millions of years of mating decisions made by our prehistoric