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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 brains are 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), but I think there is a much more obvious reason for men to prefer thin-waisted women. In the Pleistocene, when miscarriage and child mortality were common, adult women must have spent a high proportion of their lives pregnant or nursing young, and so were temporarily infertile. They must have become pregnant again soon after becoming fertile – a fertile woman was a rarity. To avoid rearing stepchildren unwittingly, men must have developed an aversion to even a slight thickening of the waist, lest it indicated the early stages of pregnancy.

Youth Equals Beauty?

A man cannot tell the age of a woman directly. He must infer it from her physical appearance, her behaviour 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 blonde 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, make-up or veils.

That blonde 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 blonde. In medieval Italy, fair hair and great beauty were inseparable; in Britain the words fair and beautiful were synonymous.20 Blonde adult hair may be a sexually selected honest handicap, just like a swallow’s tail streamers. Blonde hair in children is a fairly common gene among Europeans (and, curiously, Australian Aboriginals). So when a mutation arose in the not-so-distant past, somewhere near Stockholm, say, for that blondeness to last into adulthood, but not beyond the early twenties, any men with a genetic preference for blonde 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 blonde 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 blonde hair among northern European men – if it exists – is a cultural trait, instilled into men unconsciously by the association between blondeness 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 blonde hair being advantageous