The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [149]
At this point some evolutionists seem dangerously close to arguing that women have evolved the ability to be impressed by BM Ws. Yet BMWs have existed for only about one human generation. Either evolution is working absurdly fast, or there is something wrong. There are two ways to avoid this difficulty, one of which is popular at the University of Michigan, the other at Santa Barbara. The Michigan scientists say something like this: women do not have an evolved ability to be impressed by BMWs, but they have an evolved ability to be flexible and to adapt to the social pressures of the society in which they grew up. The Santa Barbara scientists say: behaviour itself is rarely what has evolved; it is the underlying psychological attitude that evolves, and modern women possess a mental mechanism, evolved during the Pleistocene, that enables them to read what correlates to status among men and find such clues desirable.
In a sense, both are saying the same thing. Women are impressed by signals of status, whatever those specific symbols are. Presumably, at some point they learn the association between BMWs and wealth: it is not a difficult equation to solve.35
The Fashion Business
We are back at a familiar paradox. Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about status. In their dress, women follow fashion more than men. Yet women seek clues to status, which change with fashion, and men seek clues to fertility, which do not. Men should not care less what women wear so long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy and generally nubile. Women should care greatly about what men wear, because it tells them a great deal about their background, their wealth, their social status, even their ambitions. So why do women follow clothes fashions more avidly than men?
I can think of several answers to this question. First, the theory is simply wrong and men prefer status symbols, whereas women prefer bodies. Perhaps, but that flies in the face of an awful lot of robust evidence. Second, women’s fashion is not about status after all. Third, modern western societies have been in a two-century aberration from which they are just emerging. In Regency England, Louis XIV’s France, medieval Christendom, ancient Greece, or among modern Yanomamö, men followed fashion as avidly as women. Men wore bright colours, flowing robes, jewels, rich materials, gorgeous uniforms, and gleaming, decorated armour. The damsels that knights rescued were no more fashionably accoutred than their paramours. Only in Victorian times did the deadly uniformity of the black frock coat and its dismal modern descendant, the grey suit, infect the male sex, and only in this century have women’s hemlines gone up and down like yo-yos.
This suggests the fourth and most intriguing explanation, which is that women do care more about clothes and men do care less, but instead of influencing the other sex with their concerns, they influence their own. Each sex uses its own preferences to guide its own behaviour. Experiments show that men think women care about physique much more than they actually do; women think men care about status cues much more than they actually do. So perhaps each sex simply acts out its instincts in the conviction that the other sex likes the same things as they do.
One experiment seems to support the idea that men and women mistake their own preferences for those of the opposite sex. April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates. In each case, the figures differed only in thinness. They asked the subjects to indicate their current figure, their ideal figure, the figure that they considered most attractive to the opposite sex and the figure they thought most attractive in the opposite