Read Online Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do by Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.so
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in this book, is that a lot of the rest of human social behaviorâin politics, in religion, in economicsâis ultimately about sex. As we try to show in later chapters on these areas of social life, what we commonly think of as political behavior, religious behavior, or economic behavior is essentially about sex and mating. So, in that sense, this chapter is more fundamental than all the other chapters. And, of course, it is the âsexiestâ chapter!
Q. Why Do Men Like Blonde Bombshells (and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Them)?
It is commonly believed by those who subscribe to the Standard Social Science Modelâin other words, virtually everybody except for evolutionary psychologistsâthat the media impose arbitrary images of ideal female beauty on girls and women in our society, and force them to aspire to these artificial and arbitrary standards. According to this claim, girls and women want to look like supermodels or actresses or pop idols because they are bombarded with images of these women. By implication, according to this view, girls and women will cease to want to look like them if the media would cease inundating them with such images, or else change the arbitrary standards of female beauty.
Nothing could be further from the truth. To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Anyone can see the absurdity of this argument. We become hungry periodically because we have physiological and psychological mechanisms that compel us to seek and consume food. And we have these innate mechanisms because they solve an important adaptive problem of survival. Our ancestors (long before they were humans or even mammals) who somehow did not become hungry for food did not survive long enough to leave offspring who carried their genes. We would of course become hungry just as much even if all the commercials about food disappeared today. The advertisements are the consequences of our tendency to become hungry, not the causes. They exploit our innate needs but do not create them.
The same is true with the ideal of female beauty. Two pieces of evidence should suffice to refute the claim that images in the media, and âcultureâ in general, force girls and women to desire to look like blonde bombshells. First, as we note below, women were dying their hair blonde more than half a millennium, possibly two millennia, ago, when there were no TV, movies, and magazines (although there were portraits, and it is due to these portraits that we know today that women were dying their hair blonde in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy). 2 Womenâs desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia.
Second, a recent study shows that women in Iran, where they are generally not exposed to the Western media and culture, and thus would not know Jessica Simpson from Roseanne Barr, and where most women wear the traditional Muslim hijab that loosely covers their entire body so as to make it impossible to tell what shape it is, are actually more concerned with their body image and want to lose more weight than their American counterparts in the land of Vogue and the Barbie doll. 3 The Standard Social Science Model, which ascribes the preferences and desires of women entirely to socialization by the media, would have difficulty explaining how Italian women in the fifteenth century and Iranian women today both aspire to and pursue the same ideal image of female beauty as do women in contemporary Western societies.
Why, then, do women want to look like blonde bombshells? Evolutionary psychology suggests that it is because men want to mate with women who look like them.
Q. Why Do Men Like Blonde Bombshells (and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Them)?
It is commonly believed by those who subscribe to the Standard Social Science Modelâin other words, virtually everybody except for evolutionary psychologistsâthat the media impose arbitrary images of ideal female beauty on girls and women in our society, and force them to aspire to these artificial and arbitrary standards. According to this claim, girls and women want to look like supermodels or actresses or pop idols because they are bombarded with images of these women. By implication, according to this view, girls and women will cease to want to look like them if the media would cease inundating them with such images, or else change the arbitrary standards of female beauty.
Nothing could be further from the truth. To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Anyone can see the absurdity of this argument. We become hungry periodically because we have physiological and psychological mechanisms that compel us to seek and consume food. And we have these innate mechanisms because they solve an important adaptive problem of survival. Our ancestors (long before they were humans or even mammals) who somehow did not become hungry for food did not survive long enough to leave offspring who carried their genes. We would of course become hungry just as much even if all the commercials about food disappeared today. The advertisements are the consequences of our tendency to become hungry, not the causes. They exploit our innate needs but do not create them.
The same is true with the ideal of female beauty. Two pieces of evidence should suffice to refute the claim that images in the media, and âcultureâ in general, force girls and women to desire to look like blonde bombshells. First, as we note below, women were dying their hair blonde more than half a millennium, possibly two millennia, ago, when there were no TV, movies, and magazines (although there were portraits, and it is due to these portraits that we know today that women were dying their hair blonde in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy). 2 Womenâs desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia.
Second, a recent study shows that women in Iran, where they are generally not exposed to the Western media and culture, and thus would not know Jessica Simpson from Roseanne Barr, and where most women wear the traditional Muslim hijab that loosely covers their entire body so as to make it impossible to tell what shape it is, are actually more concerned with their body image and want to lose more weight than their American counterparts in the land of Vogue and the Barbie doll. 3 The Standard Social Science Model, which ascribes the preferences and desires of women entirely to socialization by the media, would have difficulty explaining how Italian women in the fifteenth century and Iranian women today both aspire to and pursue the same ideal image of female beauty as do women in contemporary Western societies.
Why, then, do women want to look like blonde bombshells? Evolutionary psychology suggests that it is because men want to mate with women who look like them.
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