GENETICS

I've had two discussions with women friends in the last week, about how men are aroused by visual stimuli, and whether or not this is genetically based, and therefore, whether or not it is okay for men to place physical beauty above all other criteria when evaluating women as potential partners.

This is kind of a new topic. There are a gazillion books, magazine articles, and talk show episodes devoted to it. A lot of them come from men, trying to explain themselves to the female population, and a surprising number come from women.

I hold the unpopular opinion that this is crap. Holding physical beauty as your highest standard is:

a) a conscious decision

b) bad behaviour, and

c) mark of a lack of character

I have met a whole lot of intelligent and successful single men who have said that yes, although they want to meet someone who is intelligent and funny and ethical and all of these good things, they think, hey, why can't I have it all? Why can't she be drop-dead gorgeous as well?

And the other thing that follows nicely on is that women who are all of those things and yet not attractive are nice enough people to have as friends, but I shouldn't feel guilty about the fact that I don't want to have *sex* with them, because I am not physically attracted to them. In other words, they're nice, and just not for me.

Both of these are cop-outs as far as I'm concerned. You're just trying to find a nice way to keep your prejudices and still feel good about yourself as a person. You're still subtly saying that if a woman doesn't look a certain way she's good enough--just not *good enough for you*. That's conceited at best, and condescending at worst.

Incidentally, I worked as a genetic researcher in college. Furthermore, the project I was working on had to do with the genetics of dependency--in other words, addiction. We were, in essence, determining whether or not alcoholism and other drug dependency could be linked to genetics. I believe, based on this research, that it is.

There are a lot of ways in which our physical bodies create psychological situations which then induce us to behave in certain ways. For example, thermoregulation is most frequently accomplished behaviourally--in other words, if we are ill and need to boost up the body temperature in order to fight the infection, our bodies will most frequently induce what is essentially a craving for blankets and warm drinks and that sort of thing.

I don't think that it's easy to fight the body when it decides it wants something. I don't think that alcoholics or junkies should just have better self-control. And I don't, for that matter, think that people who are severly overweight have much choice in the matter, whether the main cause is physical or psychological, for the same reason--I think in these cases, the line between the two blurs or even ceases to exist.

I guess I'm just tired of people finding excuses for being pigs. For a while, evolution was all the rage--well, you see, men have evolved to need to have sex with multiple partners in order to increase their odds of reproducing. Now it's genes.

There isn't a lot of proof for any of this. I don't think you really could accurately prove any of it, since it's a classic nature/nurture question. By the time a man is in high school, he's been socialized to look at women a certain way. I hate to use examples from personal experience, because they're not really valid scientific proof of anything, but you know, when you have a friend who takes everything you say as a sexual innuendo, you start thinking that way whenever you're around them. And really there's no way a man could grow up in an average western town without being socialised this way.

Regardless, it doesn't matter. I'm tired of people pointing out the way species in the animal kingdom act as proof that some kind of behaviour or other is valid. Some members of the animal kingdom also eat their own young. I thought we were supposed to try to rise above animal nature, not emulate it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to look your best, and I don't think that attractive people should have to downplay it or that they don't have a right to feel good about the way they look. But specific standards of female beauty have changed drastically over the years, and most of the current models of perfection are actually unhealthy, or, in the case of images bordering on the paedophilic, even immoral.

It also doesn't just have to do with women--there are segments of the gay community which are equally harsh to their men.

So the point of all of this is that if you're a jerk, you should spend time learning how to change your behaviour instead of trying to find ways in which to rationalise it.