So....Random
Thought #4: Why are women better looking than men?
Brief answer.
I don't know.
Okay, so much
for brevity. Now it's time to indulge in long-winded speculation.
Our coherently ranting friend opined on the slutty, promiscuous whore-like
reproductive strategies of men (an observation he put much more politely
and that many people believe in). In the process he touched on something
that your Standard Issue Evolutionary Psychologist never brings up
(or hardly ever): Male Choice!
Male Choice
- the effect that the human male ability to choose who the hell he's
going to have sex with has on women's bodies, characteristics, evolutionary
development, and generally miserable lives.
Your Standard
Issue Evolutionary Psychologist is apparently both male and willing
to babble endlessly about the effect of Female Choice
on men's bodies, characteristics, stupid antics, and generally miserable
lives. This is a fascinating topic to a Male Evolutionary
Psychologist! Deep consideration of it leads him to the conclusion
that if noticeable numbers of men have some stupid self-endangering
characteristic that makes them look like idiots or otherwise leads
to a generally miserable, if entertainingly idiotic life, it's because
women want it that way!
Fool-hardiness,
status-seeking, incurable horniness, stupid yo-yo tricks, poetry,
territorial boardroom pissing contests, tumbling off Mount Everest
in an ill-fated attempt to do something useless, all these activities
and many more have been attributed to the male desire to attract women.
Sometimes the explanations for how the human female ability
to choose one male over another leads to squirting milk through your
nose are elaborate and convoluted. Sometimes they are also
quite convincing. I'm absolutely willing to believe, and in fact do
believe, that Female Choice plays a dramatic and thrilling role in
the shape and progress of a given male's generally miserable life.
But the same is
true for women. Human men can choose. They do. This
has a deep and dramatic impact on the shape and progress of a given
female's generally miserable life. Really. It totally does. A lot.
It makes them good-looking for one thing.
I could spend
pages and pages detailing the effect of male choice on women ranging
to makeup to anorexia to Cinderella to etc, etc. etc. I won't because
I'm not in the mood. But Male Choice has a huge effect on your personal
everyday life. It affects almost every intimate detail of the advertising
you see and since there is nothing more pervasive in modern life (at
least modern American life) than advertising, this means it has a
big effect. But who cares?!
All
we really need to know is that Female Choice totally fucks up men
and their lives and Male Choice totally fucks up women and their lives.
It fucks everything up so badly that some cultures try to get around
it with arranged marriages and everything. But everybody's lives still
manage to get totally fucked up by that Damn Sexual Choice thing.
It's a bitch and a constant source of underlying human anxiety until
sufficient quantities of decent children are produced and you can
relax and get all fat and mean or whatever else you want to do.
If there are any
characteristics you stereotypically attribute to men that you don't
like - feel free to blame it on sexual choice. If there are
any characteristics you stereotypically attribute to women that you
don't like - feel free to blame it on sexual choice. Let's
say you'd like to believe that your girlfriend is a bad driver because
all women are bad drivers and this drives you crazy because she drives
like an airhead idiot and hardly ever passes people and shit and pays
no attention to the rule of driving a reasonable yet aggressive amount
over the speed limit at all times out of sheer driving courtesy and
respect for order and structure in society. Let's just say you're
in the mood to develop an opinion like this for no reason other than
it irritates you not be to driving yourself. When the irritating behavior
occurs - say to yourself - 'you know why she does this? Huh? You know
why? Because generations upon generations of goddamn men like it that
way! Assholes!'
If there's something
you don't like about a man - let's say he doesn't do his laundry the
way you think it ought to be done. Say to yourself 'you know why this
retard can't do his laundry right? Huh? You know why? Because generations
upon generations of women like it that way! Damn them!' And so on.
You will be more or less right and it will make you feel loads better!
Try it! It's fun!
Somehow
or another, this phenomenon leads to scads and scads of good-looking
women. Oh,
I mean it seems relatively clear-cut. If men are motivated to choose
women who look like they can pop out offspring with a decent chance
of survival and if a cue like boob to waist size ratio is a good clue
to this (it is, not a perfect clue, but it's not a bad one), then
there's obviously going to be selective evolutionary pressure on women
to pony up with the big boobs and the small waists and for men to
reinforce this by finding that attractive. It's a neat, coherent little
system, and it's led to a tremendous rush on boob implants.
Really it has.
You don't have to blame this on anything other than evolution and
biology and the fact that proportional boob size usually does reflect
fertility to a decent degree. You can get pissed off at society about
it if you want (might as well), but tough. A certain portion of life
is devoted to a vicious cut-throat race to BE SEXUALLY CHOSEN and
a woman who can afford to up her chances with selective surgical implants
may very well want to.
We could talk
about boobs forever and one day we will but now let's turn to the
fascinating subject of Early Horrible Death since
this has a big effect on how women look also.
See, the
thing about men is that they die. More often and earlier
than women. They get away with this partially because more of them
are born (well actually they're infants when they're born not men,
but they're little boy infants who could potentially grow
into men if they don't die first). Men all over the globe are busy
dying off at rates in comparison to women that range from the Mildly
Elevated to the Truly Appalling.
This has an
effect on women's generally miserable lives. It means that right
when they get to the age where they're ready to pop out offspring
- lo and behold there's not enough goddamn men to go around! Fuck!
That sucks! Damn! It means the whole Male Choice thing is going to
get more important because there's more damn women to choose from
then there are men. Damn! Don't you just hate that? You should.
I suspect
that war has the biggest effect on this. Wars are capable
of efficiently killing off vast hordes of men in a relatively short
span of time. They usually manage to take out a number of women as
well but by and large, war has a bigger percentage impact on the male
population by making large quantities of them dead. To take a colorful
example from US history, PBS solemnly informed me the other night
that the US Civil War managed to annihilate 25% of the men in the
American south at the time under the age of 60. 25 fucking percent!
25%! That's huge.
That kind of shit
creates a periodic big disparity between the ratio of the sexes. That
means there's selective evolutionary pressure on women to develop
characteristics that will quickly and efficiently signal their ability
to reproduce before the goddamn male in question goes and gets himself
fucking killed! The competition for women to get good-looking
gets upped an impressive notch.
And this little
rather alarming fact of human life didn't start with the damn US Civil
War. Oh no! Human men having been figuring out ingenious ways to off
themselves and each other for a long, long, long, long time now. This
disparity between how many fertile women there are at a given time
and how many men there are at the same time capable of squirting viable
sperm into the reproductively correct places has a big effect on societies.
Societies
twist themselves into goddamn horrible knots trying to figure out
inventive ways to get more women pregnant under these terrifically
adverse conditions. They adopt polygamy and various kinds
of enforced prostitution (overt or not), they make up elaborate rules
regarding widows, they take sexual hypocrisy to awesome heights, and
they generally make women very very miserable. Therefore, as
a public service, I'm going to make this announcement to men everywhere,
all over the globe, who are currently busy arranging to have themselves
offed in disproportionate numbers: QUIT IT!
CUT
IT OUT!
STOP
THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY!
STOP
DYING!
Nothing
improves the quality of human life more immediately and dramatically,
for both sexes, than to just nix that whole damn 'hey how about
a whole bunch of us guys get ourselves killed all to death in a great
big gigantic war that will devastate our society and leave our entire
culture without very many of us?!'
Now
I'm not saying that there aren't lots and lots of good and valid reasons
why individual people and whole societies both would want to kill
large quantities of young men in a war or even a breathtakingly devastating
series of them. There are. It's easy to understand the enthusiasm
all around. In fact, if a culture neglects this entirely (as Communist
China has for many years and for which they haven't been as severely
reprimanded as you might expect), you end up with too many damn people,
a number of whom are looking at the enticing prospect of abject poverty
and slow starvation. But hey, you know what - let the next
generation worry about that! It'll make your life
better - and isn't that what really counts? Either you won't be maimed,
dead, or horribly psychologically scarred by Traumatizing Warfare
or there will be sufficient quantities of men available so that you
won't have to become a prostitute. Good deal all around! Let's hear
a tremendous round of applause for this common-sense approach to quality
o'life enhancement.
Of
course, it isn't going to happen, and therefore, there will be selective
evolutionary pressures that will only make women better-looking in
comparison to men who have to devote more evolutionary development
resources to figuring out how to either a) not get killed in that
fucking war or b) how to make sure to fuck someone in a fertile manner
before they do. In fact, there is a certain evolutionary pressure
against men being good-looking, in that good-lookingness seems to
be at least partly a function of not looking scary - and if you're
going to end up in a war -well hell, it might be to your advantage
to look scary.
In
other words, you got your promiscuous slutty whoring 'Hey I will fuck
anyone fertile right now, I'm not kidding, we don't even need to talk
let me just look at your boob to waist size ratio, okay, let's get
down to it, I'm probably going to die any minute now anyway, by the
way do you have a sister' male reproductive strategy so fondly enshrined
in the lore of the sexes right here. War will do it - almost all by
itself.
And
you got your - 'hey, look at me, I'm the product of intense evolutionary
selective pressures favoring physical attractiveness, I swear these
boobs are mine, come on, I need to reproduce before all you fuckers
die, can't you see how good-looking I am, pay attention to me now
in my high heels, come on, what do I have to do, strip?' female reproductive
strategy not so fondly enshrined in the hearts and minds of jealous
women everywhere who look at these physically attractive rivals flaunting
their wares and plot devious means of leveling the playing field.
War explains a lot.
Combine
war with Sexual Choice and you have such a recipe for unending angst
that it's a damn good thing sex is actually fun or none of us would
be able to stand the pressure.
This
war business is right where the physiological basis of men putting
such a high premium on looks kicks in. The parts of men's
brains that process visual information (particularly about faces)
are hooked up via a series of superhighways that lead directly to
the sexual arousal centers. This allows their brains to make very
quick calculations as to the potential pregnancy lure of a particular
woman almost instantaneously, sometimes even while being distracted
by incoming artillery fire! Women's brains do not contain such superhighways
from the visual centers. In fact, women's brains do not show as much
preference for the superhighway concept at all. Women's brains tend
to show a preference for 'why don't I think about everything at once'
- which allows them to make certain calculations very quickly - but
not to key on visual sexual characteristics as quickly or even as
strongly.
Okay,
so... many bonus points to our coherent ranting friend for inspiring
us to indulge in a Crackpot Theory about Male Choice, dead Southerners,
and enforced prostitution that helps explain why women are better
looking than men whether they want to be or not. (They don't
actually, most of them, any more than most men want to be dead in
a war. What they actually want is to be naturally attractive enough,
whatever that may mean, to snag the Best Possible Guy without any
effort whatsoever and live in the happy harmony of widespread social
acceptance just for being alive and also to have everybody in the
whole world love them and oh yeah for everyone else to be happy too
and for their kids to be healthy and wonderful, and also world peace
and to have lots of money and a new car would be nice and also...and
also...and also...).
But
you know, it might seem that a thorough discussion of good-looking
women, scary-looking men, Dead Southerners, and enforced prostitution,
would be more than good enough. And in some ways it is. But the truth
is, talking about the Civil War dead, enjoyable as it is, just is
not good enough for the standards of prettyfedup.com. Because in reality,
all you really care about is what our friend referred to as the Have
Sex with Any Fertile Woman You Can male mating strategy.
Right?
That's the inherently fascinating topic, isn't it? Either you want
to know basic things like 'how do I make the Any Woman I Can number
larger than the No Fucking Way, Are You Kidding Me, Not if You Were
the Last Guy on Earth number?' Or you want information on How the
Hell to Prevent Him From Having Sex With Any Fertile Woman He Sees.
Well,
I'm sure not going to tell you. You'll have to figure that shit out
for yourself. But we can talk about Hot Hot Sex NOW! and its relevance
to your personal life and that's almost as good.
Along
the way we'll delve into such topics as having sex with random
attractive men - or random attractive women, if that's the way
you swing. And address the deeply relevant and fascinating topic as
to whether women really have only one reproductive strategy, finding
a good mate, or whether we might be able to sneak in some other sexual
behavior!
Stay
tuned for the exciting, sexually relevant answers!
In
which we address the subject of having sex with random attractive
people....
prettyfedup.com