Posts by Bart Janssen
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Sorry Danielle.
I certainly wouldn't want to imply that biological imperatives are an excuse to do what is culturally or morally wrong and uncivilised.
There is pretty good evidence for some kind of biological drive to do some pretty horrible things. The mark of civilised folks is that they can do what is right even if it doesn't fit with what was good for us a million years ago.
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Oh and just in case I'm coming across as all clinical and biological about this stuff - I think all these things we discover about attractiveness - ratios, symmetry and pheromones - are incredibly romantic. I love the fact that there are parts of me that are hard-wired to fall in love with my sweetheart. Or is that just geeky?
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And that's controversial for whom? His Holiness?
Hell yeah. The first studies were done in the netherlands and caused all sorts of crap to start flying in the Catholic community.
It undercut one of the major arguments against gay rights and so played a political role as well. If gays really were biologically different then it would be wrong to discriminate, however if it was "merely" a choice well then surely the government had a responsibility to "help" them rectify that er wrong choice. Which of course was bollocks and these studies made such arguments particularly easy to dismiss.
Which just meant even more silly arguments were raised - sigh.
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Ah, but the first look doesn't tell the whole story.
Sure. Happy to agree with you about that second look and especially about the look that lingers after the third date. But of course that's all about pheromones :P.
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Stephen I'm not trying to be reductionist at all. It's just an observation that has been made many times in many different studies. And as I said it's an observation with less variation than you normally get when studying real people.
It's not about long term relationships or anything like that - just the initial "attractiveness" bit, that turns your head or makes you look at a magazine page just a bit longer.
Or, y'know, gay people.
That was the really cool thing about the initial studies and one of the most controversial. It demonstrated that gay men and women liked the same features about men and gay women and men liked the same features about women.
that was controversial because it showed really clearly that gay people actually really were "attracted" to the same sex. That is, it wasn't just a "choice".
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Sorry Gio didn't realise you'd had this conversation before.
At the risk of arguing semantics what I was referring to was the initial attractiveness, if you like ... "the made you look" factor. So I'm happy to stand by the studies that show regardless of what people say makes them attracted to other people, when you do the studies, what makes them look and makes them look for longer at some people than others, turns out to be some very basic proportions. The evolutionary argument comes after that observation and the evolutionary argument may be wrong but the observation is not in question.
And of course you are right that like all such studies with real humans there is variation, but interestingly there is a lot less variation than for most other such studies. You may like to believe you are different but the odds are very good that you are normal.
That doesn't have much to do with what makes you want to keep looking the next morning or what makes you want to keep talking to someone or spend your life with them. And it also has nothing to do with discovering that some people are really nice to be with even if they don't look attractive (gasp). But since this thread is about a magazine with pictures of men that are meant to be attractive, it is kinda relevant.
So does that make the comment a cliche?
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for it is my belief that the most attractive thing about a woman is an air of confidence.
yeah right
So the same eye movement studies Emma mentioned show that those who like women like the hourglass proportion. Size make little difference and neither does an air of confidence, if she has that ratio of bust to waist to hips a women will get looked at. Which is interesting when you consider that models almost never have that ratio.
After that you may well be right, the things that make you want to keep talking to her and noticing she has eyes as well will be things like confidence and the ability to use words with more than two syllables. But the initial "attractiveness" is dependent on that damn ratio, oh and of course youth which is all about reproductive ability.
Pretty much the same is true for guys. The things linked to probable reproductive performance are right up there in initial attractiveness, shoulders, buttocks (as my mother informed me while she "watched" ice skaters), not too much fat although no fat at all isn't good either. Oh and indicators of power.
However as we get past reproductive concerns it may well be true that we look for different things. It would be really interesting to do the same eye movement studies with people in their 40s and 60s and see if we become more interested in indicators of people we might like to talk to and live with rather than just those with which we want to reproduce.
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we're waaayyy too apathetic for that sort of carry-on.
I'd be offended by that if I could be bothered
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PAS is driving me to want to kill someone today.
After I've done it, please feel free to debate amongst yourselves where or not y'all drove me to do it or not.and
Kyle, I may join you. Wait, doesn't that make us terrorists if there's more than one of us?
hmmm wait could there be a reality TV show in this? A group of normal sane individuals [or weird but talented ones] is exposed to trolling of the worst kind until finally one of them breaks and invokes Godwin's law OR just kills someone...
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the contestants are often very weird, interesting, passionate, talented people who desperately love what they're doing.
Exactly Danielle. While the weirdness is certainly carefully selected (are there really no male designers who are not flamboyantly gay?) and it is amusing at times - it is the talent that these people genuinely possess that is compelling for me. Of course that doesn't explain NZ top model [looks embarrassed].