Attraction

If you imagine back millions of years ago to the time before communities had been formed (after all, there could be no society before there were enough humans to form a society), it seems probable that the best way for humans to continue to exist would be for a male to wander around impregnating lots of different females, and for those females to reproduce no more young that what they could take care of by themselves. The most successful humans would be those that were genetically motivated to behave accordingly. That would include a sex drive to motivate couples to copulate, then motivation for the male to move on and means and motivation for the female to take care of the child. I believe that many of these motivators can be tied to sexual attraction as we know it today.

While culture does influence our concept of attraction, the degree is probably overstated by most. It is more effective for culture to exploit our natural inclinations. If they were to create them, it would be most effective for them to ally with culture, and many of the ways in which we tend to be sexually attracted do not at all harmonize with our accepted social norms. Humans tend to want to credit civilization for everything, but I don’t give it too much credit as we mostly act in highly uncivilized ways. The role of culture is often to provide means for us to get along despite our genetic impulses. This is why I think the current fad of encouraging people to follow their bliss or whatever is not only poor advice, it is dangerous.

Evolutionarily speaking, diversity is essential. Our success at genetic diversification can in part be attributed to our attraction to those who seem exotic. When critiquing human sexual attraction, it is important to realize the distinction between the majority and the minority. (One of the major flaws with democracy is that it values the majority opinion only.) If everyone agreed on everything, we would all compete for the same things to the extent that we would kill each other fighting over them. Majority opinion need only be 51%, which means it can be disagreed with by 49%. This slightly unequal balance is what makes us survive as a species. When analyzing human sexual attraction, we can make generalities regarding it that only a majority of our species need relate to. So for instance, it is a flaw to think that all humans should be heterosexual. A minority of homosexuals makes perfect evolutionary sense in maintaining a diverse balance in order to avoid over-competition. This notion will be especially hard to grasp by dogmatists who believe that everyone else should think and behave exactly like them, or worse, their conception of a “higher being.”

In order to maximize the chances of conception, it makes sense that females would be attracted to males a few years older than them, since females reach puberty a few years earlier. Much to my chagrin, it similarly makes sense that females be attracted to taller males, since males with longer limbs will generally have one longer muscle which will put their sperm closer to the egg. It would make sense for males to be attracted to younger, healthy-looking females, who are more fertile and more physically capable of taking care of young. We can find all kinds of evolutionary logical explanations of attraction such as these.

I will now return to my initial postulation that pre-society humans must have been propagated by males wandering around impregnating females and then leaving females to raise the children themselves. I am not suggesting we should return to this barbarism, simply demonstrating that ways in which we are and tend to want to behave today can be credited for allowing our species to continue to exist in past millennia. Behaviors current society frowns upon were at one time essential. These ideas need not be applied to humans only, but I’m not going to try to speak for how other species might be attracted to each other.

Species growth would want the couple to start coupling as soon as possible. The quickest way for this to happen would be to skip mutual consent altogether and just have one gender be stronger, more aggressive and more dominating than the other. Of course you wouldn’t want one gender too much stronger or they would tend to kill the other gender off, which would cause a serious problem. It would also help if the genders met half way in this regard, which can explain sado-masochistic tendencies. To avoid trauma and still provide motivation for couples to get on with it, it would make most sense for attraction to be superficial. For the record, being able to make someone laugh is every bit as superficial as looks.

Species growth would also want for the couple to stop coupling once the female was impregnated and provide incentive for the male to go impregnate someone else. I propose that this can explain why sexual attraction tends to wane over time (I know many will object to this, but any relationship that has not figured out how to keep things novel will have a pathetic sex life) and why males tend to not be attracted to rotund (to be euphemistic) females (although in northerly latitudes the perceived relative healthiness of women with more fat would supersede this). Big hips help ease birth itself, which can explain the attraction to the hour-glass figure. The fact that the female must be able to successfully feed the kid can explain why males tend to be attracted to big breasts. (The necessity of females to be willing to care for their young can explain the motherly nurturing instinct.)