WHY DOES THIS STUFF APPEAL TO US:

not to mention likely photo retouching etc. Is there a reason this unnatural image is pasted in front of us to make our daughters feel inadequate? Is it because when we get aroused, our blood rushes away from our brains? -not quite!

No it is a TRICK! thousands of years of evolution have made our genes adapt to the fact that many females of our species are a waste of our seed. We have evolved to be aroused by females with attributes which PROMISE ABILITY TO PRODUCE OFFSPRING. That's what it is all about - we trigger on factors that say, "this female should be able to help pass on your genes":

--- consider what gets us horny, and why:

at least we know and admit the no-longer-ideal characteristics we are programmed to respond to. I believe women are generally in denial about being attracted to the "alpha male" - a brutish thug capable of beating up the rest of the males to allow him to acquire a whole harem. That's why nice guys don't see much action, but typical violent criminals or outlaw bikers have fan clubs of hot women. Human kind will advance when all the shrinks and liberals in denial can face up to the forces of evil-ution which have conspired to produce our frailty.

eric

 go to more innovative investigation of gender roles or back to eric's skeptic pages or check out more of Eric's rants

 Comments can be sent to eric@voicenet.com I'm happy to publish critical responses to my claims. 

   Interesting, but I only 50% agree. There is no relationship between breast size and ability to produce milk. Nor does physical beauty as we  think of it have other than a tangential relationship with health. An ugly woman with small breasts is about as likely  to be a good mother as a better endowed pretty girl. Furthermore, we are almost the only species in which large breasts seem to have become a major sexual focus.

   I think that secondary sexual characteristics have evolved for other reasons. Some of this may almost be chance. Why, in one  species, is a big tail a sex symbol (peacock), while another flaunts its wattle? Every species will tend to adopt certain bodily  features as sexually relevant, and once they are adopted, evolution more or less naturally favors those with bigger and better ones!  So perhaps, as humans lost some of their ability to detect scent signals, and as some monkey signals of being in heat may  have become irrelevant to a species whose female is continuously sexually receptive, other cues became more critical. Certain  facial features, a certain shape of leg, larger breasts, shapely derriere....  I do agree that young age is an evolved sex attractant.  that is clearly and powerfully connected with child bearing.

   I'm no anthropologist, but I think the issue is more complicated than your discussion portrays it.

my response: Good points Ed, I agree that looks would be no indicator of being a "good mother"  - I wouldn't be surprised if breast size has some correlation with fecundity in malnourished primitive societies. I think much of physical beauty has strong correlation with health - ugliness is associated with sickly infested skin, growths, bad teeth, eyes that don't track, malformation, etc. I feel fecundity correlates with beauty. For many species, being able to produce some useless secondary sex characteristic may serve as a overall health indicators.
    There is a species of small fish where the female is attracted to the male who is able to survive getting closest to predators. - ironically, that would help the species evolve the quick movements making them able to evade predators (but at a great cost to males)

   From:
         "Roger M. Wilcox" <rogermw@ix.netcom.com>

Regarding our standard of beauty:

   I saw a little segment during "Sex Week" [TM] on The earning Channel about what makes given facial features attractive.  First, they demonstrated that even babies not conditioned by Hollywood standards of beauty will spend more time looking at pictures of supermodels than at pictures of ordinary-looking women, so (they concluded) modern standards of beauty are not  entirely subjective.
   Second, they made a computer-generated average of the faces of several ordinary-looking men, and a computer- generated average of the faces of several ordinary-looking women.  The "average" faces that came out were drop-dead gorgeous.  Apparently, someone who is "good-looking" merely has features that epitomize the human average.  (An "average-looking" person would, of course, be exactly one standard deviation *away* from the feature norm, i.e. an average amount off-average.)  They theorized that attraction to middle-of-the-population-spread features is a way to weed out possible genetic defects in a potential mate, i.e. if this person's nose is too big then maybe (s)he's got off-kilter genes somewhere else besides.

Oi -
I keep falling for the ever-popular "sure, send something and I'll publish
it" routine.
This time I'm heartened enough that you have posted material in support of
getting more women into the skeptics' game of marbles, that I would like to
address some of the minor offenses on your otherwise amusing page at
http://www.phact.org/e/skeptic/why.htm - here goes:
1) That "unnatural bimbo" reference might be to your animated icon, but the
list that follows seems to refer more to the physical characteristics of
the real woman in your subliminally doctored photo.  Bimbo as a slang term
is judgemental.  Insulting a cartoon is one thing, denigrating a person is
another.  It would be in your interest (to keep the pose of being unbiased
if not as some PC gesture) to find another term or specify that the term
bimbo describes the headless cartoon.
2) The action of your animated icon, and the fact that your human bimbo is
smiling and apes direct eye contact (never mind her pupil size), are not
addressed.  Your comments and both responses refer only to still images,
and only in terms of these stills as agglomerations of physical
characteristics.  Is this another example of men reacting emotionally to
something (implied arousal and/or acceptance) and then adopting
pseudo-scientific justifications to avoid facing that reality (assuming you
and both respondents are heterosexual genetic males)?  [BTW: Get a load of
Gene Tierney watching Victor Mature descending a staircase in The Shanghai
Gesture for a really funny example of panting after an alpha male.]
3) One option left out of the whole breast size correlation thread:  Didn't
late 60s/early 70s sex research reveal that women's breasts swell as they
approach orgasm?  Don't ask me to do homework on this, it's just a
suggestion...
Ahem;
Fellow Ring Member Jennifer "Why is there only one woman on PhACT's Famous
Names list?" Kramer