Human attraction and sexuality is a murky subject, so I'm not here to provide answers. I'm just looking to start a discussion and get people thinking.
I think the most basic level of attraction lies in biology. For example, I like men. As far as I can tell, this is something biological. It is also something I share with bisexual men, homosexual men, and heterosexual women.
Also, biology can lead to finding certain traits more attractive than others. For example, an attraction to a tall, strong person probably lies in the desire to have a partner who is strong enough to survive and/or is going to give you strong babies. Naturally, we seek out healthy partners, and health has a way of showing up on the surface.
But beyond those basics, where does attraction come from?
I know I am NOT attracted to guys who are too strong. I think even most football players are too big for me. Honestly, I want my man to be more “mere mortal” than “greek god.” I suppose it's because I don't want to feel dominated. This may be part of a social norm where men compete with each other in terms of fitness or it could be a part of the biological desire to be the Alpha Male.
I also like guys with longer faces. I have no idea if this has an biological basis or not. I also prefer shorter hair, and I'm positive that hair length cannot possibly have a strict biological reason behind it. I think I pay more attention to the face than anything else. I can even ignore body.
I guess this is where the nature v. nurture debate comes in. It appears that attraction starts with biological reasons but it can also branch off into something totally different based on environmental reasons.
But enough of that mumbo-jumbo. Let's look at pictures of hot guys now:
Colin Dack via HAWT Blog
James Franco
Milo Ventimiglia
Jude Law
Jude Law
6 comments:
There's been many studies of how evolution affects attraction with heterosexuals but homosexual attraction, as far as I know is still a murky subject.
Darwin's sexual selection theory could account for it as there have been studies that suggest a gay man's brain is more similar to a heterosexual female...
There is also the exotic factor. What is exotic becomes more attractive because its out of the norm or the complete opposite can also occur, because its out of the norm, it becomes ugly.
There is also the very big factor of social influences. We've been told since we were little what "beauty" is via the media, fashion magazines, and the sort. Maybe people are attracted to blonds because of the social standards of beauty after all, fat used to be attractive as it denotes wealth and security along with pale skin for it means that people didn't work in the sun...
Just some interesting facts is that some Caucasians in America tan to become darker yet in other nations, darker skinned people use "whitening" cream...
But what is almost universal is the idea of symmetry...the more symmetrical the face, the more beautiful it is...though not always...
An interesting question you ask. There are some universal qualities to attraction that seem to hold throughout the ages, but by and large a lot of it changes. For example, thinness didn't used to have the same attractive quality as it does in today's society.
It's an interesting subject that's been poked around into but without many (if any) definitive answers. After all, we're not peacocks and such. :-P
It's all about symmetry in my book, whether male or female. If you are too heavy, I feel that you are slothenly; if you are too skinny, I think that you are unhealthy. Too much muscle, then you are a meathead; too little and you are a wimp.
Yep its a neat topic. My first year of university, I was convinced I wanted to go into psychiatry and research. I spent a lot of time abusing the search indexes the school provided to read journal articles about such topics. There is a lot of interesting research that has been published about this exact topic. I can't recall any details :-/
But if we want to (ignorantly) speculate (which is fun too): like every aspect of the fuzzy thing we call personality, I think we would all agree that its a mixture of hereditary/biological predispositions that have been suppressed or accentuated via environmental factors. It's especially interesting to think about the fact that because our brain is changing ("wiring") itself at a much greater rate when we are very young (< 8 yrs?)-- its neat to think of the 'little' things that for whatever reason may have had very big impacts to our more 'permanent' personality traits.
An illustrative analogy is like stretching taffy. If you have a small piece of taffy, and you make small indentions in it. Then, as you stretch the taffy the indentions will stretch into bigger, but morphed, artifacts. Scale this up to a tremendously complex system with a tremendously rich set of personality traits...and well...yea we've scaled out past what our ape brains can comprehend, me thinks.
Much Love,
Steve
Colin Dack is the best of the group.
Wow, great points everyone. I completely forgot about the weight issue, where over-weight used to be consider good. We're studying the flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in school, and that ideal of weight comes to mind when of think of the thunder thighs that he's been known to paint.
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