Thread where Al tells us we should like muscular booty

[Elok]

There, SB, you can have your babe thread back. Now, where were we, Al?

[Darius871]

whatever, I'll just copy/paste...

No, it's just that some of us have brains that have evolved since the days of hunting on the savanna and realize that the viability of a mate in a modern economy has little to do with how much she can squat.

gribbler summed it up very well with these posts.

As for why we aren't attracted to women who look like they could make it in the savanna, it's because we aren't hunter-gatherers living in a savanna culture. Thank God.

..................

Culture plays a huge role in what people find attractive.

Uh, in fairness, I think you guys are missing what Alby's getting at here. At no time did he say or suggest a damned thing about "viability of a mate in a modern economy" or modern culture, or who would be most preferable for a long-term relationship, or who would be most stimulating on a personal and intellectual level, or who would be most able to financially support offspring. I think even he would agree that these goals are entirely irrespective of physical appearance.

What he's talking about, rather, is who would, before that captain buzzkill known as the intellect muddies the water with such considerations, catch one's eye in the first instance and make one immediately think "holy crap would I like to bang the **** out of her," which is and always has been, after all, the sole purpose of th[e babe] thread. That has nothing to do with the intellect and is strictly a question of baser instincts, which developed in an evolutionary laboratory eons ago and could not possibly have been significantly impacted by the mere blip on the radar screen that the past ten thousand years of "civilization" have been in the overall history of primates. In that sense he is surely correct that conduciveness to successful procreation and survival in the wilderness would tend to be the strongest triggers to initial sexual attraction at the most basic, instinctual level, before the intellect chimes in. I'm surprised that anyone would dispute that. It is surely true that once the intellect chimes in one may hypothesize all sorts of scenarios and conditions in which a less biologically "worthy" mate would nonetheless be extremely fulfilling personally and sexually, but that's separate from the very limited issue Alby is addressing. FFS.

[Al B. Sure!]

THANK YOU DARIUS!!!!

Maybe if these fools hear it from someone else, they'll actually understand what I'm saying.


As for you, Elok, here:

So...Sioux, Han Chinese, Masai, Australian Aborigines and Norwegians, with their drastically different features and body types, must necessarily have the same general rubric for what is attractive?

Actually yes.

http://www.newsweek.com/1996/06/02/the-biology-of-beauty.html#

"Judging beauty involves looking at another person," says University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, "and figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's genes."

It's widely assumed that ideals of beauty vary from era to era and from culture to culture. But a harvest of new research is confounding that idea. Studies have established that people everywhere -- regardless of race, class or age -- share a sense of what's attractive. And though no one knows just how our minds translate the sight of a face or a body into rapture, new studies suggest that we judge each other by rules we're not even aware of. We may consciously admire Kate Moss's legs or Arnold's biceps, but we're also viscerally attuned to small variations in the size and symmetry of facial bones and the placement of weight on the body.

This isn't to say that our preferences are purely innate -- or that beauty is all that matters in life. Most of us manage to find jobs, attract mates and bear offspring despite our physical imperfections. Nor should anyone assume that the new beauty research justifies the biases it illuminates. Our beautylust is often better suited to the Stone Age than to the Information Age; the qualities we find alluring may be powerful emblems of health, fertility and resistance to disease, but they say nothing about people's moral worth. The human weakness for what Thornhill calls "biological quality" causes no end of pain and injustice. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less real.

No one suggests that points of attraction never vary. Rolls of fat can signal high status in a poor society or low status in a rich one, and lip plugs go over better in the Kalahari than they do in Kansas. But local fashions seem to rest on a bedrock of shared preferences. You don't have to be Italian to find Michelangelo's David better looking than, say, Alfonse D'Amato. When British researchers asked women from England, China and India to rate pictures of Greek men, the women responded as if working from the same crib sheet. And when researchers at the University of Louisville showed a diverse collection of faces to whites, Asians and Latinos from 13 countries, the subjects' ethnic background scarcely affected their preferences.

For Johnston, the real fun starts after the judging is finished. By collecting people's ideal faces and comparing them to average faces, he can measure the distance between fantasy and reality. As a rule, he finds that an ideal female has a higher forehead than an average one, as well as fuller lips, a shorter jaw and a smaller chin and nose. Indeed, the ideal 25-year-old woman, as configured by participants in a 1993 study, had a 14-year-old's abundant lips and an 11-year-old's delicate jaw. Because her lower face was so small, she also had relatively prominent eyes and cheekbones.

The participants in that study were all college kids from New Mexico, but researchers have since shown that British and Japanese students express the same bias. And if there are lingering doubts about the depth of that bias, Johnston's latest findings should dispel them. In a forthcoming study, he reports that male volunteers not only consciously prefer women with small lower faces but show marked rises in brain activity when looking at pictures of them. And though Johnston has yet to publish specs on the ideal male, his unpublished findings suggest that a big jaw, a strong chin and an imposing brow are as prized in a man's face as their opposites are in a woman's.

Almost anything that interferes with fertility -- obesity, malnutrition, pregnancy, meno-pause -- changes a woman's shape. Healthy, fertile women typically have waist-hip ratios of .6 to .8, meaning their waists are 60 to 80 percent the size of their hips, whatever their actual weight. To take one familiar example, a 36-25-36 figure would have a WHR of .7. Many women outside this range are healthy and capable of having children, of course. But as researchers in the Netherlands discovered in a 1993 study, even a slight increase in waist size relative to hip size can signal reproductive problems. Among 500 women who were attempting in vitro fertilization, the odds of conceiving during any given cycle declined by 30 percent with every 10 percent increase in WHR. In other words, a woman with a WHR of .9 was nearly a third less likely to get pregnant than one with a WHR of .8, regardless of her age or weight. From an evolutionary perspective, it's hard to imagine men not respond- ing to such a revealing signal. And as Singh has shown repeatedly, they do.

The same pattern holds when Singh generates line drawings of different female figures and asks male volunteers to rank them for attractiveness, sexiness, health and fertility. He has surveyed men of various backgrounds, nationalities and ages. And whether the judges are 8-year-olds or 85-year-olds, their runaway favorite is a figure of average weight with a .7 WHR. Small wonder that when women were liberated from corsets and bustles, they took up girdles, wide belts and other waist-reducing contraptions. Last year alone, American women's outlays for shape-enhancing garments topped a half-billion dollars.

[Al B. Sure!]

I don't think you give enough credit to just how similar humans are. Someone like Heraclitus likes to drone about the supposed extreme variation and biodiversity of humans but I think and there's evidence that shows that we are all very much the same. A few ten thousand years of separation into the continents (which was not as much separation as people think since humans have gotten around) has not been enough to really differentiate humans, especially not in an area as basic as sexual attraction.

[Elok]

Al, when it comes to body type, at least, the results you gave were restricted to hip-to-waist ratio--nothing about glutes and legs, just general body shape. It also establishes that men the world over have a certain predilection for somewhat infantile female faces, which is a point for a lot of SB's waifish women and a point away from the rather strong-jawed women you favor. There's also the question of why most East Asian women, for example, have extremely slim figures, far away from the "optimal" ratio. I don't think it's a matter of malnutrition or environmental pressure.

This is probably gonna be one hell of an X-post, so I'll post and assess the damage.

[Thoth]

There, SB, you can have your babe thread back. Now, where were we, Al?

Here:



If you don't want to hit that, try Asher, he's probably more your type.

[Al B. Sure!]

Al, when it comes to body type, at least, the results you gave were restricted to hip-to-waist ratio--nothing about glutes and legs, just general body shape. It also establishes that men the world over have a certain predilection for somewhat infantile female faces, which is a point for a lot of SB's waifish women and a point away from the rather strong-jawed women you favor. There's also the question of why most East Asian women, for example, have extremely slim figures, far away from the "optimal" ratio. I don't think it's a matter of malnutrition or environmental pressure.

This is probably gonna be one hell of an X-post, so I'll post and assess the damage.

No x-post at all.

I think the issue is that the glutes and legs thing just hasn't been explored by scientists yet as far as I know. I see no reason why if a specific hip-to-waist ratio is preferred because it is a signal with biological relevance that other signals with similar relevance wouldn't also be universal. Generally speaking, men prefer bigger breasts, right? Do those contribute to 'general body shape' (as defined by you) more than thighs do?

However, those areas are related to hip-to-waist ratio. Wider hips are almost always accompanied with larger thighs, etc. And I can't imagine the bulk of male humanity preferring stick-like legs. Does that sound right to you?

If women hold preferences for men who are more muscular because of the obvious utilitarian benefits being more muscular can provide, would it be surprising if men have preferences for similarly utilitarian features?

[Darius871]

Here:





If you don't want to hit that, try Asher, he's probably more your type.

Oh, FFS. It's not the mohawk that's the problem and it's not even the cumbersome-to-remove whatever-the-hell-that's-supposed-to-be-that-she's-wearing that's the problem. It's the straight-up butherface and gender ambiguity. Viewing the southern hemisphere and chest from this angle and seeing that face I simply have no occasion for confidence that that is not a dude, and therefore the chubby goes away. You joke about Asher, but I know for a fact that he looks slightly more effeminate than that thing, and I'd feel straighter banging him than it. That's the bottom line here.

[giblets]

I think Albert may have the gayest taste in women ever. He'd be less gay if he started having sex with men. Really I have no idea why he thinks men are genetically coded to like muscular ass.

[Elok]

No, it wasn't an X-post, because people are still polluting the Babe Thread. Gah.

To continue based on my re-reading what was said there, why on earth should biological adaptations related to physical strength and endurance have anything to do with sexual attraction (beyond "wow, I bet she could go for hours")? As I've said, in other animals sexual selection frequently hinges on things totally unrelated to viability, if not counter to it. The explanation I've heard for some traits, like peacock tails, is that the creature looks at the opposite sex, sees a being with a ridiculous handicap, and assumes it must be pretty tough if it can survive dragging that sucker around. That is, apparent lack of viability is ATTRACTIVE in such cases.

Or maybe it's just biologists grasping at straws, and sexuality makes no sense. There are some other things, like bowerbirds (yeah, another bird example--I don't know much about mammal sexual displays, by weird coincidence), that have nothing to do with it one way or another. "Ooh, he can assemble twigs and petals in a tidy way, I'd better have sex with him!" Come to think of it, most of the choosiness in the animal kingdom is on the part of females, which makes this all the stranger. In a...state of nature, or whatever you want to call it, men of most species can chuck sperm around wherever they please without worry.

Beyond that, supposing we are "defective," why should it be a matter of any concern to us? It's not like I need a woman who can run across the savannah like an antelope.

And now THIS is an X-post. Quit screwing with me!

[Darius871]

I think Albert may have the gayest taste in women ever. He'd be less gay if he started having sex with men. Really I have no idea why he thinks men are genetically coded to like muscular ass.

I don't think by muscular he actually means "ripped" in the bodybuilder sense, as that's just too masculine. It's more about size, and the only way to have a big ass other than being fat is to have relatively developed muscles down there.

[Thoth]

Oh, FFS. It's not the mohawk that's the problem and it's not even the cumbersome-to-remove whatever-the-hell-that's-supposed-to-be-that-she's-wearing that's the problem. It's the straight-up butherface and gender ambiguity. Viewing the southern hemisphere and chest from this angle and seeing that face I simply have no occasion for confidence that that is not a dude, and therefore the chubby goes away. You joke about Asher, but I know for a fact that he looks slightly more effeminate than that thing, and I'd feel straighter banging him than it. That's the bottom line here.

You've gotta be ****ing kidding me. You have doubts about the femaleness of that hot piece of ass?

Consult your doctor. You may have hidden gender confidence issues.

[Darius871]

You've gotta be ****ing kidding me. You have doubts about the femaleness of that hot piece of ass?

Consult your doctor. You may have hidden gender confidence issues.

Clearly you've never been to a drag show. I've seen more men more effeminate than that than I can count. Not about to take any chances until it turns the **** around, and even then a detailed inspection will be necessary.

Seriously, does anyone know who that is or if a gallery exists? This affront to my masculinity will not stand, man.

[Elok]

Al: after reviewing your last three pics in the babe thread, my wife speculates that your preferences may have less to do with body build than with posture; in all three pics, the women are sticking their back ends out like they're big rigs. She adds that this might be a bonobo-chimp type deal where presenting booty is a signal for coitus.

And whatever gifts that mohawk chick was born with are utterly neutralized by the abnormal getup. Show me a perfectly grilled porterhouse steak smothered in marmalade and pickles, I won't be interested. Also, yeah, that face is not attractive.

[Thoth]

Clearly you've never been to a drag show. .

Err....No. I'll leave that up to you and Alpert.