Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do (7 page)

When one of us (Kanazawa) took his first sociology course in 1982, his instructor used the second edition, published in 1981, of the bestselling introductory sociology textbook
Sociology
by Ian Robertson. On Chapter 2, there is a picture of the Tasaday, all peacefully and quietly sitting in their cave. The caption to the photograph reads, “The Tasaday, a recently discovered ‘stone age' tribe in the Philippines, apparently do not have words in their language to express enmity or hatred. Competition, acquisitiveness, aggression, and greed are all unknown among these gentle people. The existence of societies like the Tasaday challenges Western assumptions about ‘human nature.'” Five years later, Kanazawa taught his own introductory sociology course at the University of Washington for the first time and used the third edition of Robertson's still bestselling textbook, published in 1987—a year after the hoax had been uncovered. All references to the Tasaday had been deleted in the third edition.

Incredibly, anthropologists still debate the authenticity of the Tasaday even today,
¹⁹
but the majority of opinions appears to be that they were not a genuine Stone Age people. One thing is certain: A small tribe of twenty-six people could not have been completely isolated from the outside world for centuries because that would lead to massive inbreeding. And they also could not possibly have been so peaceful that their language lacked any word for conflict and competition. For better or worse, aggression and violence are part of male human nature. It could be heightened, as among the Yanomamö, but it could not be completely erased from human nature.

The Native American Environmentalism
²⁰

Unlike the first two, our third and final example of an exotic culture that never was is something that is not yet widely known as false. It is commonly believed even today that, unlike the later European settlers to the American continents, Native Americans are protective of the environment. It is often said that Native Americans make every decision with the next seven generations in mind.

In 1854, the governor of the Washington Territory, on behalf of President Franklin Pierce, met with Chief Seattle, leader of the Duwamish Indians, and offered to buy Chief Seattle's land. This was Chief Seattle's response to the offer:

It's a beautiful speech. The only problem is that Chief Seattle never made it. The whole speech was written by a white screen-writer and professor of film, Ted Perry, for the 1971 ABC TV drama
Home
. It was fiction. This is the origin of the myth of Native American respect for the environment.

There is no contemporaneous record of what Chief Seattle actually said at the meeting with the governor in 1854, but according to one eyewitness account, made thirty years later, Chief Seattle thanked the governor for the President's generosity. He was very eager to do business with the President and sell his land to the US government.

The myth that Native Americans are protective of the environment was further fortified by the “Keep America Beautiful” series of public ser vice announcements in 1971, the same year
Home
aired, with the unforgettable image of the “crying Indian.” The Indian witnesses white people littering and polluting the environment, and quietly weeps for Mother Earth and the abuse that she must go through at the hands of white people. The message of the public service announcement was that we must all be as protective of the environment as the Native Americans were.

(After his death in 1999, it was revealed that Iron Eyes Cody, the man who played the “crying Indian” in the public ser vice announcements in 1971 and subsequently made a career in Hollywood, portraying numerous Native American characters in movies and TV shows, was not Native American at all. He was born Espera Oscar DeCorti, a son of two
Italian
immigrants.)

Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans were no more or no less protective of the environment than were any other groups on earth. A large majority of plant and animal species that ever existed on the American continents had been driven extinct by Native Americans long before Columbus set foot in the West Indies. Environmental protection is a luxury that became possible to Western societies only in the last several decades. Before industrialization and the current age of material abundance, all human groups had to exploit the environment to the maximum just to survive. No one could afford to be environmentally conscious, and Native Americans were no exception.

 

The point of these examples of exotic culture that never was is to highlight the fact that all human cultures, however exotic and seemingly different on the surface, are essentially the same. There are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from any other, just like there are no human bodies that are radically and completely different from any other. Every time there appears to be a new discovery of an exotic culture that is different from all others, it turns out to be a hoax.

On to the Puzzles and Questions

Now that we have discussed the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology in the last two chapters, you should feel free to delve into the questions that we pose, and answers we suggest for them, in the substantive chapters (chapters 3–8). There is, of course, much more to evolutionary psychology than we discussed in chapters 1 and 2, and if you are interested, we suggest that you explore the books and articles that we recommend in footnote [10] in chapter 1. But our discussion in the last two chapters should be sufficient to inform the questions and answers anywhere in the next six chapters. So feel free to jump in, jump around, and explore the questions that most interest you. Enjoy!

THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX AND MATING

Because it focuses so much on reproductive success, most of the fascinating studies that come out each year in evolutionary psychology are about sex and mating. One of the earliest studies in the field, conducted in the mid-1980s, surveyed over ten thousand people from thirty-seven cultures throughout the world and asked them what they sought in their ideal mate.
¹
To the surprise of everyone (except for evolutionary psychologists), the study found that, regardless of culture, language, religion, race, or geography, men everywhere want the same things in women, and women everywhere want the same things in men (but different from what men want in women).

You may believe that your personal preferences for an ideal mate are truly personal and individual, not shared by other people. The basic message of evolutionary psychology is that, contrary to what you may have thought, your preferences and desires for your ideal mate are strongly shaped by the forces of evolution. Ultimately, it's not what you want that matters; it's what your genes want in order to assist their goal of spreading themselves as much and as far as possible.

Another message of evolutionary psychology, particularly important in this book, is that a lot of the rest of human social behavior—in politics, in religion, in economics—is ultimately about sex. As we try to show in later chapters on these areas of social life, what we commonly think of as political behavior, religious behavior, or economic behavior is essentially about sex and mating. So, in that sense, this chapter is more fundamental than all the other chapters. And, of course, it is the “sexiest” chapter!

Q. Why Do Men Like Blonde Bombshells (and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Them)?

It is commonly believed by those who subscribe to the Standard Social Science Model—in other words, virtually everybody except for evolutionary psychologists—that the media impose arbitrary images of ideal female beauty on girls and women in our society, and force them to aspire to these artificial and arbitrary standards. According to this claim, girls and women want to look like supermodels or actresses or pop idols because they are bombarded with images of these women. By implication, according to this view, girls and women will cease to want to look like them if the media would cease inundating them with such images, or else change the arbitrary standards of female beauty.

Nothing could be further from the truth.
To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Anyone can see the absurdity of this argument. We become hungry periodically because we have physiological and psychological mechanisms that compel us to seek and consume food. And we have these innate mechanisms because they solve an important adaptive problem of survival. Our ancestors (long before they were humans or even mammals) who somehow did not become hungry for food did not survive long enough to leave offspring who carried their genes. We would of course become hungry just as much even if all the commercials about food disappeared today. The advertisements are the
consequences
of our tendency to become hungry, not the causes. They exploit our innate needs but do not create them.

The same is true with the ideal of female beauty. Two pieces of evidence should suffice to refute the claim that images in the media, and “culture” in general, force girls and women to desire to look like blonde bombshells. First, as we note below, women were dying their hair blonde more than half a millennium, possibly two millennia, ago, when there were no TV, movies, and magazines (although there were portraits, and it is due to these portraits that we know today that women were dying their hair blonde in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italy).
²
Women's desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia.

Second, a recent study shows that women in Iran, where they are generally not exposed to the Western media and culture, and thus would not know Jessica Simpson from Roseanne Barr, and where most women wear the traditional Muslim
hijab
that loosely covers their entire body so as to make it impossible to tell what shape it is, are actually
more
concerned with their body image and want to lose
more
weight than their American counterparts in the land of
Vogue
and the Barbie doll.
³
The Standard Social Science Model, which ascribes the preferences and desires of women entirely to socialization by the media, would have difficulty explaining how Italian women in the fifteenth century and Iranian women today both aspire to and pursue the same ideal image of female beauty as do women in contemporary Western societies.

Why, then, do women want to look like blonde bombshells? Evolutionary psychology suggests that it is because men want to mate with women who look like them. Women's desire to look like them is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to this desire of men. This then begs the question: Why do men want to mate with women who look like them? Because women who look like them have higher reproductive value and fertility and attain greater reproductive success on average. There is nothing arbitrary about the image of ideal female beauty; it has been precisely and carefully calculated by millions of years of evolution by sexual selection. Men today want to mate with women who look like blonde bombshells, and as a result, women want to look like them, because our ancestral men who did not want to mate with women who looked like them did not leave as many offspring.

Let's take a closer look at exactly what we mean by “blonde bombshells.” Note, first, that there has been a long line of blonde bombshells in the Western media: Pamela Anderson, Madonna, Brigitte Bardot, the popular British bombshell Jordan—all the way back to the iconic Marilyn Monroe and even further back in history. And there are contemporary examples as well: Jessica Simpson, Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johansson, among many others. Readers from non-Western societies can suitably substitute representatives of female beauty from their own cultures. We do not know who they are, but we can nonetheless be confident that they share many features with their Western counterparts.

What are these features? We will isolate and discuss in turn the key features that define the image of ideal female beauty. These are youth, long hair, small waist, large breasts, blonde hair, and blue eyes. There is evolutionary logic behind each one.

Youth

Men prefer young women because they have greater reproductive value and fertility than older women. A woman's
reproductive value
is the expected number of children that she will have in the remainder of her reproductive career, and therefore reaches its maximum at the onset of menstruation, steadily declines over her life course, and reaches zero at menopause.
⁴
Her
fertility
is the average number of children that she actually has at any given age, and reaches its maximum in her twenties. Evolutionary psychological logic suggests that this is why men are attracted to teenage girls and young women, despite the laws of civilized society concerning the age of consent. Remember, there were no laws against statutory rape in the ancestral environment; in fact, there were no laws at all. The Savanna Principle, which states that the human brain has difficulty dealing with entities that did not exist in the ancestral environment, suggests that the human brain cannot really comprehend written laws, including laws regarding the age of consent.

For example, male high school teachers and college professors in the United States (but
not
their female colleagues) have a higher-than-expected rate of divorce and a lower-than-expected rate of remarriage, probably because they are constantly exposed to girls and women at the peak of their reproductive value. Any adult woman they might be married to or date pales in comparison to their female students on the reproductive score.
⁵
This can also explain why most Hollywood marriages do not last very long. Actors are constantly exposed to and closely associate with younger and younger generations of starlets, while their actress-model wives can only get older.

In (Futile) Search for the Human Barbie Doll

Here's a little autobiographical aside, which nonetheless makes our point about the importance of youth in the ideal female beauty. When we first began writing this book in 2000, we chose Pamela Anderson as the ideal of female beauty, the human Barbie doll, and the title of this section was “Why Do Men Like Pamela Anderson (and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Her)?” As years went by, however, she ceased to fit the bill.
Baywatch
went off the air in 2001, and Pamela Anderson turned 40 in 2007. So we then chose to replace her with Britney Spears, who was at the time the perfect image of a virginal, nubile princess. Well, you know what has happened to her lately. Next candidate, please!

As we sought yet again to replace Britney Spears with another perfect image of female beauty, it dawned on us that, no matter whom we would choose to use, she would be out of date pretty soon because of the high premium placed on youth for the ideal female beauty. (Had we written this book thirty years ago, this section would have been titled “Why Do Men Like Farrah Fawcett-Majors [and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Her]?” It would have made our book look
really
dated by now; Farrah Fawcett turned 60 in 2007.) Since we want our book to be read for a long time and don't ever want it to look dated, we finally decided not to use an actual example of a blonde bombshell.

Long Hair

Men in general prefer women with long hair.
⁶
And most young women choose to grow their hair long. Once again, men's preference for women with long hair is probably the reason for women's preference to grow their hair long. The question thus is: Why do men prefer women with long hair?

Because the human fetus grows inside the woman's body for nine months, and then the mother nurses the newborn baby for a few years afterward, the woman's health is crucial for the well-being of the child. Sickly women do not make good mothers, to a significantly greater extent than sickly men do not make good fathers. Thus, men are interested in selecting healthy women to be the mothers of their children. Part of the reason that men prefer young women, besides their higher reproductive value and fertility, is that younger women tend to be healthier on average than older women.

How can men assess the health of their potential mates? There were no clinics in the ancestral environment; ancestral men had to judge women's health by themselves. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness, and this is the reason why men like beautiful women. (See the section, “Why Is Beauty
Not
in the Eye of the Beholder or Skin-Deep?” later in this chapter.) Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. During illness, a body needs to sequester all available nutrients (like iron and protein) to fight the illness. Since hair is not essential to survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the first place to which a body turns to collect the necessary nutrients. Thus, a person's poor health first shows up in the condition of the hair.
⁷

Further, hair grows very slowly, at about six inches per year. That means that if a woman has shoulder-length hair (two feet long), it accurately indicates her health status for the past four years, because once the hair grows there is nothing the bearer can do to change its appearance later. A woman might be healthy now, but if she was sick sometime in the past four years, her long hair would indicate her past sickly status. And there was nothing a woman could do in the ancestral environment to make her hair appear healthy and lustrous when she was not healthy. This is also why older women tend to keep their hair short, because they tend to become less healthy as they grow older, and they do not want telltale signs of their current health status hanging from their heads.

If you want to see this process in action, try a little experiment on your own. Find a female stranger in a public place (like a park or a subway station). Observe her from behind, without looking at her face, her hands, her clothes, or anything else about her, and look only at her hair. Try to guess her age from the condition of her hair alone, nothing else. Once you come up with a guess for her age, pass by her, turn around to the front, and discreetly look at the woman's face. You will find that you are very rarely surprised by her apparent age when you look at her face and her entire body, because the condition of her hair is usually a very accurate indicator of her age. You've now discovered the importance of hair as an indicator of age in the ancestral environment.