Path: usenet From: xmark98@mindless.com (Mark98) Newsgroups: alt.smokers.glamour Subject: Re: kid pics Date: Thu, 05 Mar 1998 15:55:32 GMT Organization: Altopia Corp. - Usenet Access - http://www.altopia.com Lines: 313 Message-ID: <3500ca63.11078992@news.alt.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Approved: asg-sub@lelnet.com X-Copyright-1: This post appears here as part of a compilation X-Copyright-2: which is copyrighted. X-Copyright-3: See http://www.lelnet.com/asg/ for details. Allow me to play devil's advocate: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Male Sexual Attraction to Pubescent and Adolescent Girls: A Matter of Evolution, Not Perversion. n.s. aristoff There are some people out there who seem to thrive on the myth that male sexual attraction to pubescent and adolescent females (or even girls somewhat younger) is somehow "abnormal." However, this myth has been exploded by the recent work in evolutionary psychology, a multi-disciplinary field which includes psychology, cultural anthropology, sexology and sociology. Most evolutionary psychologists doing research and theory acknowledge that men are sexually attracted by youthful appearance. This isn't simply a matter of one country or another being a "youth culture," but is universal among all peoples who have been studied, from industrial nations to preliterate cultures. Moreover, historical data appear to confirm that such attraction is also trans-historical. According to evolutionary theory, the adaptations which resulted in what we understand as human sexual attraction evolved in what is termed an environment of evolutionary adaptedness (here, EEA). This is not merely a particular time or place, but a set of environmental parameters relevant to the ontogeny and functioning of a given adaptation. Evolutionary theory also posits that the primary reason for all adaptations is to ensure reproduction. Most modern evolutionary psychologists agree that selection favored males equipped with psychological mechanisms that perceived cues of nubility as maximally sexually attractive (other things equal). (A "nubile" female is one who is just beginning ovulatory menstrual cycles who has not yet become pregnant.) One of the leading theoreticians in the field, Donald Symonds writes in "Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture" (Ed. by Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton, University of Chicago Press, 1995, Chapter Five: "Beauty is in the Adaptations of the Beholder: The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Female Sexual Attractiveness") that male sexual desire evolved in such a way that they are more likely to be sexually attracted to females who are just-nubile or slightly younger. This is true whether one believes men primarily evaluate females as potential wives or as short-term mates. Symonds' article runs for 32 pages and is filled with examples and considerations of alternative theories. However, I have culled various quotes which support and summarize these points. The data on living natural-fertility preliterate peoples strongly implies that for tens of thousands of years, at least, women almost always were married by the time they were nubile, the biological father of a woman's child was very likely to be her husband, and women typically began their reproductive careers at nubility, could rear no more than one child every three or four years, and nursed each child intensively for a period of years. An ancestral male who married a nubile (or somewhat younger) female would have had maximum opportunity to sire her offspring during her most fecund years and, more important, would not have had to invest in children that had been sired by other men or to incur the various costs involved in ongoing conflict with the mother over how she allocates her parental effort among his and other men's children. Also, a nubile woman, compared to a woman even a few years older, would not have been investing her time and energy in other men's children, would have had more living relatives to invest in her and her children, and would have been more likely to survive until a newly conceived child was old enough to survive on its own. In other words, a female who was just or not quite nubile was an excellent choice of mate from an evolutionary standpoint because she was unlikely to have conceived. A man who makes such a female his wife would simply be maximizing his reproductive potential. This tendency toward attraction to visual cues which indicate nubility (i.e., bodily and facial characteristics) is confirmed among the Yanomamo, who are preliterate peoples of southern Venezuela and Northern Brazil who lived in undisturbed aboriginal conditions. Among Yanomamo females, menarche occurs at an average age of 12.4 years, cohabitation begins sometime within the next two years, first live births occur at an average age of 16.8 years..., peak fertility occurs between 20 and 24 years of age, and last births occur at an average age of 39.9 years.... [I]n the EEA nubility probably occurred between 15 and 18 years of age. The "hypothesis that human males are most strongly sexually attracted by nubility cues," Symonds also points out, "is subject to many independent tests, because it implies that every typical pregnancy- and lactation-induced change in women's bodies that could have been reliably detected by ancestral males should tend to reduce female sexual attractiveness (other things equal). Symonds documents a variety of such changes, but [one] of the best-documented determinants of female sexual attractiveness -- low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) -- ...appear[s] to conform to this prediction:" Before puberty boys and girls have similar WHRs [but as a girl reaches puberty her] WHR decreases because her pelvis widens and she deposits fat primarily on her hips and thighs.... Free estrogen lowers WHR, free testosterone increases it, resulting in a bi-modal distribution of WHRs with little overlap between the sexes: healthy pre-menopausal women typically have WHRs between .67 and .80, healthy men between .80 and .95. An increase in WHR can be an early sign of pregnancy.... WHR obviously increases dramatically and transiently later in pregnancy, but some of this increase is permanent, so that WHR tends to increase with each successive pregnancy. In the absence of pregnancies, WHR still increases with age, but much more slowly, so that a 22-year-old nullipara [women who have never had children] has essentially the same WHR that she had at 17. During menopause, female WHR rises almost to that of the male. Thus, in the human EEA [since females typically gave birth shortly after nubility] average female WHR was lowest at nubility and rose thereafter with increasing age and successive pregnancies. There is ample evidence that a lower WHR is also positively correlated with reproductive endocrinological fitness and fecundity. Controlling for all other factors (fatness, smoking, age, cycle regularity, etc.), women with higher WHRs have a greater difficulty becoming pregnant. Interestingly, while models may have become slimmer over the last thirty to sixty years, the WHRs of those women whom men rate as most attractive has remained essentially constant. In other words, men may or may not be attracted to skinnier or heavier women by fashion, but WHR appears to remain unchanged. None of this is to say that men are not sexually attracted to adult women. It merely means many people need to heed the fact that while society may have changed the definition of "adult" to exclude younger females, evolution has not recognized such a change. Thus, although men are certainly sexually attracted to women over the age of 18, their attraction to females typically begins around the time or shortly after a female enters puberty. There is ample evidence in American and every other culture around the globe that there are various physical qualities which young girls possess which attract men sexually. Symonds cites several computerized composite-face studies which support this view: Johnston and Franklin (1993) developed a computer program that allows a user to "evolve" on a computer screen -- by a process of random variation and selective retention -- his or her ideal face (within the limits set by the system's somewhat cartoon-like representation of faces). 20 males and 20 female subjects used this program to evolve their ideal beautiful female face. Johnston and Franklin then computer-generated a composite of these 40 faces (the "beautiful composite") as well as a composite of the faces of their female subjects (the "subject composite"), whose average age was twenty. In most dimensions the beautiful composite and the subject composite did not differ significantly, but the beautiful composite had a significantly shorter lower face (the nasion to chin proportion was typical of an 11 or 12- year-old girl), fuller lips in the vertical dimension (female lip fullness peaks at age 14 in Western populations), and a smaller mouth. However, the beautiful composite definitely appears to be a sexually-mature woman, not a barely pubescent girl. Johnston and Franklin then asked independent judges to rate the attractiveness of each of the forty beautiful composite faces and the subject composite face. On average the beautiful faces were judged to be about as attractive as the composite.... But when Johnston and Franklin altered the highest-rated beautiful face to give it the same vertical proportions as the subject composite (i.e., the lower face was lengthened), the altered version was judged to be significantly less attractive. Perrett, May and Yoshikawa (1994) obtained very similar results using computer-generated composites of (Caucasian) female faces....The composite of the fifteen highest-rated faces, compared with the sample composite, was found to have higher cheekbones, larger eyes relative to face size (but not in absolute dimensions), a thinner jaw, and shorter distances between nose and mouth and between mouth and chin. Any ethnologist (if not common sense) will tell you that such features are found more commonly in pubescent and adolescent girls than females over the age of 18. Symonds also points out that when the same experiment was conducted in Japan, using female Japanese faces and Japanese raters, the same results -- except for cheekbones -- were obtained, and the results were replicated using United Kingdom raters. All of the research cited above found that a relatively short lower face and gracile jaw are perceived as attractive. Men are not sexually attracted to young females because they (the men) are abnormal, brainwashed by a "youth culture," wish to steal anyone's innocence, or are fearful of age-appropriate partners. They are attracted because male desire has evolved to make them so attracted. As Symonds argues: The relationship between female age and sexual attractiveness among natural-fertility preliterate peoples highlights the vacuity of the commonly voiced claim that Western men are sexually attracted to young women (and to older women who retain a relatively youthful appearance) because ours is a "youth culture." Between 1953 and 1990 the average age of a Playboy centerfold model was 21.3 years, but if the Yanomamo [a southern Venezuelan tribe] had "skin" magazines, there would be NO centerfolds as old as twenty-one. In fact, during the period from 1953 to 1990 the average age of Playboy centerfolds increased. This may be because in recent years many women have begun to exercise more and sunbathe less, thus retaining a relatively nubile appearance into their twenties. In addition, during the last forty years there has been a general trend among women to postpone marriage and first reproduction, so that there is a larger pool of nulliparas in their early to mid-twenties today than there was during Playboy's early years. If in the EEA the optimal female mate was just beginning ovulatory menstrual cycles, selection would have penalized an error in the too-old and too-pregnant direction much more strongly than it penalized an error of the same magnitude in the too-young and not-quite fecund direction. Thus natural selection would have favored men who desired slightly too young, not quite fecund females over those men who tended to desire women who were in their late teens or twenties. As mentioned above, if the Yanomamo had "skin" magazines they would not feature any centerfold models as old as twenty-one, but they would feature some fourteen-year-olds. In fact about 90 percent of Yanomamo females are copulating with sexually mature males by the time they are fourteen years old. But even here, Symonds might be cutting off the age of female sexual attractiveness (and male sexual desire) too early. Various penile plethysmography studies by Freund, et al. at the Clarke Institute in Toronto, indicate that normal, non-paraphilic men are attracted to depictions of the genitalia of even 6- to 8-year- old girls. (The attraction is not strong, but it is there.) As Symonds speculates: When male mating psychology is better understood, even the notion of a single, unitary continuum of "sexual attraction" may turn out to be too simple. Margaret Mead wrote in "Male and Female" that everywhere girls are permanently clothed before boys and that a little girl will be taught to cross her legs or to tuck her heels under her, or to sit with her legs parallel. This is because "older boys and men find little girls of four and five definitely female and attractive, and that attractiveness must be masked and guarded just as the male eye must be protected from the attractiveness of their older sisters and mothers." During the course of human evolutionary history men may often have been betrothed and even married to prepubescent girls, as often occurs among living preliterate peoples. Male mating psychology may turn out to include sentiments, which are elicited by very young females, that are not exactly sexual, but not exactly not sexual either, sentiments for which there are no specific words in the English language. (It would be interesting to know whether such words exist in any language.) The answer to the latter mystery awaits further research and theory. In the meantime, none of this justifies any particular BEHAVIOR (which is distinguished here from desire). The rightness or wrongness of any particular act may be debated, discussed and modified. But those who continue foam at the mouth that attraction to young girls is some unspeakable perversion can only do so from an irrational faith in the myths created by religion and politics. Other suggested reading: Matt Ridley, The Red Queen. Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. Penguin, 1993. Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and J.H. Barkow, Eds. The Adapted Mind. Oxford University Press, 1993. Article (other than quoted passages) copyright 1995 Passion Press. >From uncommon desires newsletter #24 (forthcoming). For more information, write Ophelia Editions, P.O. Box 2377, NY, NY 10185. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Mark98 Remove the "x" from my email address to mail me!