Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman's health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone, and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute the ingredients of male standards of female beauty. (p.53)
"Trophy" wives are not just the perquisites of high status, but in fact increase the status of the man who can win them. (p.59)
People suspect that a homely man must have high status if he can interest a stunning woman, presumably because people know that attractive women have high value as mates and hence usually can get what they want in a mate. (p.59-60)
Men across cultures today value attractive women not only because attractiveness signals a woman's reproductive capacity but also because it signals status. (p.60)
Lesbians are more like heterosexual women in their desires, but where they differ, they place even less value on physical qualities, both in their offerings and in the qualities they seek. (p.62)
Male homosexuals and male heterosexuals seem to have indistinguishable mating preferences, except with respect to the sex of their preferred partner. Both place a premium on appearance, and youth is a central ingredient in their definition of beauty. (p.63)
In a study of a computer dating service involving 1,048 German men and 1,590 German women, the ethologist Karl Grammer found that as men' s income goes up, they seek younger partners.(p.64)
The media images we are bombarded with daily, however, have a potentially pernicious consequence. In one study, after groups of men looked at photographs of either highly attractive women or women of average attractiveness, they were asked to evaluate their commitment to their current romantic partner. Disturbingly, the men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partner to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness. Perhaps more important, the men who had viewed attractive women there after rated themselves as less committed, less satisfied, less serious, and less close to their actual partners. (p.64-65)
Indeed, contemporary studies show that the single best predictor of extra marital sex is premarital sexual permissiveness people who have many sexual partners before marriage are more unfaithful than those who have few sexual partners before marriage. (p.69)
Modem men place a premium on fidelity. When American men in the study of temporary and permanent partners evaluated sixty-seven possible characteristics for their desirability in a committed mateship, faithfulness and sexual loyalty emerged as the most highly valued traits. [...] Unfaithfulness proves to be more upsetting to men than any other pain a spouse can inflict on her mate. Women also become extremely upset over an unfaithful mate, but several other factors, such as sexual aggressiveness, exceed infidelity in the grief they cause women. (p.69)
( David M. Buss – The Evolution of Desire )
