BURNING LUST for SEXY BUSTY BLONDES - Science explains Women long for the classic Barbie figure with big boobs, long blonde hair and blue eyes because it makes men want to impregnate them, an evolutionary psychologist has proclaimed. London School of Economics reader Satoshi Kanazawa has successfully manipulated the more malleable and shameless news outlets into excitedly …
evolutionarily speaking, skinny flat-chested brunettes with brown eyes should be outcompeted by the curvaceous buxom fair-haired baby-bluers. A hasty sampling of the population I just conducted through the window suggests that this is not the case, which I'm going to use instead as evidence for my own theory that evolutionary psychology is not an overwhelming factor in the behaviour of homo sapiens
This one is old as the world. The attractiveness of the "different". The reason why a hawk will invariably attack a white pidgeon in a flock of black and vice versa.
The level of "Pavlov's dog" response to Barbie dolls is inversely proportional to the distance from the tropics. What will make everyone turn around and look on a street in Naples will be barely noticed walking down the street of Stockholm or Helsinki and vice versa.
A recent(ish) study concluded that the genes for blondness are only 7 thousand years old or so (or was it 11, I can't remember for sure, but it was something quite recent like that). If that is correct, or at least close, then it would be no surprise that the blonds haven't taken over yet -- these things take time (in generations, more than in years, mind).
All that considering the theories of the evo-psycho have any merit, of course. Which they probably don't, since it's pretty obvious (by seeing those prehistoric statuettes of grotesquely obese women as presumably symbols of fertility) that beauty standards are hardly stable.
Obvious choice for an icon, really.
(DISCLAIMER: My points here are entirely theoretical, as I'm already married to a nice, ample, "healthy" blonde)
While I find blonde hair and blue eyes attractive in an aesthetic sense, the lack of same isn't necessarily a deal-breaker for me. What _is_ a deal-breaker is a body that makes me hesitant to jump on a woman's bones for fear of breaking them all.
I won't speak for all the guys here, but breasts, hips, asses, thighs and curves are important to me; it's what makes a woman's body sensual and graceful. Mind you, I wouldn't necessarily pass on a woman who didn't have _all_ of the above, but I _do_ generally prefer a woman who doesn't look like she just escaped from Dachau.
I feel sorry for the last two or three generations of American guys who've been brought up to believe that a woman who weighs more than a hundred pounds soaking wet is a "fat chick". I blame Hollywood, and the fashion industry.
I also think that these days, blondes are overrated, their "value" inflated owing to the fact that the state of the art in cosmetics now allows pretty much any woman to become a classic California Blonde. Besides -- just between you and me, guys -- I've always thought that redheads were waa-aaay hotter... and by this, of course, I mean a _natural_ redhead, like an Irish redhead, not flourescent-painted "punk rock" red.
(I'm sorry... IT Angle? Well, let's see... a lady named Sarah Bee moderates these comments in this very same IT rag, and I've seen her in the fotos posted here of the big Reg staff get-together a year or two ago, and if I weren't married I'd totally ask her out. OK, granted, a weak IT angle, but an IT angle nonetheless.)
Ever consider that the "strongest, and most fit males that have the male-equivalent evolutionary 'ideal' traits to attract women" are those ones that get those buxom blondes? The rest of us "normal" folk have to resort to those "more average" brown-haired, flat-chested types (or any "lesser" variation thereof).
But, do women actually *want* to look like MM, or is it just (some*) men who want them to? While there are several postulates here, they don't appear to add up to the headline claim.
Of course, just because we're genetically predisposed to a certain form of behaviour, that doesn't make it right. That's what (allegedly) makes us human.
* I liked her in Some Like It Hot.
(Anon 'cos I should be working, but I'm watching the snow & reading El Reg instead)
One of the many, many problems with this bloke's theories is his failure to account for the 'any hole's a goal' types who would cheerfully shag a labrador if nothing else was available.
If anything, humanity is more likely to degenerate to something that resembling flabby neanderthals with hypertrophied eyes from staring at daytime TV.
Whilst not averse to the larger bosom, a nice rounded bum, proper hips and shapely legs attract me the most (plus nice face too obviously) . As the great Spinal Tap said 'The bigger the cushion...'.
Mind you having only ever been with shapely legged, rounded bummed ladies with proper hips I've never managed to bag one with large lady bumps as well so I've no idea whether I've missed out or not. I'd like to find out but I think the wife would disapprove.
Even though I'm especially keen on a decent handfull of bosom, you're not necessarily missing out. What looks good in clothes does not necessarily mean more fun in bed, and neither does age seem to make that much difference.
In short, personality and knowing how best to use what you've got still rules. The women I've dated have had lots of different body shapes, and I wouldn't rule out any out of hand.
In my experence whilst working in IT is a disadvantage to dating, but there's other factors that are far more common reasons of being turned down (which are none of your business, but being very averse to ever having children is a particularly notable one). Certainly I've never been involved with someone and then split up because I was into computers.
As my father used to say "Anything more than a handful or mouthful is a waste".
Personally, i've had girls with all different sizes from A to G.
The smaller ones honestly feel and look better, more shapely, less stretched.
That's my two cents :P
Beer- because it usually leads to seeing a few.
No more than a handful, please. I dinnae care what colour their eyes are, only that every now and again they light up with a smile. I prefer a lady not for her looks…but for the twin facts that she can a) put up with my constant rambling and b) likes to cuddle. I’ve done the whole “super-sexy-but-stupidly-overworked-and-never-sits-down-for-a-second” thing. “Frenetic” is not for me. I’ve done the “super-sexy-but-constantly-depressed” as well as the “super-sexy-but-hates-cuddling-with-anyone” thing.
I gots me a lady now who enjoys nothing more than curling up on the couch to watch Battlestar Gallactica followed by several hours of debating every topic in existence at such lengths as to make internet nerdrage threads look tame.
Who cares what she looks like; that lady’s for me!*
Let me summarize:
The male population gets uglier and smarter by the generation, witness the successful procreation of genius masterminds like Gates.
The female population turns increasingly babelicious, dropping the occasional brain cell along the way (your words, not mine!).
So on average the gene pool should be stable, until the masterminds discover cloning and thereby make the female gender obsolete! Or maybe they discover cloning and create an army of über-babes? Gotta think that through...
'Women long for the classic Barbie figure with big boobs, long blonde
hair and blue eyes'
Doesn't sound like a problem to me - can't be more than about twenty quid from Toys 'R Us, surely ;)
Barbie isn't my idea of an sexy woman, and I'm not sure what evolution would say about the unnatural hair colours of several of my partners.
"Big boobs are supposedly indicative of fertility, along with a large waist-to-hip ratio."
A large waist-to-hip ratio is indicative of fertility in the sense that it suggests that the woman in question is pregnant.
Even so, I think most men would go for a large hip-to-waist ratio, or a small waist-to-hip ratio.
Either way of putting it (fnarrr), it is the waist to hip ratio, and I seem to remember reading that around 0.7 (i.e. the 'hourglass' figure) was both most attractive to men, and also good for child bearing.
The latter being a good evolutionary reason for men linking it. Or more precisely, the reason that men who like curvy hips tended to have partners who had children successfully in pre-successful Caesarean operation days, who presumably inherited the tendency to also like it.
The good news for women is it is not the size of your bum that matters, but the proportion. And ignore the women's fashion magazines, who are not actually targeting men.
Wait a minute, why am I bothering? this is an IT site!
Well, not naturally anyway. But even as a blonde she was nothing like Barbie.
Sarah, I think you've hit the nail on the head: the guy is very good at getting his post-pub philosophising well publicised. There are so many things that you can take apart:
* sex and, therefore, libido is not just about procreation. Largely about making babies, yes, but not entirely. Building trust is also important.
* smut films aren't made with real people
* I've read elsewhere but please don't ask for the citation that it's the women who choose their men and their preference changes over the cycle
* long legs and big "boobs" (why the female preference for the synonym for mistakes?) don't generally go together. So it's kind of difficult to idealise both Marilyn and Barbie. Personally I do find the images of Marilyn Monroe jaw-droppingly attractive and Barbie rather asexual. I've read somewhere that Barbie's appeal is related to her as role model - powerful woman. BTIYW
* what women think men find attractive and what men think is attractive are often very different things. We don't notice haircuts, jewellery, the myriad shades of pink and especially not shoes. Personality does count a bit.
* at the end of a long night it's any port in a storn, innit
But, at the end of the day, I'd like to being paid to do this kind of research. More fun than web 2.0!
I think the idea is that you don't have to be *naturally* blonde - it's just the colour that suggests youthfulness.
But yeah, of course you can pick all this stuff apart, we're not such simple creatures. Well, mostly.
Boobs is a good word. Others are either coy, clinical or bordering on offensive in many contexts.
I think we should popularise 'Ingrids' as a term now, in honour of recently deceased horror actress Ingrid Pitt.
That is the first I've heard that that delicious pair have gone to meet their honker. That is sad news!
Meanwhile, while the Monroe type - but with a bit more on top, ideally, and not in her 90's when she does gather her shit together for one last final farewell from beyond the long cold grave, will distract me so much it's all I can do to stay alive - even if it is just someone vaguely reminiscent of Marilyn and not, say, http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Monroe,%20Marilyn/Annex/Annex%20-%20Monroe,%20Marilyn%20%28Some%20Like%20it%20Hot%29_06.jpg - the real aphrodisiac for me is a sharp intellect and equivalent sense of humor. Not to the point that I could do it with another guy, I grant, or a ginner - but anyway at least you can see that being turned on by the deep stuff rather than the shallow is something I resisted for as long as I was able! Am I an aberation or what?
"long legs and big "boobs" (why the female preference for the synonym for mistakes?)"
Back in the eighties I remember hearing that this was a succesfull piece of feminist agit prop perpetrated in the '70s. Hard to imagine nowadays when people say 'my bad' tater than 'I boobed'.
Paris, cos she did.
...to make the most of his abilities earlier in his life, when it would get him laid, and having successfully made a family and conquered the universe, the impetus was no longer there.
More likely he only got laid when he learned to relax and stop worrying about operating systems.
According to that logic, women should be getting constantly more blonde/beautiful, and must have been doing so for centuries. By 2010, we should be walking with angels. Not so. Kanazawa is a daft 'apeth, and to reach register "boffin" status, will will have to up his game beyond the perusal of sweaty and much-surfed internet pages.
This is pretty low grade boffinry. In most parts of the world there just are no blondes, blue-eyed or otherwise. The idea that the human species could have evolved to favour genes that aren't in the pool of most populations (including the ancestral East African one where the first million years of our evolution happened) is, um, let's see if I can be nice about this, um ... total bollocks?
There's no suggestion int he article that the research is based on cultural norms. Men react to female types of beauty they have been trained from birth to desire more, and in the western world, with its global dominance, that apparently means the big-breated blonde barbie type.
But humanity evolved in Africa and the blonde type appears to have evolved in, roughly, northern Russia/Asia, then migrated west to northern Europe and hid away there in closer climes, while the rest of humanity, in many shades of brown, and in many body shapes, enveloped the rest of the world. In no time, from (say) the last Ice Age until the 1800, were the blonde whites in predominance in anywhere but their original habitat. So the data this research has produced is easily confuted. It cannot have been a factor in humanity's long evolutionary history. It is clearly absurd. Men could not and would not have developed a yen for anything other than the desirable, most-fertile, female types of their particular catchment area.
In the rest of the animal population, males develop and compete for female attention. Thus the males get more gorgeous (think peacocks) while the females can stay safely (inconspicuously) drab. Homo sapiens, by their reason and strong social conditioning, seem to have replaced this pattern with a male-dominated selection process, where the females compete for males. But, when push comes to shove (erm...), it is women who choose to copulate. Once the modern busty blonde has the men lining up for her, she chooses the lucky fella.
So... where are the tests that show what women select for, or have selected for, through human history? Based on film, celebs, etc., they like doe-eyed, cute men who are strong-yet-tender. Has this always been true? It seems that beards had a sexual-health function, as do, say, pheasant tails or moose antlers. Funny how researchers never seem to test the population. I guess that would mean thinking outside the cultural conditioning box, i.e. the idea that women hunt men and men have always liked what men like now.
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Its a nice thought, thats some form of natural selection goes on with humans.
Its nice that he thinks its got something to do with physical attributes and not "women who cant count to 31 have more kids" and "men with poor cause-and-effect processing" have more kids. Dumb people breed more. poor people breed more because poor and dumb goes hand in hand.
@ Charlie
* smut films aren't made with real people
-the smut I watch is. porn stars are funny-lookin.
* I've read elsewhere but please don't ask for the citation that it's the women who choose their men and their preference changes over the cycle
-true, but you cant keep a chick unless you can appeal to them for the majority of the 4-week rollercoaster unless you found one with acute short term memory loss.
* what women think men find attractive and what men think is attractive are often very different things. We don't notice haircuts, jewellery, the myriad shades of pink and especially not shoes. Personality does count a bit.
I notice. If you cant dress yourself and look like you were made over by a retarded clown, Im not interested, no matter how stereotypically hot you may be in other areas; persnal appearance is a chance for me to gauge how in touch with reality you are (fitting into a size 6 and being a size 6 are not the same things) whether or not you're colourblind (nice green and purple eyeshadow, there) and whether you have compatible sense of aesthetics : If Im going to be sharing kids and a home with you, you better not be trying to rock lime-green slingbacks encrusted with pink rhinestones. I'm not saying you have to look like a cover girl, Im not even trying to suggest that aiming for that 'would be nice', but to say that guys dont notice when women make an effort is pretty disingenuous.
we all want a nice woman with a warm hands and a good heart! we dont care what she looks like! YMMV, but I prefer a woman who can dress herself, doesnt look or act like a spaz, and when all other non-physical 'needs' are ticked off the list Im going for the hottest woman I can find 'in my bracket', and so far the girls Ive talked to about this do the same.
Give me a brunette any day, preferably with some curves. Boobs anywhere from small and cute to generous but certainly not massive.
It sounds cheesy but to me personality really is way more important, and a smile would melt me faster than any boobs ever could. Given I'm a bisexual man the same goes for a man and his behind as with boobs.
AC because most of the world still seems to think bisexual men are weird even though bisexual women are (if not attention hogging) sexy.
...Albert Eienstein was either the wrinkliest young man in town or he was banging anything that moved till the day he died....
That means there must be at least another 30 years or so left for me to get smart and get laid by bevvies of Marylin's.... ho hum, no rush...
then most women seek a body that has not means of reproduction (unless they do a fully functional Barbie or is that just those funny shops with dark windows in Soho??) seems incredible to me.
As to the rest of his statements, considering the number of dodgy looking women on all those morning tv shows (dad doesn't believe he fathered my empteenth child) I think he is barking. Consider the number of children that Paris has (0 unless you count the dog(s)) versus my wife (who is attractive to me but may not meet the great doctor's demands for the perfect woman) with 2 kids and his theory starts to fall apart.
Me thinks that not being a real genius the good doc is simply trying to get laid by some attractive long legged and well stacked blonde student (with no reproductive parts).
I find it interesting that Marilyn Monroe, is frequently pointed out as the standard of feminine beauty, and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn't place her among the most beautiful women to have ever lived.
But by today's standards she is fat, and would never have had any kind of movie career.
(For the record, I put Marilyn Monroe as the second most beautiful woman to have ever lived.)
(Paris doesn't place.)
Marilyn wasn't fat by modern standards - it's an urban myth. She may or may not have been a size 16, but a size 16 in 1950 is not the same as a size 16 in 2010. A quick google will tell you that she had a small frame with large breasts.
In any case, size 16 is now the average dress size in the UK and if you have big boobs it's usually necessary to go up a dress size to fit them in.
Is this the proof the neo-Nazis need to pronounce the Aryan Race (whatever the fuck that is) is the Real Thing?
But this is not exactly new stuff from the Nipponese Nutter.
I can only assume that Kanazawa woke up in Basildon sometime and thought he'd gone to Valhalla.
Can we have a 'huge load of bollocks' icon, please.
Lots there to think about, Sarah, but about the only thing that's right is that women with big breasts tend to have slightly higher fertility and to produce a significantly greater proportion of female.
A lot of it goes back to the extent of exposure to testosterone in the first three months of foetal life. Females who are exposed to higher levels of testosterone in early foetal life tend to be generally more masculine, have smaller breasts, are more sensitised to respond to any testosterone exposure they may have in later life and are more likely to produce higher levels of testosterone in later life, and, to put it simply, have hair growth a bit more like that of males. They also tend, on average, to produce fewer children and a preponderance of males.
All of which has been known for millennia, which is why, although wedding rings are worn on different hands in different countries, it's on the fourth finger they're consistently worn. Why? Because the relative length of that finger, as compared to the index finger, has long been known to indicate various things about reproductive probabilities in both men and women. That relative length is determined by exposure to testosterone during the first three months of foetal life. The longer the fourth finger relative to the index finger, the higher was the exposure to testosterone during that period.
So if you're looking for a wife who is likely to be able to produce sons and who is likely to approach male levels of randiness, then go for a woman whose ring fingers are longer than her index fingers. She may well, of course, be flat-chested and have a heavy moustache. If you're looking for a woman who's likely to produce a preponderance of daughters, go for the busty one with short ring fingers but long index fingers.
Dumb, busty blondes tend to be pursued by males who, although they may be sharp enough in some very restricted areas of intellectual activity. aren't perhaps all that wonderfully bright themselves in some areas of life.
Streetwise males have known for centuries that flat-chested girls who can grow a moustache often have far more going for them than some people realise.
in that there are other factors come into the equation.
For a start, the pH of the vagina is a relevant factor in influencing which sperm actually make it through that dangerous area and the pH balance of the vagina varies with the testosterone:estrogen balance of the female.
And recent research indicates that females with high testosterone levels produce ova which have an outer layer more readily penetrated by the vital Y bearers rather than by X bearers.
There's more to this than meets the eye.
Paris -- because even she knows there's more to gender than meets the eye.
I can't believe no one has picked up on this yet: if there's research to be done in this area, well, ahem...may I respectfully offer up my services? fnarr, fnarr and all that.
Okay, shall we agree we sum up his life's work with the pithy statement 'Gentlemen prefer blondes'? Now, I'm positive I've heard that phrase well before I heard of him but full marks to him for getting column inches out of rehashing it.
I've got some ideas for his next 'discoveries': Bears have been known to defecate in forested regions & the Pope's reasonably sure he's into Catholicism!
(DISCLAIMER 01: I'm a professional designer and illustrator who attended art school for four years, and spent upwards of four hours a day drawing and painting naked chicks.)
(DISCLAIMER 02: I've been married for nearly twenty years to a healthy, zaftig, Rubenesque blonde woman with an ample chest and wide waist-to-hip ratio.)
All the usual leering, sarcastic jokes and comments about sensationalistic reporting aside, consider some prime examples from the history of art and sculpture. Take first the "Venus Of Willendorf", an early prehistoric sculptured ritual figure. While her body is in no way "babealicious", she exhibits many traits -- large breasts, hips and abdomen -- which are carried down through history as an indication of being fertile and bountiful, and therefore desirable, and internalized in most cultures as a standard for feminine beauty.
Check out the female figures in Classical Greek and Roman sculpture, especially the famous Nike Of Samothrace:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nike_of_Samothrace.JPG
Despite her head and arms being broken off by invading Christians, this figure is pure hotness. Even taking into account the larger-than-life scale, she's obviously a big, healthy, babealicious gal with plenty of hips and curves, a far cry from your modern malnourished runway model.
Consider also most of your female figures in Renaissance and nineteenth-century French painting; again, they're all very large and "healthy" women with full breasts, sensually swelling bellies, great round hips and large thighs... and, by this point in the history of art, are often also babealicious as well.
Paris, because she epitomizes your modern, emaciated bag-of-bones standard for "beauty".
Historically, thin people were poor, they couldn't afford the amount of food to make you socially over weight, hence there were a lot of thin people.
Painting is a job, the rich generally had extra money to get their pictures done, therefore you will see an good amount of paintings with generally large richer ladies on.
Larger ladies were rare and as well as rich, so large ladies were considered beautiful. Times have changed and the thin girls are now rare.
Girls generally get dolled up, not for pulling blokes, but trying to out do other girls when they are out. Its a shame that most of these didn't get trained in applying makeup and slapping it on with a paintball gun doesn't make you look any better.
Sounds like an excuse for some sad researcher to hang around bars with beautful women he would otherwise have not chance with, all in the name of some research that, let's face it, is pretty bloody obvious!
Men like beautiful, busty beauty's! Well pass the smelling salts, I think I might faint from the shock of that revelation!
[assuming he is from where his name would imply!]
http://r-style.main.jp/aai/pages/aai10.htm
I bit young for me <cry> but I could fall for somebody that looked like that. On the other hand, the procession of blondes, the Parises, the Eleniaks, and such that grace the cack on TV... no interest. So either I'm a TrueGeek hardwired to appreciate brown-haired slanty-eyes girls, or that report bounces off the typical traditional stereotype and misses the fact that beauty is a highly subjective thing (ie most "supermodels" := fugly (IMHO)).
Paris icon, out of pity, mostly...
omg you shouldn't have posted that url - drool drool.
Black hair, (dark) brown eyes, somewhat petite figures but most of all the voices just to hear Japanese, Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese - the languages of paradise when spoken by gentle female voices. Of course, it helps when you understand what they're saying!
"Women long for the classic Barbie figure with big boobs, long blonde hair and blue eyes because it makes men want to impregnate them, an evolutionary psychologist has proclaimed."
is a pretty stupid and pointless statement.
Women may want to look like MM, and maybe not (looking at the number of painfully stick-thin celebs in the media and the growing cult of girls and women who want to look like them I suspect the evolutionary pshchologist is talking bollocks) but that has nothing to do with being impregnated.
Straight / bisexual men want to have sex with women. I am pretty sure any fertile women could get impregnated pretty damn quickly if she is not bothered about who is doing the impregnating.
If the pshycologist wants to claim that women want to look like MM so that they can get impregnated by their ideal man, who will then stick around to support her and their family then there may be something in it, but in the [paraphrased] words of Reverend Chris Rock:
"'Cause every woman since they were like 13 every guy you met has been trying to fuck you. That's right. Women are offered dick every day. Every woman in here … gets offered dick at least three times a day. That's right, every time a man's being nice to you … all he's doing is offering dick. That's all it is. "Can I get that for you? – How about some dick?" "Could I help you with that? – Could I help you to some dick?" "
I think it's self-evident that most men would probably do most types of women. There's no suggestion that men *only* go for blue-eyed busty blondes. It's just saying that there may be evolutionary advantages to being blue-eyed and blonde and busty.
I think most people have preferred types but there are some attributes that work on the reptile brain stem of pretty much everyone. Busty women are everyone's type, ultimately, on a very base and primitive level.
"London School of Economics reader Satoshi Kanazawa has successfully manipulated the more malleable and shameless news outlets into excitedly regurgitating the provocative theories contained in his book"
Yes, the Author fell for it too, I met a bloke in the pub who said that all women get turned on by goats, but only the good looking goats, thereby attaining the same credibility as Mr. Kanazawa.
Maybe the author would like to interview him for his valued opinion? If so he may be contacted via
Mr. S Caper
The Cock and Bull Inn
Main Street
The Village
Middle of Nowhere
...surely this would lead to a divergence of beauties and beasts as hotties get together to produce more hotties and beasts get together to produce devil children. The human race will then be split into two halves and will never become one!
Paris, I guess she's a beauty... although I'm unsure which half of the race would rule?
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