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
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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 perfec
t 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.
Small Waist
Why are 36–24–36 considered the ideal female measurements? It turns out that these numbers are not chosen arbitrarily.
An evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, Devendra Singh, conducted experiments in different societies to demonstrate that men have a universal preference for low waist-to-hip ratio (the waist measurement divided by the hip measurement). Presented with figure drawings of women identical in every way except the waist-to-hip ratio (varying from 0.7 to 1.0), most men in Singh’s experiments expressed preference for women with the waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, which is very close to the waist-to-hip ratio of anyone with the 36–24–36 measurements (0.67).8 One of us (Kanazawa) has informally replicated Singh’s experiments in three different countries on three different continents (the US, New Zealand, and the UK) and found the same results as Singh. Most men prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio, and most women prefer men with a 0.9 waist-to-hip ratio.
Why, then, do men want women with low waist-to-hip ratios? Singh argues that this is because healthy women have lower waist-to-hip ratios than unhealthy women. A host of diseases—such as diabetes, hypertension, heart attack, stroke, and gallbladder disorders—change the distribution of body fat so that sickly women cannot maintain low waist-to-hip ratios. Women with low waist-to-hip ratios are also more fertile; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones.9 And, of course, women who are already pregnant with another man’s child cannot maintain a low waist-to-hip ratio.
The female waist-to-hip ratio also fluctuates, albeit very slightly, over the menstrual cycle; it becomes lowest during ovulation, when the woman is fertile.10 Thus, men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.
The preference for a low waist-to-hip ratio, identified by Singh, explains both the popularity of corsets in many Western societies throughout history as a device to make women’s waists appear as small as possible, and the current trend of young women to bare their midriffs. It also explains why it is teenage girls, not menopausal women, who are more likely to bare their midriffs as an honest signal of their high fecundity (the ability to conceive), just like it is young women, not old women, who grow their hair long as an honest signal of their health. Once again, the superstardom of Britney Spears was not the cause of young girls’ desire to show their midriffs; rather, it is a consequence of it.
Large Breasts
Why men prefer women with large breasts had long been a mystery in evolutionary psychology, especially since the size of a woman’s breasts has no relationship with her ability to lactate; women with small breasts can produce as much milk for their infants as those with large breasts.11 So women with large breasts do not necessarily make better mothers than women with small breasts. Why, then, do men prefer women with large breasts? There was no satisfactory answer to this question until recently.
The then Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe suggested a solution to this puzzle in the late 1990s,12 although with hindsight it is another mystery why nobody else thought of the idea sooner. Marlowe makes the simple observation that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus, it is much easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight if she has larger breasts than if she has smaller breasts, which do not change as much with age. Recall that there were no driver’s licenses or birth certificates that men could check to learn how old women were in the ancestral environment. There was no calendar and thus no concept of birthdays in the ancestral environment, so women themselves didn’t know exactly how old they were. The ancestral men needed to infer a woman’s age and reproductive value from some physical signs, and the state of her breasts provided a pretty good clue, but only if they were large enough to change their shape conspicuously with age. Men could tell women’s ages more accurately, and attempt to mate with only young women, if they had larger breasts. Marlowe hypothesizes that this is why men find women with large breasts more attractive.
More recently, there has been a competing evolutionary psychological explanation for why men prefer women with large breasts. A study of Polish women shows that women who simultaneously have large breasts and a tight waist have the greatest fecundity, indicated by their levels of two reproducti
ve hormones (17-ß-estradiol and progesterone).13 So men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason as they prefer women with small waists. Further empirical evidence is necessary to evaluate which of these two competing evolutionary psychological explanations is more accurate. This is just one of many areas where there are competing hypotheses in evolutionary psychology—a sign of active, healthy science.
Men can accurately infer a woman’s age and reproductive value if they can directly observe their breasts and other physical features (such as the fat content of the body). But what would men do if they could not directly observe women’s bodies? What if the woman’s body is concealed, by heavy clothing, for instance? Men need another way to determine a woman’s age: her hair color.
Blonde Hair
Why do blondes have more fun? Because gentlemen prefer blondes.14 Why do gentlemen prefer blondes? Because they have evolved psychological mechanisms that predispose them to prefer women with blonde hair. Why?
The notion that blonde hair is the female ideal goes back at least half a millennium,15 possibly a couple of millennia.16 There is evidence that women during the Roman era and the Renaissance period dyed their hair blonde, long before the discovery of peroxide in 1812. Women desired to be blonde so strongly throughout recorded history that they accomplished it without the aid of peroxide.
Some believe that men prefer blonde hair because blonde women tend to have lighter skin, which they prefer.17 But this seems to be false. While men do prefer women with lighter skin color,18 because it is an indication of higher fertility19 (a woman’s skin color darkens when she is pregnant or on the Pill),20 the lightest skin color is associated with red hair, not blonde hair; yet, according to one study,21 both men and women have extreme aversion to potential mates with red hair. It turns out that men prefer blonde hair for exactly the same reason that they prefer large breasts: both are accurate indicators of a woman’s age and thus reproductive value.