by Jesse James
Among other cultures, peacocking with dangerous chemicals occurs regularly. Consider the bizarre phenomenon of ‘Kung fu kerosene drinking’ in Indonesia. Indonesian Kung fu masters routinely drink kerosene as a demonstration of their strength; those who escape (or can hide) the toxic effects of imbibing kerosene must have good genes, resulting in more romps in the bedroom. The Kung fu masters don’t mention what affect, if any, hydrocarbons have on their ability to perform.23
Ingesting poisonous chemicals is not just a recent phenomenon. The Mayans apparently engaged in ritual enemas involving alcohol administered rectally, if images depicted on Mayan pottery are taken literally. A recent study concluded that ‘ancient Maya took intoxicating enemas in a ritual context.’ Indeed, what better way to showcase one’s genetic superiority than to survive a toxic chemical enema, administered for all to see.24
How would you like that Martini, sir? Shaken, stirred or up the butt?
Ten thousand years ago we displayed our genetic prowess by spearing a woolly mammoth or crushing a man’s skull in battle. Today, long-range rifles and cruise missiles take all the fun out of killing. Wars are less glamorous, less personal, and in somewhat shorter supply. So instead of marching off to the battlefield, we flaunt our genetic vigor by poisoning our bodies with cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.
Human self-mutilation in pursuit of genetic bliss is hardly limited to the ingestion of dangerous substances. Some of the best fitness indicators are physical damage, external for the world to see. Take tanning, for example. What girl wouldn’t prefer a ‘bronze horseman’ to a ghostly pale computer gamer hunkered over the keyboard? We already know that such preferences aren’t random. Both men and women find tanned skin sexy. And tanning, of course, is genuinely harmful to the body, increasing the risk of deadly skin cancers. Exposing oneself to the sun is indeed harmful, but exposing oneself to a fake sun is even worse. Over 30 million Americans visit tanning salons each year, including over 25% of teen girls. According to a 2005 study conducted by the American Academy of Dermatology, 92% of respondents admitted that they knew tanning was dangerous, while 65% said they look better with a brownish tint. Dermatologist James M. Spencer warns that ‘Indoor tanning is simply not safe …tanning bed users have an increased risk of developing skin cancer, including the most deadly form, melanoma, in the long term.’ Tanning is sexy precisely because it isn’t safe.25
Tattoos also represent an honest signal of genetic fitness. One’s ability to withstand the combination of pain and toxic ink suggests good genes. Why else would a woman find herself attracted to a man with a scorpion inked into his arm? He has mutilated his body, welcomed a toxin into his bloodstream, risked infection, and wasted valuable energy and resources in the tattoo parlor. Tattoos are sexy simply because they advertise fitness.
And tattoos have been popular for at least seven thousand years. German tourists recently blundered upon the frozen corpse of ‘Ötzi the Iceman‘ in the Ötz valley of the Alps. The iceman, dating from the fourth or fifth millennium BC, proudly displayed 57 carbon tattoos all over his body. Otzi perhaps enjoyed increased sexual benefits before something killed him, quite possibly the ink. Back in Otzi’s time and indeed throughout most of human history tattooing was extremely dangerous. Jared Diamond informs us that ‘tattooing was not only painful but dangerous because of the risk of infection; hence tattooed people in effect were advertising two facets of their strength, resistance to disease plus tolerance of pain.’26 A recent Scientific American article notes that ‘Body art may be evidence of high-quality genes in men … body art could serve as an “honest” signal of fitness in the Darwinian sense. So maybe that’s why pierced, tattooed rock stars do so well with the ladies.’27 Maybe so. Another reason could be the Bentley.
Throughout history, men have used what evolutionary biologist Thorstein Veblen calls ‘conspicuous consumption’ to flaunt their genetic fitness. He coined the term in his 1899 book ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class.’ Conspicuous consumption is widespread and palpable. Once you understand the concept you will notice it all around you.
The core principle is easy to understand. If you conspicuously flaunt (or waste) your money, time and energy, then you must have money, time and energy to burn. And if you have money, time and energy to burn, then you must be doing something right, because most people cannot afford profligate consumption. In other words, you’re a little bit better off than everyone else. Or maybe a lot, depending on what you’re flaunting.
Veblen noted that luxury items such as flashy cars, exorbitant homes, expensive artwork, and luxury yachts provided obvious examples of conspicuous consumption. Such items offer few practical functions. They are valuable because they communicate that their owner does not need money; he can afford to conspicuously waste his resources. Why? Because he is rich. Why is he rich? Because he is a high fitness individual.28
The logic is: ‘You can’t see my bank accounts, my wealthy friends or my awesome DNA, but you can see the Lamborghini in my driveway and the gaudy gold ring on my finger.’
Luxury items became known as ‘Veblen goods.’ When a Ferrari passes you on the Freeway, or Paul Allen’s yacht cruises by your fishing boat, or you see a Picasso painting in your boss’s office, you no longer need to answer the question ‘why would he waste so much money on something so useless?’ Veblen goods advertise high fitness. That’s all.
Conspicuous consumption easily morphs into conspicuous waste. Take, for example, the Kwakiutl tribe of Vancouver Island, who were quite fond of potlatches. A potlatch occurs when a tribal leader convenes a great feast, usually including representatives or dignitaries of neighboring tribes. Amidst the jubilation of dancing and inebriation, the Kwakiutl potlatches would often devolve into rampant, excessive gift-giving and, sometimes, outright burning of valuable items and destruction of wealth. The Kwakiutl, in this respect, were hardly alone, as potlatches occurred throughout the Pacific Northwest before they were finally banned in the late 19th century. Why would a tribal elder organize a gathering in which much of his wealth would be given away or destroyed? The answer, according to Thorstein Veblen, is that profligate waste elevated the status of the tribe’s leaders. The message is clear: We are so rich and powerful that we can afford to give away or destroy most of our wealth. Potlatches were honest signals of status because only wealthy, high-status males could afford such conspicuous squander.
While Vancouver Island Indians were conspicuously wasting their wealth, Leonardo Da Vinci was conspicuously wasting his time. Painting the Mona Lisa consumed four years of his life, time which could have otherwise been spent earning a living, building a home, acquiring skills or accumulating material possessions. Art has no survival value; you can’t eat it, make babies with it, and it won’t keep you dry in the rain. In painting the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci communicated to the world that the enormity of his wealth and status allowed him to waste four years of his life creating something of no practical value. In the ‘Art Instinct,’ Denis Dutton argues that one of the universal signatures of art is impracticality. But Steven Pinker reminds us that ‘useless things, paradoxically, can be highly useful for a certain purpose: appraising the assets of the bearer.’29 Apparently useless things can indeed be practical when they advertise our genetic fitness.
The owner of a Picasso painting flaunts his wealth and fitness as vigorously as a peacock showing off its ornamental tail. How could the art collector afford to squander his money on such a functionally worthless display if he were not fit? Art aficionados don’t hide their collections in dark basements. They show off their Picassos and Rembrandts in their homes, offices, or museums. People buy art in order to flaunt it, boosting their status and communicating their fitness through conspicuous consumption. This much is obvious.
But what about the artist himself? He too flaunts his fitness, perhaps even more than the art collector. Producing a work of art - a masterpiece - requires vast amounts of time and energy. Such time and energy could be expended elsewhere, earning money,
acquiring food and mates, attending to basic survival needs. Investing years of effort into a functionally worthless painting or sculpture proves that the artist enjoys a luxury of either time or money, maybe both. In other words, he enjoys high fitness above the quotidian grind of the general population. He can afford to squander his time and energy producing something relatively useless. The rest of us must actually work, while he can play.
And beauty is impossible to fake. Only a brilliant artist could produce brilliant works of art. Who but Van Gogh could paint a Van Gogh? The quality of the art suggests the fitness of the artist.
Geoffrey Miller explains that ‘maybe our aesthetic preferences evolved to favor art-works that could only have been produced by a high-fitness artist. Art-objects may be displays for their creator’s fitness, and may be judged as such. As with the sexual ornaments on our bodies, perhaps beauty boils down to fitness.’30
Perhaps it does. A world-renowned evolutionary biologist specializing in sexual selection, Miller argues that the human impulse to produce art represents a clever mating tactic to impress potential sexual partners. Artistic creativity is unevenly distributed, difficult to fake, costly to realize, and almost universally respected. Artists are sexy.
Want to piss off an art professor? Attend a university art history class. Eventually the professor will display a painting or sculpture and ask in all seriousness, ‘What is the meaning of this? What is the artist trying to communicate?’ You can safely reply: ‘Good genes!’ If you try this in real life, prepare to get booted out of the class.
And as you’re leaving class (or being carried out by security), you might deliver a parting shot to the good professor; ‘The Mona Lisa is just a fancy version of the peacock’s tail.’
Miller notes that the primary function of almost all animal signaling devices is to convey genetic information about the signaler, not general information about the world. Art is Amotz Zahavi’s honest signaling elevated to human absurdity; a twenty million dollar Van Gogh.
In ‘The Will to Power,’ Friedrich Nietzsche included a chapter called ‘The Will to Art.’ He sensed the connection between art and sexual fitness: ‘Artists, if they are any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable.’31
Consider Jimi Hendrix. Overdosing on drugs at the age of 27, Hendrix’s life might be considered one long unproductive bender. He contributed nothing tangible to the world; no great ideas, no technology, no useful buildings or enlightening books. For over a decade, he flaunted his genetic fitness by producing great music, a narcissistic self-display typical of young males. His lifestyle granted him no favors from natural selection; he died young. But Hendrix enjoyed sexual relations with hundreds of rock groupies, maintained long-term relationships with several women, and fathered at least three children. If you sleep with enough women, some will give you presents. In other cultures and other eras, he would have fathered many more.
Does the theory of fitness indicators bother you? It rubs many people the wrong way. Reducing art to mere peacocking will not win us any friends at the local gallery. Transcendental cultural meaning fades away. Inegalitarianism rears its ugly head; some people really are ‘better’ than others, at least in certain ways. Fitness indicator theory seems to justify narcissistic self-exhibition. Individuality becomes merely an advertisement for one’s genes.
I warned you; Diogenes is blushing.
Plastic Fantastic Lover
Considering the disparate sexual preferences for each gender, it should come as no surprise that men and women advertise their mate value in different ways. Male peacocking tends to focus on intangible qualities such as strength, dominance, wealth, willingness to take risks, status, and power. Female peacocking focuses more on external appearance as an indicator of fertility.
Men lie about their income, while women fudge their looks. Women spend an average of sixty three minutes applying makeup and trying on outfits before heading out the door. Three hundred thousand American women purchase breast implants each year.
Did you know that Americans spend more money on beauty products than education or social services? Women purchase 2,136,960 tubes of lipstick and 2,959,200 jars of skin care products daily. Females spend $18 billion annually on makeup, $38 million on hair care, $15 billion on perfume and cologne, $82 billion on clothes, $12 billion on gym memberships, and $8 billion on self-help books and programs. Beauty products enable women to acquire better mates because female mate value derives from indicators of fertility.
Women invest inordinate amounts of time maintaining their appearance. Some women in Victorian times even had their lower ribs surgically removed to achieve a ‘waspier’ waste. Impeccable grooming, hairstyling, dieting, and the application of facial makeup enhance the woman’s sex appeal by making her look younger and more fertile. According to biologists, red lipstick mimics the female chimpanzee rump presentation. Tell that to the next hottie you meet in a bar.
We would be naïve to believe that women consciously think to themselves, ‘I will go on a diet, get a new hairstyle and buy some fancy rouge to attract a male with superior genes.’ No, our cognitive psychology is simply not designed to admit such realpolitik in the mating game.
Women seek to improve their body image in order to boost their self-esteem. A woman’s body image is directly linked to her overall sexual attractiveness, as well as to specific body attributes such as thighs, hips and waist. How a woman feels about her body impacts all aspects of her sexuality.
Male peacocking, in contrast, centers on demonstrations of physical strength, skill and dominance, wealth advertisement, even gratuitous brutality. While a woman scrupulously applies her makeup, a man pumps iron at the gym. Young males in particular must compete for status through sports and bold, aggressive displays of dominance or aggression.
The capacity for violence throughout history has been considered an essential manly virtue. Head-hunting and coup-counting enabled young warriors to gain status in tribal societies. In many cultures, homicide (committed against an enemy or rival tribe member) is a rite of passage, marking the transition from adolescence to manhood.
In ‘primitive’ societies, murder was better than roses and wine for picking up women. The man with the highest kill-count in battle fathered the most children.
Young, unmarried males compete with special ferocity because they have not lived long enough to acquire the wealth and status needed to compete in more gentlemanly domains. In modern society, an unmarried man between the ages of 24 and 35 is three times as likely to murder another man as is a married man the same age.
Famed anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered that Yanomamo men who had killed at least one enemy fathered three times as many children as those who had not. Most young killers were married, while most young men who had not killed were unmarried. Killers were held in high esteem among the Yanomamo, enjoying the fruits of their brutality by mating with multiple women.32
Men are more civilized today, but the old instincts die hard. The brutality of the boxing ring, the MMA octagon and the hockey rink have replaced the killing fields of yesteryear. How many bar fights erupt in the presence of women? Hardly a month goes by without someone being murdered in a nightclub by a young man in a fit of rage. Violent displays of dominance and aggression are endemic to the young male mind. How else can a poor boy compete for the affections of women?
Bob Dylan tells us ‘when you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose.’ Young men take those words to heart. According to evolutionary biologists, men with low status should theoretically be willing to accept almost any risk to gain a mate. And they do.
The phenomenon of war has baffled scientists for the past two hundred years. Why would a healthy young male march off to war, knowing that his chances of returning are slim? Dying in a trench or crashing an airplane doesn’t improve our genetic fitness, so what accounts for the seemi
ngly carefree attitude of young men towards combat? Evolutionary biologists understand that people maximize their genetic fitness by engaging in behaviors that help them survive and pass on their genes; eating, having sex and generally avoiding things that might hurt us. When faced with a charging lion, we run. When approaching the edge of a cliff, we back away. But when our government offers us the chance to die in battle, some of us volunteer enthusiastically for the job. Why?
Consider the socioeconomic background of the average soldier. Bill Gates and his sons didn’t march into Baghdad. Wealthy, high status people – and their offspring – rarely accept the risks associated with full-on combat. When they do participate in war, they remain far from the front lines, giving orders or handling logistics. The kids from the Tennessee backcountry, or Louisiana Bayou, or the mountains of Montana do the dying. How come?
According to evolutionary biologists, men use their wealth and status to attract women. But fame and fortune are rare commodities, seldom distributed equally within a society. Some men have them, but most do not. Young men especially have little time to acquire wealth and status. Motivated by the looming possibility of genetic oblivion, young males should be willing to accept almost any risk to gain a mate. Just like birds that venture into dangerous territories when facing starvation, or football quarterbacks who throw a Hail Mary pass at the end of a losing game, single males with few reproductive prospects should be willing to accept almost any risk, other than certain death, to boost their status or increase their wealth. Small wonder, then, that young men from poor socioeconomic backgrounds dominate the ranks of both soldiers and criminals. Robbing a bank or shooting up Fallujah entails great risk, but also offers potential rewards measured in wealth and status. For some men, it’s a bet worth making.
Psychologists Margot Wilson and Martin Daily explain that ‘any creature that is recognizably on track toward complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory. Impoverished young men on this track are therefore likely to risk life and limb to improve their chances in the sweepstakes for status, wealth, and mates. In all societies they are the demographic sector in which the firebrands, delinquents, and cannon fodder are concentrated. One of the reasons the crime rate shot up in the 1960s is that boys from the baby boom began to enter their crime-prone years. Though there are many reasons why countries differ in their willingness to wage war, one factor is simply the proportion of the population that consist of men between the ages of 15 and 29.’33