Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman?

by Wolpert, Lewis;

  Another possibility is that attractiveness in general was a signal of a good immune system which can cope well with environmental challenges such as parasites. Three-month-old children gaze longer at faces judged to be attractive than at unattractive ones, and this implies that recognition of beauty is not learned but that we may be born with an innate detector. However, the criteria for beauty in women do vary across cultures, as we shall see. Women are much more concerned with their appearance than men.

  It is claimed that symmetry has greater effects on men’s preferences than on women’s, and that symmetrical women are more attractive and also more fertile. Research has shown that these women have levels of female hormones thirty per cent higher than usual, so there may be something in the reproductive theory. Some other attractive features such as clear eyes and smooth skin clearly denote health, as well as non-facial features such as being in an optimum weight range. Age is important for female attractiveness. The years from age twenty-three to twenty-eight are best for reproduction. Men have evolved to be attracted to women with high childbearing potential, and thus the fact that female fertility typically declines after the late twenties is very relevant, making greater age in women a negative feature for males. The physical beauty of women attracts more attention in most societies than do the good looks of the men, Hollywood excepted. Women face more risk in choosing a mate, and therefore prefer higher-status males. One study of thirty-seven cultures found that women chose mates who were older, committed and resourceful. But women have been found to value highly men with slightly feminised faces, as they appear to be more co-operative and honest, and therefore better potential parents.

  An expression of happiness in women is most attractive to men, but one of the least attractive factors for women when judging the appearance of men. A series of studies in which a thousand adults rated the sexual attractiveness of people in photographs demonstrating different body language, such as broad smiles for happiness and averted eyes for shame, found that women preferred men who looked a bit unhappy. Maybe this illustrates their mothering instinct. Expressions of pride, by contrast, were the most attractive male attribute for men, though men rated them one of the least attractive in women. But male smiles did suggest to women that the man would be good to children.

  There are claims that women maintain direct eye contact while speaking for about twelve seconds, while men maintain eye contact for only about three seconds. It is also claimed that a woman, whether she lives in a jungle or a modern Western city, signals sexual interest with the same sequence of expressions: she smiles, lifts her eyebrows and looks at the man with wide-open eyes. Then she tilts her head down and to the side and looks away. It could be an innate pattern for flirting. The chest thrusts of men may play a similar role. But all these claims may be anecdotal.

  Cross-culturally there is high variability regarding the ideal female body and breast size. In the Renaissance the ideal woman was fatter than at any other time in modern history. By today’s standards paintings from that era celebrate women whom today we would consider overweight but at that time were the epitome of sexiness. Body Mass Index (BMI), which is defined as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres, provides a numeric measure of a person’s ‘fatness’ or ‘thinness’, and may represent a primary factor in determining physical attractiveness. But there are differences between cultures. Swami and Tovée found that men from industrialised societies tend to prefer a lower BMI than those from semi-industrialised societies. By contrast, in most traditional non-Western countries, body fat is prized as a sign that a person is more prosperous and successful and in women as a measure of femininity. Some cultures prefer plumper women, and in Africa women with ample proportions and a generously sized backside are traditionally regarded as attractive.

  Extreme examples of socially determined beauty have occurred around the world. These include the Mangbetu people of central Africa who used to wrap the heads of female infants in giraffe hide in order to induce a cone-shaped head; these cranial deformations have been found also in ancient cultures in the Middle East and South America. In other African societies plates are inserted into young women’s lips to enlarge them, or the earlobes of both men and women weighed down so that they become elongated. The Padaung people of Burma considered a very long neck to be the ideal of female beauty and girls were fitted with progressively more and more brass neck rings to achieve this look. This custom still survives among Burmese refugees in northern Thailand. The modern fashion for body piercing among young people, although usually less extreme, may echo this sort of tradition.

  A peculiar problem is why in many classical paintings women have exposed breasts, and why women in some societies, including modern ones, are willing to expose their breasts in public, particularly on the beach. There is often opposition from males to this exposure and it is frequently prevented by law. By contrast it is rare for either men or women to wish to expose their genitals in public. However, covering one’s body out of modesty is not universal. In the far north of America the Inuit are normally warmly clothed against the cold weather, but it is socially acceptable for them to go without clothing in their snow huts. Come to that, why are breasts attractive and genitals ugly in our society? Topless in women is one thing, but bottomless in men quite another.

  That humans, particularly women, are somehow programmed for monogamy is one proposed evolutionary theory. But there is little evidence to support this view since in over 150 cultures infidelity has been cited as the most common cause of divorce. In the West a spouse’s infidelity is cited as the primary cause of divorce in between twenty-five and fifty per cent of cases; and approximately half of divorced men and women report that their former spouse had engaged in extramarital sex. Twenty to twenty-five per cent of men and ten to fifteen per cent of women in Western societies are known to have engaged in extramarital sex at least once during their marriage, says the Kinsey Institute. Pregnancy is a particularly dangerous time for male infidelity. Women prefer to cite emotional reasons for it, such as ‘falling in love’, and are less willing to accept purely sexual justifications for extramarital affairs. Women fantasise about sex with another partner in terms of personal qualities, whereas men concentrate on physical characteristics. Men can even have sexual pleasure when committing rape, since their sex drive may allow them to ignore the feelings of their victim.

  There is a strong biological basis for avoiding incest, as discussed earlier. What clues are used to make sure that incest does not occur? The Westermarck hypothesis is that we develop a strong sexual aversion to people with whom we have been reared in close proximity in early childhood. A selection pressure among animals exists for fathers to identify potential daughters so as to avoid perceiving them as potential mates. In human societies, as shown for example in the data gathered from a kibbutz in Israel, it is highly unusual to marry an unrelated person with whom you have been brought up, but there is nonetheless evidence that as adults these people may develop a strong sexual mutual attraction. Evolutionary psychologist Debra Lieberman reported after a survey of 600 people that there is some form of brain mechanism which assesses various clues to estimate how closely related two people are. This is manifested more strongly in women because women invest more in the genetic fitness of a particular child than men do. On the other hand, men who grew up with only brothers do not seem to find the idea of incest as inherently distasteful as those who grew up with sisters.

  Some experts have calculated that as many as one in a hundred women have been sexually abused as children by a family member, though it is difficult to find precise numbers because shame leads to under-reporting. Father–daughter incest is not uncommon, nor the abuse of younger siblings by older brothers. Sex between parent and child and between siblings is almost universally forbidden but some cultures allow sexual and marital relations between aunts and uncles and between nephews and nieces. There are cases, such as the Egyptian pharaohs, where the elite have ac
cepted brother–sister marriages.

  In human courtship there is much emphasis on feminine passivity in contrast with masculine pursuit, and this occurs throughout the animal kingdom. The male is the more active and aggressive in mating behaviour, with the female being pursued and persuaded. This probably has a biological basis, but Margaret Mead’s studies among the Tchambuli in Papua New Guinea contradicted this and she found ‘a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture’, the women being ‘dominant’ and ‘impersonal’ and the men ‘emotionally dependent’. Mead concluded on the basis of studies of three primitive societies that the ‘passivity’ hitherto regarded as typically feminine can no longer be regarded as an essential part of the sex. ‘The material suggests that we may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society or a given period assigns to either sex.’ However, some later researchers have strongly disputed her methods and the robustness of her findings, particularly Derek Freeman in his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth.

  It is commonly believed that men think about sex much more often than women. But the evidence is not overwhelming. A study of college students who kept track of their thoughts relating to food, sleep and sex for one week found that the young men did indeed think more about sex than the young women did, but they also thought more about food and sleep. In modern society it has been observed that the average man will spend about forty minutes a day staring at the bodies of ten different women, which is a lot of time. Meanwhile women on average look at six men, and mainly at their eyes, for half that time, just over twenty minutes a day.

  Men’s sexual fantasies tend to be more explicit than women’s, whose imagined scenarios tend to be more complex and personal. Studies report that about half of men think about sex every day or several times a day, which fits with my own experience, while only twenty per cent of women think about sex equally often. The first sexual fantasy occurs generally between eleven and thirteen years old, with men generally starting younger than women, says the Kinsey Institute. Women, when recalling their sexual fantasies, more often see themselves being dominated, while men are the opposite. They see themselves as being in charge, either with a single or multiple partners. The sites of sexual desire in the brain have been identified with fMRI and several of them are in the amygdala.

  Departures from the norm in sexual orientation provide some interesting insights into male–female differences. Sexual orientation refers to the gender to which a person is attracted–to the opposite sex if they are heterosexual, to the same sex if homosexual, or to both sexes if bisexual. Estimates of non-heterosexual orientation suggest it occurs in about three to six per cent of men and one to four per cent of women. A representative survey of Britons found that one and a half per cent called themselves gay or lesbian and half a per cent bisexual. About half of lesbians and homosexual men reported the desire to have children.

  About twenty per cent of men and women have some erotic feelings for the same sex at some stage in their lives. Lesbian and heterosexual women are physically aroused by sexy videos and pictures of both men and women, while both gay and heterosexual men respond only in accordance with their own normal sexual orientation. Heterosexual women’s brain activity is greater when seeing male than female genitals, and vice versa for lesbians.

  Gender identity and sexual orientation are programmed into our brains during development of the embryo. There is evidence, though, that the postnatal social environment can have an effect on either, say Bao and Swaab. Sexual orientation is determined during development of the embryo under the influence of genes and sex hormones on the developing brain, and becomes overt during puberty under the further influence of sex hormones, as described in the previous chapter. As development of the genitals takes place earlier in embryonic life than the sexual differentiation of the brain, these two processes can be separately influenced. Sexual orientation is not affected by hormones in adulthood, and removal of an ovary or testis does not influence it, nor does adult treatment with sex hormones. Numerous studies have clearly shown that both gay men and lesbians have a normal concentration of sex hormones typical of their genetic sex. The difficulty of changing a person’s sexual orientation, as distinct from gender, is an important argument for it being strongly biologically based.

  Homosexual adults are likely to show unusual behaviour by the norms of their gender in childhood, but their home environment and the influence of parents have little impact on their sexual orientation. People’s basic sexual orientation is stable and rarely changes except around puberty. Homosexual relationships between young and old are found in primitive societies like New Guinea, where they occur between a young male and an older teacher or tribal holy man. Boys engage in sex with older men for some years, but become heterosexual adults. This homosexual activity is part of the initiation into adulthood of the younger male and it comes to an end when the boy is married. Homosexual behaviour for many people in primitive societies may be merely a kind of sideline, coexisting in people who are predominantly heterosexual as adults.

  The direct effect of testosterone on the developing human brain is the main mechanism responsible for male sexual orientation. It is when things go wrong that this becomes clear. Complete insensitivity to testosterone may be caused by mutations in the gene for the hormone receptor. XY males then develop as women and experience straightforward female heterosexual orientation. Despite their Y chromosome their sex-typical behaviour cannot usually be distinguished from that of girls and women in general. It has been suggested by a number of people that there is a relationship between left- or right-handedness and sexual orientation; they report that heterosexual individuals are somewhat more likely to be right-handed than homosexual individuals. But this has not been verified. Neither has sexual orientation been fully linked to variations in prenatal testosterone examined from maternal blood or amniotic fluid. But one characteristic has already been mentioned as providing an indirect measure of prenatal testosterone exposure: the ratio of the length of the index finger to the fourth digit of the hand (2D:4D), which is greater in women than in men. An online study of more than 200,000 people, who measured their own 2D:4D and reported their sexual orientation, found that 2D:4D related as predicted to sexual orientation in men, but not in women.

  Women with CAH who were exposed to excess testosterone in the womb tend to have more sexual interest, arousal and fantasy relating to women, and to have less sexual interest in and experience with men, according to Berenbaum and Beltz. If exposed to very high concentrations of testosterone in the womb, they show masculinisation of their genital structures and a greater a variety of male-typical behavioural traits such as aggressive play, but they also display an increased probability of interest or participation in homosexual relationships. And some studies found up to thirty or forty per cent of CAH girls have some form of homosexual attraction. But this still leaves a majority of CAH women who are heterosexual. By contrast the lack of an effect of homosexuality in men of female characteristics, like empathising and not systemising, may be surprising given how strongly these differences are found between heterosexual females and heterosexual males, as we shall see. In relation to certain skills discussed later, some studies have found that heterosexual men outperform homosexual men on tests of typically male skills such as mental rotation and judgement of line orientation, while in contrast, homosexual men show significantly better object location memory (on which women normally perform well) compared to heterosexual men.

  There is a strong genetic component to homosexuality. If being homosexual were strictly genetic, then in identical twins there would be a hundred-per-cent correlation rate for sexual orientation. But one study found only a fifty-two-per-cent correlation for male identical twins and twenty-two per cent for male fraternal twins. A study on female twins came up with similar results
–if one identical twin was a lesbian, in forty-eight per cent of cases the other twin was also, and for fraternal twins the figure was sixteen per cent. It is, however, still unclear exactly which genes are involved in determining homosexuality. Some genetic studies have suggested an X-linked inheritance, because the X chromosome has genes involved in sex, reproduction and cognition. There are studies suggesting that the gene Xq28 may play an important role in male homosexuality, but it is a controversial field. There is also some evidence that women with homosexual sons have an extreme skewing (non-random inactivation) of one of the X chromosomes, which is normally randomly inactivated. But since the whole process of the development of sexual orientation is so complex, it probably involves many genes.

  A surprising finding is that the odds of a boy being gay increase by one-third for each elder brother he has. Fraternal birth order appears as a prenatal cause of fifteen per cent of incidences of homosexuality in males. There are strong social influences determining homosexuality. Gay men and lesbian women have reported significantly higher rates of childhood molestation than heterosexual men and women. A quite different social finding is that many gay men and lesbian women lost their father through death or divorce by the age of ten. Eighteen per cent of gay men and thirty-five per cent of lesbians were found to be affected in this way in one study.

  Does the structure of the brain reflect sexual orientation? Differences have been reported in the size of brain regions based on sexual orientation. The third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH-3), which is about twice as large in men as in women, is smaller in gay men and more similar in size to that of females. Heterosexual and homosexual men also have been reported to differ in the size of part of the corpus callosum which connects the two brain hemispheres and allows communication between them. Other research involving brain measurements has also indicated that there may be a neurobiological basis to some sexual orientation in both heterosexual and homosexual men and women.