[nfb-talk] Female Preferences amongst blind men

[Mike Bullis]

>From Today's Ny Times.
Mike
IDEA LAB. The Anatomy Of Desire.

By DANIEL BERGNER. Daniel Bergner is the author, most recently, of 'The
Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing.
The two mannequins stood side by side in the back of the white van. Johan
Karremans, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, along
with his student and collaborator, Sander Arons, clothed the plastic women
identically in tight black tops and dark skirts. Arons then drove the van
around the country to the homes of blind men. 

The cargo van is one of two mobile labs belonging to the university's
psychology department. Sometimes, outside an elementary school, children
climb into the back of a van to have their brain waves tested on a
encephalogram machine. But this experiment, the results of which will soon
be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, dealt with desire
-- in this case the desire of heterosexual men -- and was an attempt to
gauge the force of culture, to weigh the learned and the innate, in
determining sexual attraction. 

The headless mannequins, which Karremans bought, he told me recently, 'on
the Dutch version of Craigslist,' have adjustable waists and hips, and the
researchers set each body differently, so that one had a waist-to-hip ratio
of 0.7 and the other of 0.84. Based on a range of studies of male
preferences done by other scientists, Karremans chose the lower ratio as an
ideal, a slim yet curvy paragon, at least among Western populations. The
higher ratio, by contrast, doesn't represent obesity, just a fullness that
falls close to the average woman's shape. 

The study involved men who had been sightless from birth. The idea was that
the bombardment of visual media -- of models on billboards and actresses on
television and porn stars online -- which may be so powerful and even
dominant in molding desire, couldn't have had any direct effect on these
men, who emerged from the womb into a congenital dark. Would their tastes in
women's bodies match those of men who could see? How would their preferences
reflect on the roles of nature and nurture, on the influence of evolution
and the impact of experience, in forming our psyches? 

More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud placed sex at the foundation of
psychology; erotic desire was the fundamental element of the self.
Psychiatric researchers have long since tended to distance themselves from
much of his thinking, yet few would deny the libido's crucial part in who we
are, with its neural systems radiating outward from the primal regions of
the brain. So the studies of sexologists like Karremans, no matter how
far-fetched or even bizarre they may sometimes seem -- hot mannequins and
blind men! -- are often an attempt not only to parse the erotic but also to
begin to understand the way our very beings are constructed. 

Over the past two decades, researchers have been looking at whether cinched
yet sumptuous female body shapes, corresponding to low waist-to-hip ratios,
are preferred by men across societies and have been favored across time, the
idea being that if the answer is yes, evolutionary factors would seem to
outweigh culture in determining at least this one aspect of lust. And
frequently when scientists have shown simple line drawings of women to men
around the world, from Germany to Japan to Guinea-Bissau, the answer has in
fact been yes; ratios of 0.7, or sometimes lower, have been rated the most
attractive, no matter whether more or less overall flesh is the cultural
ideal. A study of Miss Americas from the 1920s to the '80s and of Playboy
centerfolds from the '50s to 1990 came up with the same result; the chosen
women became thinner over the decades, but their proportions stayed
constant, right around 0.7. The evolutionary explanations for these findings
share the logic that lower ratios somehow signaled ancestral men that a
woman would produce more or fitter offspring, and the argument of one recent
study, built on data from several thousand women and children, is that
mothers with lower ratios tend to produce smarter kids, because, the
researchers suggest after controlling for other factors, certain fatty acids
in a woman's hip padding, delivered in the womb and through breast-feeding,
are beneficial to the development of a baby's brain, while belly fat is
detrimental. 

Yet the Miss America and centerfold findings have been criticized for flawed
statistics; a study of the nudes celebrated by the 17th-century Flemish
painter Peter Paul Rubens documented W.H.R.'s a good deal higher than 0.7;
and research among isolated hunter-gatherers in Tanzania and the primitive
Matsigenka people in a remote rain-forest territory of Peru has countered
the idea of cross-cultural consistency. In Peru, within a vast park whose
core serves as a kind of societal preserve, because outsiders are almost
completely barred, a pair of scientists with line drawings discovered that
Matsigenka men don't favor women with lower W.H.R.'s at all. Among a
Matsigenka group living just outside the park and within reach of Western
media and modernity, meanwhile, the researchers reported tastes in female
forms to be more similar to those of Western men, and in a nearby area,
among a tribally mixed population with yet more Western contact, male
preferences were no different from those in the West. Culture, in this
study, appeared to mold the shape of lust. 

Amid all the conflicting evidence, Karremans sent his mannequins around the
Netherlands. The blind stood before them; they were told to touch the women,
to focus their hands on the waists and hips. The breasts on both figures
were the same, in case the men reached too high. The men extended their
arms; they ran their hands over the region. Then they scored the
attractiveness of the bodies. Karremans had a hunch, he told me, that their
ratings wouldn't match those of the sighted men he used as controls, half of
them blindfolded so that they, too, would be judging by feel. It seemed
likely, he said, that visual culture would play an overwhelming part in
creating the outlines of lust. And though the blind had almost surely grown
up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass
shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that
they had heard descriptions amounting to, 'The more hourglass shaped, the
more attractive,' which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin
over the figure that was only somewhat less so. 

But, with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the
blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more
pronounced sweep from waist to hip. One possible explanation emphasizes the
sense of smell -- though the mannequins wore no perfume. By this line of
thinking, certain ratios of hormones and their metabolites in the female
body are associated with biological advantage, as well as with particular
pheromonal scents and low W.H.R.'s. The male begins life wired, through the
influence of evolution, to favor these odors and then learns, mostly through
unconscious experience, to connect the cues of smell to the proportions of
waist and hip. He makes this connection through sight if he can see and by
touch if he can't. 

The explanation may be more elusive than this simple logic. And the study's
implications about nature and nurture are far from straightforward.
Karremans's findings don't rule out the sway of culture, not at all. If
experience played no role in etching our preferences, there would be
scarcely any diversity of lust; we would all be drawn to the same forms. One
nuance in the study's data points to this complexity: sighted and blind men
both strongly favored the mannequin with the lower W.H.R., but this
slimmer-waisted body received especially high scores from the men with
sight, maybe because a life spent amid cultural signals compounds the work
of evolution. Still, the gropings of Karremans's blind offer a glimpse into
the ancestral depths of our desires.