THE USES OF BEAUTY
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BEAUTY AS A UNIVERSAL
Botticelli's Venus is beautifuclass="underline" Michelangelo 's David is handsome.
But were they always thus? Would a Neolithic hunter-gatherer have agreed? Do Japanese or Eskimo people agree? Will our great-grandchildren agree? Is sexual attraction fashionable and evanescent or permanent and inflexible?
We all know how dated and frankly unattractive the fashions and the beauties of a decade ago look now, let alone those of a century ago. Men in doublet and hose may still seem sexy to some, but men in frock coats surely do not. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a person 's sense of what is beautiful and sexy is subtly educated to prefer the prevailing norms of fashion. Rubens would not have chosen Twiggy as a model. Moreover, beauty is plainly relative, as any prisoner who has spent months without seeing a member of the opposite sex can testify.
And yet this flexibility stays within limits. It is impossible to name a time when women of ten or forty were considered "sexier " than women of twenty. It is inconceivable that male paunches were ever actually attractive to women or that tall men were thought uglier than short ones: It is hard to imagine that weak chins were ever thought beautiful on either sex. If beauty is a matter of fashion, how is it that wrinkled skin, gray hair, hairy backs, and very long noses have never been "in fashion "? The more things change, the more they stay the same. The famous sculpture of Nefertiti's head and neck, 3,300 years old, is as stunning today as when Akhenaten first courted the real thing.
Incidentally, in this chapter on what makes people sexually attractive to one another, I am going to take almost all my examples from white Europeans, and from northern Europeans at that. By this I am not implying that white European standards of beauty are absolute and superior but merely that they are the only ones I know enough about to describe. There is no room for a separate investigation into the standards of beauty that black, Asian, or other people employ. But the problem that I am principally concerned with is universal to all people: Are standards of beauty cultural whims or
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The Red Queen
innate drives? What is flexible and what endures? I will argue in this chapter that only by understanding how sexual attraction evolved is it possible to make sense of the mixture of culture and instinct, and understand why some features flow with the fashion while others resist. The first clue comes from the study of incest: FREUD AND INCEST TABOOS
Very few men have sex with their sisters. Caligula and Cesare Borgia were notorious because they were (rumored to be) such exceptions.
Even fewer men have sex with their mothers, in spite of what Freud tells us is an intense longing to do so. Sexual abuse by fathers of daughters is far more common. But it is still rare.
Compare two explanations of these facts. First, that people secretly desire incest but are able to overcome these desires with the help of social taboos and rules; second, that people do not find their very close relatives sexually arousing, that the taboo is in the mind. The first explanation is Sigmund Freud ' s. He argued that our first and most intense sexual attraction is toward our oppositesex parent. That is why, he went on to say, all human societies impose on their subjects strict and specific taboos against incest: Since the taboo "is not to be found in the psychology of the individual, " there is a " necessity for stern prohibitions. " Without those taboos, he implied, we would all be dreadfully inbred and suffer from genetic abnormalities:'
Freud made three unjustified assumptions. First, he equat-ed attraction with sexual attraction. A two-year-old girl may love her father, but that does not mean she lusts after him. Second, he assumed without proof that people have incestuous desires. Freudians say the reason very few people express these desires is that they have "repressed" them—which makes Freud 's argument irrefutable.
Third, he assumed that social rules about cousins marrying were
" incest taboos. " Until very recently scientists and laymen alike followed Freud in believing that laws forbidding marriages between cousins were enacted to prevent incest and inbreeding. They may not have been.
THE USES OF BEAUTY
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Freud 's rival in this field was Edward Westermarck; in 1891 he suggested that men do not mate with their mothers and sisters not because of social rules but because they are simply not turned on by those they were reared with: Westermarck 's idea was simple: Men and women cannot recognize their relatives as relatives, so they have no way of preventing inbreeding as such. (Curiously, quail are different; they can recognize their brothers and sisters even when reared apart.) But they can use a simple psychological rule that works ninety-nine times out of a hundred to avert an incestuous match. They can avoid mating with those whom they knew very well during childhood. Sexual aversion to one 's closest relatives is thus achieved. True, this will not avert marriage between cousins, but then there is nothing much wrong with marriage between cousins: The chance of a recessive deleterious gene emerging from such a match is small, and the advantages of genetic alliance to preserve complexes of genes that are adapted to work with one another probably outweigh it: (Quail prefer to mate with first cousins rather than with strangers.) Westermarck did not know that, of course, but it strengthens his argument, for it suggests that the only incestuous relations a human being should avoid are the ones between brother and sister, and parent and child.'
Westermarck 's theory leads to several simple predictions: Stepsiblings would generally not be found to marry unless they were brought up apart. Very close childhood friends would also generally not be found to marry: Here the best evidence comes from two sources: Israeli kibbutzim and an old Chinese marriage custom. In kibbutzim, children are reared in creches with unrelated companions.
Lifelong friendships are formed, but marriages between fellow kibbutz children are very rare. In Taiwan some families practice "shim-pua marriage" in which an infant daughter is brought up by the family of the man she will marry. She is therefore effectively married to her stepbrother. Such marriages are often infertile, largely because the two partners find each other sexually unattractive: Conversely, two siblings reared apart are surprisingly likely to fall in love with each other if they meet at the right age.4
All of this adds up to a picture of sexual inhibition between people who saw a great deal of each other during childhood; frater-
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Tht Red Quern
nal incest, as Westermarck suggested, is therefore prevented by this instinctive aversion that siblings have for each other: But Westermarck 's theory would also predict that if incest does occur, it will prove to be between parent and child, and specifically between father and daughter, because a father is past the age at which familiarity breeds aversion and because men usually initiate sex. That, of course, is the most common form of incest.'