Until recently, sexual selection was an argument of last resort, when appeals to natural selection by the "environment " had THE USES OF BEAUTY
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failed: But why should it be? Why is it more plausible to suggest that blond hair in Baltic people was selected by vitamin D deficiency than to suggest it was selected by sexual preferences? The evidence is beginning to accumulate that humanity is a highly sexually selected species and that this explains the great variations between races in hairiness, nose length, hair length, hair curliness, beards, eye color—variations that plainly have little to do with climate or any other physical factor. In the common pheasant, every one of forty-six isolated wild populations in central Asia has a different combination of male plumage ornaments: white collars, green heads, blue rumps, orange breasts. Likewise, in mankind, sexual selection is at work. 22
The male obsession with youth is characteristically human.
There is no other animal yet studied that shares this obsession quite as strongly: Male chimpanzees find middle-aged females almost as attractive as young ones as long as they are in season: This is obviously because the human habits of lifelong marriage and long, slow periods of child rearing are also unique. If a man is to devote his life to a wife, he must know that she has a potentially long reproductive life ahead of her: If he were to form occasional short-lived pair bonds throughout his life, it would not matter how young his mates were. We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates and so left more sons and daughters in the world than other men: 23
THE LEGS THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND SHIPS
That many of the components of female beauty are clues to age, every woman and every cosmetic company well knows. But there is more to beauty than youth. The reasons that many youthful women are not beautiful are generally twofold: They are overweight or underweight, or their facial features do not fit our image of beauty.
Beauty is a trinity of youth, figure, and face.
A pop song from the 1970s included the cruelly sexist line
" nice legs, shame about the face. " The importance of regular, sym-
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metrical facial features is somewhat puzzling: Why should a man throw away a chance at mating with a young and fertile woman simply because she has a long nose or a double chin?
It is possible that facial features are a clue to genetic or nurtured quality, or to character and personality. Facial symmetry may well prove to be a clue to good genes or good health during development. 24 "The face is the most information-dense part of the body " is how Don Symons put it to me one day: And the less symmetrical a face, the less attractive. But asymmetry is not a common reason for ugliness; many people have perfectly symmetrical faces and yet are still ugly. The other noticeable feature of facial beauty is that the average face is more beautiful than any extreme: In 1883, Francis Galton discovered that merging the photographs of several women 's faces produced a composite that is usually judged to be better looking than any of the individual faces that went into making it:" The experiment has been repeated recently with computer-merged photographs of female undergraduates: The more faces that go into the image, the more beautiful the woman appears.26 Indeed, the faces of models are eminently forgettable.
Despite seeing them on the covers of magazines every day, we learn to recognize few individuals. The faces of politicians, not known for their beauty, are much more memorable: Faces that are "full of character " are almost by definition nonaverage faces. The more average and unblemished the face, the more beautiful, but the less it tells you about its owner 's character.
This attraction to the average—to a nose that is neither too long nor too short, to eyes that are not too close together nor too far apart, to a chin that is neither prominent nor receding, to lips that are full but not too full, to cheekbones that are prominent but not absurdly so, to a face that is the average, oval shape, neither too long nor too broad—crops up throughout literature as a theme of female beauty. It suggests to me that a Fisherian sexy-son—or rather, in this case, sexy-daughter—effect is at work: Given the importance of facial beauty, a man who chooses an ugly-faced mate will probably have daughters that marry late or marry second-rate husbands: Throughout human history men have fulfilled their THE USES OF BEAUTY
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ambitions through their daughters ' looks: In societies with few other opportunities for social mobility, a great beauty could always marry above her station:" Of course women inherit their looks from their fathers as well as their mothers, so a woman should also prefer regular features in a man—and women mostly do.
All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face, and runaway selection will take over. Any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average. It is a cruel, despotic fashion, one that enforces its pitiless logic at the expense of many a brilliant, kind, and accomplished woman who happens to be plain, and one that has ironically been made worse by the demographic transition to prescribed monogamy. In medieval Europe and in ancient Rome, powerful men took all the beauties into their harems, leaving a general shortage of women for the other men, so an ugly woman stood a better chance of eventually finding some man desperate enough to marry her. That may not sound very just, but justice is rarely the consequence of sexual selection.
PERSONALITIES
So much for what in women attracts men: What draws women to certain men? ,Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty—face, youth, and figure: But in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men. 28
The single exception is height: Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men: In the world of dating agencies, the principle that a man must be taller than his date is so universal that it has been called "the cardinal principle of date selection: " Out of 720 applications by couples for bank accounts, only one was from a couple in which the woman was
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taller than the man, and yet couples chosen at random from the population would show scores of such cases. People mate "assorta-tively " for height. Men seek shorter wives, and women seek taller husbands. This cannot be due only to the men. When shown drawings of men and women together and asked to write stories to go with them, even women who stated adamantly that the size of a man made no difference to them wrote stories about anxious or weak men more often when the man depicted was shorter than the woman: The laudatory metaphor " he's a big man " is found in many cultures. It has been calculated that every inch is worth $6,000 a year in salary in modern America."
Bruce Ellis has summarized the evidence that personality is critical in men. In a monogamous society a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a "chief, " and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions. And not coincidentally, these are the things women find attractive. They are clues to future status: In one test of this truism, three scientists told their subjects stories about two different people of undefined gender taking part in a tennis match and doing equally welclass="underline" One was portrayed as strong, competitive, dominant, and determined, the other as consistent, playing for fun rather than to win, easily intimidated by a stronger opponent, and uncompetitive. When asked to summarize the characters of these two people, women and men came up with similar descriptions. But whereas women said that the dominant one was more sexually attractive (if male), men did not find the dominant one more attractive (if female)."