Likewise, the same scientists videotaped an actor in two simulated interviews; in one he sat meekly in a chair near the door, with his head bowed, nodding at the interviewer, while in the other he was relaxed, leaning back and gesturing confidently: When shown the videos, women found the more dominant actor more desirable as a date and more sexually attractive, whereas men did THE USES OF BEAUTY
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not when the actor was female. Body language matters for male sexiness:"
If women select mates on the basis of personality more than men do, this correlates with the fact noted in chapter 8, and well known to many couples, that women are better judges of character. Good female judges of character left more descendants than bad. Good male judges did no better than bad male judges.
The importance of character may explain why Hollywood directors believe that the perfect box-office draw is a familiar, popular male star and a little-known female beauty (and pay them accordingly). Male stars, such as Sean Connery and Mel Gibson, build their reputations gradually: Female stars, such as Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone, rocket to fame in a single movie. The recipe of the James Bond films was perfect: a new girl every time but the same old Bond. (Man, though less than some male mammals, exhibits the "Coolidge effect ": a new female refreshes his libido: The effect is named after the famous story about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being shown around a farm. Learning that a cockerel could have sex dozens of times a day, Mrs: Coolidge said: " Please tell that to the president. " On being told, Mr.
Coolidge asked, "Same hen every time? " "Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time. " The president continued: " Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.") '2
The evidence that women do use direct clues of male status is overwhelming: American men who marry in a given year earn about one and a half times as much as men of the same age who do not. In a survey of two hundred tribal societies, two scientists confirmed that the handsomeness of a man depends on his skills and prowess rather than on his appearance. Dominance in a man is universally considered attractive by women. In Buss 's study of thirty-seven societies, women put more value on men's financial prospects than vice versa. All in all, as Bruce Ellis put it in a recent review,
" status and economic achievement are highly relevant barometers of male attractiveness, more so than physical attributes."
What are the clues to status? Ellis suggests that clothes and ornaments provide one set of clues: an Armani suit, a Rolex
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watch, and a BMW are as blatantly revealing of rank as any admiral 's sleeve stripes or Sioux chief 's headdress. In a book that chronicled how fashion has always been, until recently, a matter of class emulation, Quentin Bell wrote: " The history of fashionable dress is tied to the competition between classes, in the first place the emulation of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie and then the more extended competition which results from the ability of the prole-tariat to compete with the middle classes: . : . Implicit in the whole is a system of sartorial morality dependent upon pecuniary standards of value.'
Bobbi Low has surveyed hundreds of societies and come to the conclusion that male ornaments almost always relate to rank and status—maturity, seniority, physical prowess, ferocity, or ability to indulge in conspicuous consumption—whereas female ornaments tend to signal marital or pubertal status and sometimes husband's wealth. Certainly a Victorian duchess was emphasizing not her own wealth but her husband 's in the class distinctions of her clothes: This applies as plainly in modern urban societies as it did in ancient tribal ones: Tom Wolfe was the first to comment on how the circular ornaments on the hoods of Mercedes-Benzes had become status symbols among Harlem drug dealers.
At this point some evolutionists seem dangerously close to arguing that women have evolved the ability to be impressed by BMWs: Yet BMWs have existed for only about one human generation: Either evolution is working absurdly fast, or there is something wrong: There are two ways to avoid this difficulty, one of which is popular at the University of Michigan, the other at Santa Barbara. The Michigan scientists say something like this: Women do not have an evolved ability to be impressed by BMWs, but they have an evolved ability to be flexible and to adapt to the social pressures of the society in which they grew up. The Santa Barbara scientists say: Behavior itself is rarely what has evolved; it is the underlying psychological attitude that evolves, and modern women possess a mental mechanism, evolved during the Pleistocene period, that enables them to read what correlates to status among men and find such clues desirable.
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In a sense, both are saying the same thing: Women are impressed by signals of status, whatever those specific symbols are: Presumably at some point they learn the association between BMWs and wealth; it is not a difficult equation to solve. i5
THE FASHION BUSINESS
We are back at a familiar paradox. Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about status. In their dress, women follow fashion more than men do: Yet women seek clues to status, which change with fashion, and men seek clues to fertility, which do not.
Men should not care less what women wear as long as they are smooth-skinned, slim, young, healthy, and generally nubile: Women should care greatly about what men wear because it tells them a good deal about their background, their wealth, their social status, even their ambitions. So why do women follow clothes fashions more avidly than men?
I can think of several answers to this question. First, the theory is simply wrong, and men prefer status symbols, whereas women prefer bodies. Perhaps, but that flies in the face of an awful lot of robust evidence: Second, women 's fashion is not about status after alclass="underline" Third, modern Western societies have been in a two-century aberration from which they are just emerging: In Regency England, Louis XIV 's France, medieval Christendom, ancient Greece, or among modern Yanomamo, men followed fashion as avidly as women: Men wore bright colors, flowing robes, jewels, rich materials, gorgeous uniforms, and gleaming, decorated armor.
The damsels that knights rescued were no more fashionably attired than their paramours. Only in Victorian times did the deadly uniformity of the black frock coat and its dismal modern descendant, the gray suit, infect the male sex, and only in this century have women 's hemlines gone up and down like yo-yos: This suggests the fourth and most intriguing explanation, which is that women do care more about clothes and men do care less, but instead of influencing the other sex with their concerns,
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they influence their own. Each gender uses its own preferences to guide its own behavior. Experiments show that men think women care about physique much more than they actually do; women think men care about status cues much more than they actually do. So perhaps each sex simply acts out its instincts in the conviction that the other sex likes the same things as they do.