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Men’s Preference for the Female Hourglass Figure.
In 2008, I published a paper in the International Journal of e-Collaboration wherein I had investigated the WHRs of advertised female online escorts across 48 countries (1,068 female profiles were coded). The mean advertised WHR ratio was 0.72. Incidentally, I’ve also looked at the WHRs of sex dolls of a company that specializes in the manufacturing of this particular product. The mean WHR across ten doll models was 0.68. Obviously, both of these figures (no pun intended) fall within the expected preferred range of 0.68 to 0.72.
Barnaby J. Dixson of Victoria University in New Zealand, along with several colleagues, has published two papers in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (2009) and in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (in press) that further lend credence to the hourglass preference using highly novel data sources. In one case, Dixson et al. used an eye-tracking apparatus to capture the areas that men are most likely to look at (and the first areas that they gaze at) when exposed to frontal images of a naked woman. Six different version of the photo were created, by altering the woman’s breast size and WHR (three breast sizes and two WHRs). Not surprisingly, men focused on the breasts and the midriff, and they preferred the WHR of 0.70. In a second study, Dixson and his colleagues explored the WHRs of men in extremely remote villages in Papua New Guinea. In this case, this is a particularly relevant data set as the men in question are minimally (if at all) exposed to Western images. Hence, the notion that men’s preferences are socially constructed can be tested in a very direct manner. The men were shown photos of ten women’s bodies both preoperatively and postoperatively. The women had had a micrograft surgery that produces a more pronounced hourglass shape. The mean WHR of the ten women preoperatively was 0.80 whereas postoperatively it was 0.72. The Papua New Guinean men had a much stronger preference for the postoperative WHR of 0.72.
Finally, Steve Platek and Devendra Singh (who is the grand daddy of research on WHR) have a recent paper in PLoS wherein they imaged men’s brains as these watched images of preoperative and postoperative women (the latter having WHRs much closer to the preferred near-universal ideal of 0.70). There was greater activation in regions of the brain associated with reward processing when men viewed the postoperative photos.
Note that in the last paragraph, I used the term near-universal. This recognizes the fact that cultural contexts can alter an evolved WHR preference. For example, in environments defined by a greater likelihood of caloric uncertainty, men’s preferences shift toward a larger WHR. Hence, even in an instance where there is unequivocal evidence for an innate preference, culture still plays an important role in shaping the phenomenon in question.
Be on the lookout for my forthcoming trade book to be published by Prometheus Books next year wherein I discuss the latter studies in the context of advertising along with endless other fun and interesting facts about our innate consummatory nature.
Twitter Alert: Finally, I was advised that it would be a good idea if I were to set up a Twitter account. Frankly, I am unsure what the exact benefits of this tool are in my case but I thought that I should at least try it out and see what it leads to. Hence, to those who wish to follow me, you can do so at @GadSaad. I am likely to mainly use it to make professional announcements such as when I put up a post, or when my next book comes out etc. Please don’t expect me to be “Twittering” about the Tuna salad that I am eating, and the stormy weather outside!
The last taboo: toy boys
As Stephen Vizinczey’s era-transcending novel, ‘In Praise of Older Women’, is re-published, Celia Walden asks why older women with toy boys are still taboo.
On the red carpet at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards last month, one couple drew more attention than most. The subtle swell of her belly denoting early pregnancy, a middle-aged woman in white reached instinctively for the young man at her side. He, placing a protective hand on her lower back, stood silently by as she gave interviews. They might have been mother and son but they were lovers, soon-to-be husband and wife: they were the 42-year-old film director Sam Taylor-Wood and her 22-year-old actor fiancé Aaron Johnson. “Yikes,” one camera-woman winced, “here comes the cradle-snatcher.”
The sentiment might have been more eloquently expressed, certainly by a member of Taylor-Wood’s own sex, but older women and their boy toys have a tendency to prompt voluble – even crude – reactions. As the film director worked her way down the red carpet, birch-haired male executives with 19-year-old models on their arms ambled past, but the absurdity of those couplings passes unnoticed. Only the Older Woman, it seems, is taboo in a world where precious few remain.
Despite marrying her young boyfriend, actor Ashton Kutcher, five years ago, actress Demi Moore still provokes catty headlines for the 15-year age gap. Madonna is widely derided for her relationship with 22-year-old model Jesus Luz, as was designer Sadie Frost, who dated a succession of young men after her split from Jude Law.
Then there is 52-year-old Kim Cattrall, who was accused of playing up to her Sex and the City alter ego, Samantha, when she began a relationship with a 28-year-old chef, Alan Wyse, which – surprise, surprise, sneer the cynics – didn’t last the course. In the celebrity world a toy boy may be de rigeur, but in reality, the pairing remains as rare as it is controversial.
Literature and film would have us believe otherwise. Bergman’s Torment, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Last Picture Show, Sunset Boulevard, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone and, of course, The Graduate, have kept young male cinema-goers titillated by the notion for years. Byron did the same in Don Juan, as did Stendhal in Scarlet and Black, and Bernard Schlink in The Reader. The dynamic has always inspired the artistic imagination, but no written account goes into as much depth as Stephen Vizinczey’s era-transcending, In Praise of Older Women, re-released this week as a Penguin Classic.
The best-selling book, which was originally published in 1965 and has sold more than five million copies worldwide, must have provoked a veritable glut of misalliances after its narrator, Andras Vajda, described in enchanting detail his discovery that the embraces of older women are infinitely preferable to those of younger girls.
“One of my chief irritations at the time was the blankness of the faces of my young girl friends,” says the young Vajda of one married lover, Maya. “But Maya’s face, with the fine lines of her 40 some years, expressed all the shades of her thoughts and emotions.”
Forty-five years after penning those lines, the Hungarian-born Vizinczey, now 76, remains ardent on the subject. “To be a young man and have a grown woman as your lover is not just sexy, it is paradise,” he says. “That’s what my novel is about. Women start at 30 and just get better.”
Putting any condemnation of the pairing down to “people hating to see other people happy,” Vizinczey lambasts the idea that women with children should no longer be sexual beings.
“If anything, a woman who has had children can be even sexier than before, because childbirth gives her a profound experience. The sexiest thing about a woman is her intelligence. The older women in the book were intelligent enough to learn from their experiences. An older woman who is an idiot is clearly inferior to an intelligent 20-year-old, but the intelligent 20-year-old will be even more interesting and exciting when she’s 40 or 60.”
Our modern day deification of youth may push an increasing amount of young men into the arms of older women, he feels. “The sex appeal of a woman has very little to do with the kind of things magazines talk about. It doesn’t have much to do with big breasts, small breasts, figure – the most important part of sex appeal is humanity, an affectionate nature, intelligence. Allure certainly has very little to do with clothes. Isn’t a woman best dressed when she is naked?”
“If you take the evolutionary argument,” agrees psychologist Oliver James, author of Affluenza, “there is a great deal more sense in a younger man being with an older woman than the other way around, because a younger man can be more vigorous and useful to the woman.”
It is a theory Germaine Greer supported in her contentious book, The Boy, a thesis on “why boys have always been the world’s pin-ups”. “Historically,” the author of The Female Eunuch explained, “older women were expected to introduce boys to the refinement and excitement of sex. They were lovers, but they were also teachers.”
Besides sex, Greer maintains, “older men sit in judgment, but boys don’t do that. They are able to admire a woman for what she has achieved.” Thirty years ago, Paul Theroux put his love of older women down to their ability to give men “something that is very nearly incomparable, the chance to complete in adulthood what was impossible to complete as a child, a blameless gift of lechery that combines the best of youth, a maturity, romance, and realism in equal parts”.
But if the appeal from the young man’s perspective is obvious, so are the pitfalls. Writer Oscar Humphries, the son of comedian Barry Humphries who enjoyed a liaison with Jimmy Choo founder Tamara Mellon when he was 22 and she was 40, remembers assuming a submissive role in the relationship. “The first time we had dinner together in London,” he wrote at the time, “I half-heartedly reached for my overburdened Switch card when the bill arrived. I feigned hurt when she brushed it aside with her corporate Amex… Can there be equality in our relationship? Well, there is sexual equality, but, I have to admit, little else.”
A mutually enjoyable game of dominance and submission is what drives the dynamic, adds James. “But whether it is love or sex spurring on the people involved, there will always be a large measure of desire on the part of the older person for the younger, which is where the “older woman” dynamic is not straightforward, because women, on the whole, are not attracted by nubility in younger members of the opposite sex – whereas men are.”
So are these older women liberated or damaged? Where the celebrity contingent are concerned, James believes, narcissism and the search for eternal youth may play a big part, reducing the toy boy to a pick-me-up not unlike a new handbag. “There probably is something wrong with women who persist in going for very large age gaps,” he claims. “The real problem starts when the younger person grows up.”
Women in the public eye, Vizinczey shrugs, “are financially independent and therefore can defy convention, but women who cannot afford to defy convention have to do it in secret or be labelled predators, even put in jail, thanks to our puritanical laws. Predatory relationships exist, but they can exist even between people of the same age.”
So long as the relationships are fictional, it seems, we are able to enjoy them. We all regret Benjamin’s decision not to elope with Mrs Robinson, but how long would such a coupling have lasted? Not long, according to Theroux, which should mean no great sadness for either party. “The classic situation is nothing long-term; indeed, she might not particularly want to see you afterwards. The preliminaries, the half-truths, the confidences, the wooing – all these are dispensed with. There isn’t time; she comes straight to the point and then goes back to her life. She is doing what older men do to younger women.”
Vizinczey vehemently disagrees. “Most relationships don’t last, regardless of the age of the couples. Enduring relationships depend not only on the ages of the couples, but whether or not they are people on the same wavelength, which is why I think mine will go on lasting.” Because his particular older woman…? She’s Canadian, she’s called Gloria – and he’s been married to her for 45 years.
* ‘In Praise of Older Women’ by Stephen Vizinczey (Penguin Modern paperback) is available from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + 99p p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Source:Â http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/7360779/The-last-taboo-toy-boys.html
No Agreement on Sex?
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 5, 2010
Researchers found that no uniform consensus existed when a representative sample of people, ages 18- to 96 years old, were asked what the term meant to them.
Is oral sex considered sex? It wasn’t to around 30 percent of the study participants.
How about anal sex? For around 20 percent of the participants, no.
A surprising number of older men did not consider penile-vaginal intercourse to be sex.
More than idle gossip, the answers to questions about sex can inform — or misinform — research, medical advice and health education efforts.
“Researchers, doctors, parents, sex educators should all be very careful and not assume that their own definition of sex is shared by the person they’re talking to, be it a patient, a student, a child or study participant,†said Brandon Hill, research associate at the Kinsey Institute.
The study, conducted in conjunction with the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, delves deeper into a question first examined in 1999 — in the midst of a presidential sex scandal where the definition of sex was an issue.
Researchers from The Kinsey Institute asked college students what “had sex†meant to them, taking the approach, which was unique then, of polling the students on specific behaviors.
No consensus was found then, either.
The new study, published in the international health journal Sexual Health in February, examined whether more information helped clarify matters — study participants were asked about specific sexual behaviors and such qualifiers as whether orgasm was reached — and researchers also wanted to involve a more representative audience, not just college students.
“Throwing the net wider, with a more representative sample, only made it more confusing and complicated,†Hill said. “People were even less consistent across the board.”
The study involved responses from 486 Indiana residents who took part in a telephone survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research at IU.
Participants, mostly heterosexual, were asked, “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was …,†followed by 14 behaviorally specific items.
Here are some of the results:
- *Responses did not differ significantly overall for men and women. The study involved 204 men and 282 women.
- *95 percent of respondents would consider penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) having had sex, but this rate drops to 89 percent if there is no ejaculation.
- *81 percent considered penile-anal intercourse having had sex, with the rate dropping to 77 percent for men in the youngest age group (18-29), 50 percent for men in the oldest age group (65 and up) and 67 percent for women in the oldest age group.
- *71 percent and 73 percent considered oral contact with a partner’s genitals (OG), either performing or receiving, as having had sex.
- *Men in the youngest and oldest age groups were less likely to answer “yes†compared with the middle two age groups for when they performed OG.
- *Significantly fewer men in the oldest age group answered “yes†for PVI (77 percent).
Hill said it is common for a doctor, when seeing a patient with symptoms of sexually transmitted infections, to ask how many sexual partners the patient has or has had. The number will differ according to the patients’ definitions of sex.
William L. Yarber, RCAP’s senior director and co-author of the study, said its findings reaffirm the need to be specific about behaviors when talking about sex.
“There’s a vagueness of what sex is in our culture and media,†Yarber said.
“If people don’t consider certain behaviors sex, they might not think sexual health messages about risk pertain to them. The AIDS epidemic has forced us to be much more specific about behaviors, as far as identifying specific behaviors that put people at risk instead of just sex in general.
“But there’s still room for improvement.”
Source: Indiana University
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Teens With More Screen Time Have Lower Quality Relationships
ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2010) — Teens who spend more time watching television or using computers appear to have poorer relationships with their parents and peers, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Over the past 20 years, teens have used an ever-expanding array of screen-based tools for communication and entertainment, according to background information in the article. “The availability and attractiveness of screen time activities has provoked excitement about the opportunities afforded by these options, as well as concern about whether these displace other activities that are important for health and development,” the authors write. “One area of interest is how screen time may affect the quality of relationships with family and friends.”
Rosalina Richards, Ph.D., of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, and colleagues studied 3,043 adolescents age 14 to 15 in 2004. The teens completed a confidential questionnaire about their free-time habits, as well as an assessment of their attachment to parents and peers.
Overall, the more time teens spent watching television or playing on a computer, the more likely they were to report low attachment to parents (in other words, difficulty forming a relationship or emotional bond). The risk of having low attachment to parents increased 4 percent for every hour spent viewing television and 5 percent for every hour spent playing on a computer. Conversely, teens who spend more time reading and doing homework reported a higher level of attachment to parents.
The researchers also assessed interview responses from 976 individuals who were age 15 years in 1987 to 1988. Among these teens, more time spent viewing television was associated with lower attachment to both parents and peers. For every additional hour of television, teens had a 13 percent increased risk of low attachment to their parents and a 24 percent increased risk of low attachment to peers. “Recommendations that children watch less television are sometimes met with the concern that being unable to discuss popular shows or characters may inhibit peer relationships,” the authors write. “The findings herein do not suggest that less television viewing is detrimental to adolescent friendships.”
There are several potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between increased screen time and poorer relationships, they note. For instance, teens who have televisions in their bedroom not only spent more time watching but also may share fewer meals with family members. “However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.
“Given the importance of attachment to parents and peers in adolescent health and development, concern about high levels of screen time among adolescents is warranted,” they conclude. “With the rapid advance of screen-based options for entertainment, communication and education, ongoing research is needed to monitor the effect that these technologies have on social development and psychological and physical well-being among adolescents.”
Journal Reference:
- 1. Rosalina Richards; Rob McGee; Sheila M. Williams; David Welch; Robert J. Hancox. Adolescent Screen Time and Attachment to Parents and Peers. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med, 2010; 164 (3): 258-262 [link]
Source:Â http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301165614.htm
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