1. A few thoughts on the boob thing.

[William S. Lear]

On Thu, December 10, 1998 at 19:30:35 (-0500) Greg Nowell writes:
>...
>9.   Although it is fashionable among intellectual
>theorist women to deprecate the chemically driven
>element of male behavior, I do note that there is one
>thing which is remarkable, which is that all these
>diverse male strategies do evidently have some effect,
>judging from the fact that there are many men who do
>get laid.  If I were a woman I'm not sure I'd want to
>lay a man, as a general principle, and having studied
>the gender.  But, I do know that there are definitely
>certain men I have met who, had I been a woman, I would
>have laid.  No doubt about it.  And maybe even felt
>proud of the fact.
>
>10.  What constitutes layability is not entirely driven
>by modern capitalism.  Some studies on this have been
>reported in Science News.  In any case it would appear
>that both sexes characterize as "attractive" the people
>whose attributes are most average of all
>characteristics.   This means that if you take all the
>dimensions, such as eye width, nose length, jaw width,
>etc., and create (as they do with computers) faces that
>most nearly comply to the average, it is those faces
>which get rated most highly by people of all cultures.
>...

Funny post.  I think you might find David M. Buss, *The Evolution of
Desire: Strategies of Human Mating* (Basic Books, 1994) an interesting
read.  I tried to bring this up on PEN-L a while ago and was told
gruffly that the evolutionary approach was nonsense and that gender
roles were determined ("constituted") entirely socially.

Although I think the book is flawed by its relative lack of concern
for social effects, particularly production relations, and its
concentration on mostly modern Western sexual/gender relations, it
does have a good deal of interesting things.  Also of interest is
David M. Buss and Neil M. Malamuth (eds.), *Sex, Power, Conflict:
Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives* (Oxford University Press,
1996).

In the first book, on pp. 76 to 78, is the section on "Lust", which I
think you'd find amenable to your views.

Since human nature changes extremely slowly, but social conditions are
more subject to change, I would think that looking at our evolutionary
past would be a reasonable thing to do (in addition, of course, to
looking at social conditions).

Bill