At the risk of sounding dumb or right wing or something bad, I'm curious why it is crude or slimy to surmise that men might be biologically predisposed (not rigidly determined) to find apparently fertile women more attractive, or to test this proposition, or to discover that there is what appears be some evidence supporting it?
It's exactly what sociobiology -- indeed just plain biology -- would lead you expect. Wouldn't males males whow ere attracted to women who were in fact more fertile be more successful in propagating? Wouldn't, therefore, they be more likely to select for women who had apparant signs of fertility, thus making women who had those signs more likely to propagate?
Notice that the biologically based behavioral phenomena at issue here are on the male end -- what's being selected for in women on this hypothesis are not necessarily behavioral traits at all. Behavior like wearing makeup might be explained in part by women who wish to be attractive to men attempting to look like women who are attractive to men because they independently have physical characteristics that attract men, and those might do so because they are evidence of fertility.
t's also consistent with lots of other things we know about human sexual behavior, e.g., the propensity, which is pretty cross-cultural, of men to prefer mates who are younger than themselves, and therefore more likely to be able to bea children, and more of them. (Which doesn't mean that either the men or the women in such relationships will want children.)
The usual caveats apply -- no reasonable and biologically knwoleageable person would say that if there is such a biologically based propensity that it trumps all other considerations or is unaffected by cultural or other environmental constraints, or cannot be altered or reduced, e.g., by training. Finally and most importantly, a sociobiological explanation of a behavior is not thereby a justification for it.
I suppose what people might find objectionable about a male preference for apparently fertile women is that it might lead to prejudice in choosing mates against older women and also involves or suggests a relative lack of interest in other qualities that we think should matter more than physical appearance, such as intelligence, decency, niceness -- moral and psychological qualities we'd value in anyone regardless of sex.
But this prejudice and this kind of superficiality may well be real, in which case they call out for explanation. It's not particularly an explanation to say, our culture is patriarchial. First because that just pushes the explanatory question back one level (why is it patriarcha?), and second, the existence of patriarchy doesn't explain why this particular set of prejudices. If the basic exaplantion for patriarchy is merely the psychic charge or economic advantage men as a group get by keeping women subordinate, that doesn't explain why would there be a male preference for women who appear fertile or are younger.
jks
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