When men do think about their appearance, I think it's much more likely they are thinking how they appear to other men. I think any reasonable review of costume and apparel over the centuries would find men dressing competitively and aggressively, without much thought to whether girls like what they're wearing or not. Do you think Maori men tattoo their faces because their girlfriends ask them to? Did Vikings and Samurai put horns on their helmets because their wives thought it was sexy?
It seems to me that the male courtship displays of most vertebrates are at least as much about threatening other males as they are about attracting females. I think male clothing has consistently been visual armor and that, of course, continues today with biker-wear, gangsta-wear and the display of sports team logos. Men have, throughout history, worn things that signified violence and combat. East and West, North and South and throughout history, this is a very consistent pattern.
What it suggests, of course, is what I have been saying - that men tend to be attuned to visual stimulation - sexual stimulation by women and violent stimulation by other men - and this may be because we have a lot of testosterone running through our veins our whole lives. Just as male moose will charge during the rut, as a male elephant seal will sexually maul an automobile during mating season and a usually peaceful silverback gorilla will beat his chest in anxiety (that's actually what they're expressing) and then charge when he sees his harem encroached upon, male Homo sapiens are distracted by silicone-inflated breasts and provoked by the sight of fans wearing a rival team's jersey - as we would expect.
That it is "natural" doesn't make it right, but if we're trying to understand male behavior, it's useful to figure out where it comes from.
boddi
On 11/18/05, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
> Thu Nov 17 20:33:34 PST 2005
>
> > Still, we have these consistent patterns and its entirely
> > reasonable to understand some portion of our behavior as mediated
> > by our biology.
>
> The total number of human beings that have ever lived is estimated to
> be about 100 billion. If you find a consistent pattern that applies
> to all or most of them, you might justifiably suspect a biological
> foundation for it. But if you find a consistent pattern among, say,
> 1% of them but not in others, a more plausible way of going about
> understanding the pattern in question is that it's a peculiar culture
> that the 1% have developed among themselves, owing to a peculiar
> evolution of production and reproduction of social lives among them.
>
> The idea that having their bodies desired, wanting to make them
> desirable, ornamenting them for display, etc. is "not a big part of
> sexuality for most men" is hardly a consistent pattern that applies
> to all human beings across time and cultures. If anything, among
> many species of animals, males tend to ornament themselves more than
> females, for sexual selection depends on females. In human history,
> too, the idea that men's job is looking and desiring, not being
> looked at and desired, is a bourgeois Western invention, exemplified
> by the development of monotonous male business uniforms -- most
> prominently three-piece suits -- a peculiar institution that has
> since spread wider and wider among men of all cultures due to the
> power of the Western cultural hegemony backed by its material
> wealth. Before that, clothes were determined by social classes as
> well as genders, and there was no pattern that made men's clothes
> more drab and boring than women's in the same class. Among the so-
> called primitive tribes today, physical ornamentation is as common
> among men as women. You look at literature across time and cultures,
> and you notice that till recently there was no taboo ("what, are you
> gay?") against men taking note of and effusively complimenting other
> men's beauty and desirability. In this respect modern Western men
> are poorer than their ancestors.
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi
> <http://montages.blogspot.com>
> <http://monthlyreview.org>
> <http://mrzine.org>
>
>
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