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Originally Posted by boo boo
I think what Tore means is that the desire for hairless women is influenced by the basic biological desire to have an attractive mate, this is common animal behavior, not just human behavior. Shucks some birds actually remove feathers they deem undesirable to make themselves more attractive to mates, sound familiar eh?  |
I don't think Tore was talking generically about sexual selection, which is an accepted reason for the selection of certain sexual traits over evolutionary time, such as women tending to have larger breasts than men.
I think Tore is arguing that women having less body hair, and men desiring women with less body hair, resulted from evolutionary processes hardwiring this preference into people's psyches.
Yet we really don't know if early female hominids developed less apparent body hair than males due to sexual selection for less body hair (which would mean that men picked as their mates the women who had less body hair), or due to natural selection favoring other female attributes, such as hormone levels that increase fertility, with less body hair simply being a byproduct of the traits that actually were the focus of the selection pressure.
Perhaps men, raised without a culture that condemns women's body hair, actually would have no preference for shaved women over women who have their body hair. I argue that the evidence suggests that men are just fine with women who have their body hair, except when the culture has taught men and women that hairless women are more desirable and sexier than women who have their natural body hair.
Humans are *very* susceptible to environmental influence. In fact, that plasticity in our feelings and reactions is one of the defining traits of humans, I'd say. All humans probably feel a sensation of "disgust," but WHAT we feel disgusted by is partly and sometimes largely or solely a product of culture. I argue that culture (not innate biology) has caused people to feel disgusted by women's body hair.