I read this short article on the UK Telegraph site, and by the start of the second sentence I knew I had to send it to the IG. So I copied the URL and opened and email and pasted it in, went back to paste in the first 2 lines for the relevant quote, and began to type a quick sentence about how this is bad news for her. Before I could finish that, I started to think a little more deeply about the article, and before I knew it I'd typed her several paragraphs, mostly concentrating on what a crappy article this was, and how the logic was backwards, and how the conclusions were a messy jumble of misstated and misapplied evo-dev. At that point it became clear that I had to turn it into a blog post, so I finished up, control+A, control+V, control+Enter, and then returned to the browser and clicked the Blogger icon on my bookmarks toolbar. And here I am.
The
article is here, and I'll quote the whole thing, since it's very short. So short they had to defy grammatical structure and turn every sentence into a paragraph so it would fill the page even semi-acceptably. (I've reformatted it here, but not rewritten it, though the urge to improve it was almost a biological compunction.)
8.2 seconds needed to fall in love
The time needed for a man to fall in love at first sight is 8.2 seconds, scientists claim.
The longer a man's gaze rests on a woman when they meet for the first time, the more interested he is. If it last just four seconds, he may not be all that impressed. But if it breaks the 8.2 second barrier, he could already be in love they say. However the same is not true for women. They let their eyes linger on men for the same length of time whether they find them attractive or not.
Hidden cameras were used to secretly track the eye movements of 115 students as they spoke to actors and actresses. They were then asked to rate their conversation partner's attractiveness. The men looked into the eyes of actresses they considered beautiful for an average of 8.2 seconds, but that dropped to 4.5 seconds when gazing at those they rated less attractive, the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior reported. The female students, however, looked at the actors for the same length of time. The researchers believe that men use eye contact to seek out fit and fertile mates. But women are more wary of attracting unwanted attention because of the risks of unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood.
The longer a man's gaze rests on a woman when they meet for the first time, the more interested he is. If it last just four seconds, he may not be all that impressed. But if it breaks the 8.2 second barrier, he could already be in love they say. However the same is not true for women. They let their eyes linger on men for the same length of time whether they find them attractive or not.
It seems a fairly simple, straightforward piece, and that was my initial thought, as I started to forward it to the IG. It's funny to us (she and me) since she routinely gets the longest, least subtle, most awkward stares from total strangers. Men, usually, though sometimes women as well.
Just this week we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in San Rafael, and the busboy almost tripped as he walked past our booth with his big plastic tub of dirty dishes. He came from behind me, and when he saw the IG's face he locked on, to the exclusion of all other sensory stimuli. And nearly walked right into a table since he kept moving forward while staring to his right.
She had a bit of makeup on, a remnant of a job interview she'd been to that morning, but was still very casual and natural looking, and she gets those kind of male reactions even when she's got on zero makeup and has bags under her eyes. I'm not going to post a picture of her, but that thumbnail to the right is the next best thing.
That picture is
not the IG; it's one I saw online as part of a collection of "hot bartenders" or something like that. Click the thumb to see the full size, bartending version. I include it since the woman looks a lot like the IG. Facially, at least. I wouldn't mistake that woman for the IG, but they could certainly be sisters. In fact, I've met the IG's younger sister, and that bartender looks a lot more like the IG's sister than her own sister does. If that makes any sense. The IG dresses much more casually/conservatively, though she's got a body to flaunt it, if she were so inclined. (She is not, at least not very often.)
That exposition entered into the record, I'll return to the Telegraph article that started this whole train of thought.
My initial thought was how superficial the article was, and how they had the causality of the looks vs. love screwed up. It's not that men look longer at women they wind up being in love with, as if it's some kind of predictor of relationship longevity. It's a three-fold fact that's got zero to do with love. 1) Men like looking at pretty women. 2) Men look longer at women they find attractive. 3) Men are more likely to fall in "love" with women they find attractive.
Really, that's all the study found out, at least according to the article. And for that they needed a grant, hundreds of volunteers, hidden cameras, etc? No wonder tuition keeps increasing every year.
An article about that wouldn't be so bad, and in fact, this article isn't that much teh suck, if you just read the article. It's the headline that's so misguided. And misleading. After all, the study and the text of the article have nothing to do with "love." The study was purely about attraction, or perhaps lust, and it performed admirably in confirming that yes, men look longer at women they think are hot.
Again, let's pause to admire the quality of their research. I hope their contact info is readily obtained, for the convenience of the Noble committee.
Finally, the info about how long women look is presented, and it's not without value. That women don't look much longer at men they think are hot is an interesting tidbit. Again, it's not exactly a revelation that most women are more subtle about expressing their interest (and/or disintest) than are Big Bad Wolf-like men. But documenting it scientifically was a semi-worthy endeavor. The attempt to shoehorn in some elemental evolutionary-development psychology is pretty much a fail, though.
The article (which is probably not to blame, since I suspect its author was simply trying to summarize the abstract of a scientific paper in very few words) isn't exactly incorrect, but it grossly simplifies things.
"The researchers believe that men use eye contact to seek out fit and fertile mates." Yeah, as the article says, current ev-dev theory posits that the root biological reason that men prefer young, slim, bright-eyed, "beautiful" women is that those are outward signs that said woman is healthy and biologically fit and capable of producing offspring. It's weird to phrase that as the reason men look longer at attractive women on the first meeting though, since no one, even the few men (like me) who have read enough ev-dev to give thought to their biological motivations, give it a thought at the time. We (men) just see pretty, youthful, slim, smiling, etc, and we like and we want to look longer since 1) we like, and 2) we want to express our interest.
By the same token, ev-dev says that women are more choosy about their partners since they bear the physical costs of pregnancy and since they can only bear the offspring of one man at a time, and since they can't count on having that many babies in a lifetime. A man can spray his seed around (figuratively speaking) very widely, since he can impregnate as many women as he can get hold of. A woman can't have 10 babies at once, so she has to be picky about whose baby she has, especially since human young aren't quick or easy to rear. Which is why women naturally try to choose stable, resource-rich mates who are likely to help in that process. Again, this is all biology influencing psychology/behavior. (Influence is all it does since humans have enough brain power to act contrary to their biological imperatives, for better or worse.)
That women aren't as prone to obviously advertising their interest doesn't stem directly from their biological imperatives, though. It's partly biological in origin; showing too much interest makes men think/know she's "easy" and while men 1) love and try to take advantage of female promiscuity, they 2) cherish it for it in short term relationships, but 3) select against it when picking a long term mate. But it's mostly a learned, socialized behavior, for reasons the article did mention.
"...women are more wary of attracting unwanted attention because of the risks of unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood." That's self evident, but those are the results of choosing a poor mate, not the basis for mate selection itself.
So on that level, the article's ev-dev component fails. It gives a fundamental male ev-dev motivation, but then jumps to a socially and culturally second order explanation for female length (or not) of eye contact. The article is consistent in misapplying the faux ev-dev logic to female eye contact, though. No woman tears her eyes off of a hot guy while thinking, "I can't appear too interested since I would suffer adversely in case of an unwanted pregnancy." Nigga,
as they say, please.
(For the benefit of international oreaders, I should probably explain that that slang term means something like, "You must be joking, for your assertion was carved from pure unadulterated nonsense." And no, I wouldn't/couldn't verbalize that expression, cause I'm like, white. And stuff. But it's okay in a blog when I link to a sketch from the Chris Rock show because um... I have black friends? Anyway... moving right along.)
I'd say that the fact that women don't linger over their eye contact is much more a cultural, learned behavior than anything spurred by primal biological motivations. Every woman knows, especially the pretty ones, that men do not need any encouragement to show excessive interest. And since that's frequently aggravating to be the target of, women learn to be less friendly, non-flirty, dress down, avoid eye contact, etc. The IG engages in all of those behaviors, and still has constant unwanted male attention, on top of occasional outright harassment and stalking. Half of our conversations are her asking me why guys are so fucking clueless and persistent, and trying to figure how she can remain her normal, friendly, upbeat self when just talking casually to any of her co-workers results almost inevitably in her being hit on, pestered, bored with their sexual braggadocio, and on and on.
Sadly, I have not yet found many answers for her. My ev-dev reading has made me pretty good at explaining the biological root causes of those kinds of male behaviors. Sadly, that's not what she wants here, since the IG isn't doing that usual female thing of thinking aloud while she pours out her troubles and worries. She actually wants advice on how to be friends, or at least friendly with guys, without them always wanting to fuck her. Or at least without them making that fact so obvious that it overshadows all other interactions, in any circumstance. My usual inclination is to say that if she had a boyfriend, like me for instance, then she'd have a ready excuse/explanation to fend off the men. But that's 1) not a very useful strategy to deal with unwanted attention (the guy can even take it as a bonus, since that means sex wouldn't lead to the encumbrance of a relationship), and 2) I'd just be doing the same thing those other guys were doing, from my privileged best friend/imaginary big brother position.
As always, I'm left wondering what exactly it is that women see in men. Ev-dev answers that one too. Fortunately. For every heterosexual male on Earth.
Labels: gender issues, psychology, the I.G.
