Marty… I’m right there with you on many counts… I tend to read things and have fun with them and not really take them too seriously… Especially the mas of research I read each day guised as pseudo science…

But this stuff makes me smile wryly… Thank you for your wonderful contribution.

A.

Men- just like women- cannot be defined simply on the basis of their gender. A part of the equation is not the whole. It sounds like a cliche worthy of Hallmark or Disney but most men (i.e the ones who have grown up enough to realise that Nuts magazine has one use and one use only: loo roll) find people attractive for a myriad of reasons. Mostly, it’s down to the woman’s personality. Is she a nice person? Does she have and follow her passions? Yes, ok. Occasionally, we might look at breasts, bum and other stuff. We’ve all thought with our willies every now and then and it has usually ended in disaster. But, for the most part, men are lot more complex than people give us credit for. We’re also individuals.

The problem with evolutionary psychology is you tend to get broadcasts from the worshippers of Darwin: people who will not rest until every single decision we make is proven to be motivated by insticntive responses. If you read the research, you notice that the findings are written in the “clever, clever” language that makes the simple complicated and places a lot more importance on the findings than they really warrant. Plus, all this is based on the blind faith that the men involved in the research didn’t just make things up as they went along.

I work in the media and I’ve read the Media Law book so here goes: Far be it from me to disparage the work of hard working researchers and I at no point wish to suggest or imply that the researchers misled anyone on purpose or by accident. I’m sure they are sure of their own findings and how they relate to the world. But I think we have to do a Dawkins here and question everything. There’s a lot of research around these days and, if you read and listen to enough of it, you discover that a lot of it contradicts the other stuff. Who knows? Perhaps we’ve evolved to question everything and this is further evidence that what we do and how we react is motivated by learned instincts? Or perhaps I find women attractive for my own reasons and women find me attractive (if you switch all the lights out for a second and squint, I look like George Clooney. Honestly) for their own reasons.

We are so much more than the sum of our parts and, at the end of the day, we are individuals first and foremost.