How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

1.

When we say that we like someone because he or she looks ‘sexy’, it can sound as if we were evaluating another human being by an insultingly superficial standard. Our culture is strict on this point: announcing that we approve of people on the sole basis of their appearance doesn’t go down well in civilized circles. Before declaring a preference for a particular person, we are meant to get to know him or her gradually and via words; we are not supposed to fall in love (or lust) at first sight. It may even seem like a betrayal of others’ humanity to judge them principally by their looks, which they cannot radically alter, rather than their character, which they (supposedly) can. We think of people as being made up of inner and outer selves, and we privilege the former over the latter.

Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that our physical envelopes play an alarmingly important part in our destinies and desires. The wish to sleep with certain people can arise in us long before we have had the chance to get to know them properly – before, that is, we have had any opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with them about their history, interests and feelings. We may immediately call them ‘sexy’, perhaps judging on the basis of nothing more than a photograph or a glimpse in the street, and imagine the pleasure we would take in going on holiday with them, for no more intellectually well founded a reason than that they look nice.

This is shocking, to be sure, but in a book about sex, hard to ignore. So before we dismiss all physical appeal as being meaningless, we should ask what it is that we are really saying when we declare that someone’s looks are a ‘turn-on’. What is it that we are drawn to in them? What is the attractive person attracting us to, precisely?

Here again, evolutionary biology offers powerful and seductive answers. By its logic, we are attracted to beauty for a simple and definitive reason: it is a promise of health. What we call a ‘beautiful’ person – or, if we’re feeling more informal, a ‘sexy’ one – is in essence someone with a strong immune system and ample physical stamina. We like such individuals (or as we may put it, they ‘turn us on’) because we surmise – through that intuitive faculty that nature has granted us to make snap decisions in complex, time-sensitive situations – that with them we would have an unusually good theoretical chance of producing healthy and resilient children.

An impressive range of studies has shown that when random groups of people from around the world are presented with photographs of various male and female faces and asked to rank them in terms of their beauty, the results are surprisingly consistent across all social and cultural milieus. A consensus emerges about which sorts of faces we find most appealing. From these studies, evolutionary biologists have concluded that a ‘sexy’ person of either gender, far from being an unclassifiable abstraction, is in essence someone whose face is symmetrical (that is, the right and left sides match precisely) and whose features are balanced, proportionate and undistorted.