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

2.

It can be rather disturbing to have someone else predict whom we are going to want to sleep with before we have even had a chance to form our own opinion. The evolutionary biologists’ experiments feel like one of those magic tricks in which a conjuror blindfolds us and uncannily foretells which card we are going to pick out from among a well-shuffled pack. But unlike conjurors, evolutionary biologists have no truck with the supernatural; they maintain that there are reasoned scientific motives behind our preferences for certain faces. Symmetry and balance matter so much to us because their opposites – facial asymmetry and imbalance – are markers of diseases contracted either in the womb or in the early years of life, at a time when the greater part of the self is still being shaped. A foetus whose DNA has been corrupted by microbes or who has endured debilitating stresses during the first months of gestation will reveal these misfortunes in the arrangement of his or her features. Our looks are indicators of our genetic destiny.

It is hard to dispute the evolutionary–biological thesis that for an ancient segment of our brain, which is obsessed with survival, beauty is the ultimate hallmark of health. Evolutionary biology also seems correct in ascribing considerable importance even to the most minor aspects of facial appearance – arguing, for example, that a millimetre more or less across the bridge of our nose or between our eyebrows may have major implications for the way people respond to us. The discipline absolves physical attraction of the charge of being purely superficial. While conceding that we judge people by their appearance, it holds that appearances themselves are anything but trivial and indeed point towards some rather profound qualities. To be turned on by someone is to be fascinated by something important about them, sexual desire and the appreciation of beauty are linked to one of life’s great projects: the production of children.

3.

After a time, however, the biological explanation for attraction starts to deflate and become a little depressing, for it seems to limit our sexual concern for other people to a single qualifying criterion: how healthy they happen to be.

It isn’t that we don’t care about this quality at all. It’s simply that, given the breadth of requirements that a decent shared life imposes, our positive feelings about the appearance of a prospective mate must have to do with more than just his or her bodily well-being.

The French novelist Stendhal offers us a way out of this scientific cul-de-sac with the maxim ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness’. This definition has the immediate advantage of stretching our understanding of why we might describe certain people as being beautiful. It goes far beyond mere good health: we bestow the word on individuals because we detect in their faces a range of inner traits that we intuit would be of some benefit in the establishment of a successful relationship. We might, for example, perceive in their features such virtues as determination, intelligence, trust, humility and a gently subversive sense of humour. If it is possible for us subconsciously to find evidence of strong resistance to disease in the shape of a nose, why might we not also discover an indicator of patience in the lips, or a cathartic inclination to laugh at life’s absurdities in the brow?

4.

Just how much information our faces can convey becomes apparent when we study portraits by great painters depicting attractive people we don’t know in the flesh. Consider, for example, the rendition by Ingres of a certain Madame Devaucay. The subject is patently good-looking – hence healthy, according to an evolutionary– biological interpretation. But if we wish to explain her charm with any degree of complexity, we will need to look for virtues beyond the reproductive fitness of her DNA. She intrigues us, and may even turn us on, because her face hints at a range of qualities besides health – qualities that (without making any claims to scientific accuracy) we might be able to put words to, and that we might welcome in a flesh-and-blood partner.

Something about Madame Devaucay’s mouth and smile speaks of worldly tolerance. It is easy to believe that we could tell this mouth almost anything (how we hadn’t paid our taxes or had done something bad in the French Revolution or had unusual sexual tastes), and its owner wouldn’t hold us primly to account, wouldn’t react with shock or moralizing or provincial censorship; she would know her fair share about how troubled our souls can get without losing their claim to a fundamental decency. Her nose seems a repository of a native dignity. It somehow indicates that she is privileged but not spoilt, acquainted with suffering yet keen to maintain her elegance in straitened circumstances. Meanwhile, her hairstyle suggests at once a sense of discipline and a touching sensibleness. She might have learnt how to do her hair like this at convent school, where she would doubtless have been one of the favourites of the kindly nuns. As for her eyes, they articulate a bewitching boldness: they would gaze straight at a brutal inquisitor and never look away. She would not back down from her beliefs or betray her friends out of expediency.