Understanding Sexual Attraction - Men's

09/03/2022 17:49 Understanding Sexual Attraction: Men's Health.
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Why You're Drawn to Gorgeous Women

What strange chemistry makes a man and a woman lust only for each other? A
scientific look at the magic of seduction
BY
LAURENCE GONZALES AND WILLIE CAMDEN
JUL 26, 2005
Making Eyes, Making Love
Once, years ago, I was walking on a street in downtown Chicago, and the most
remarkable thing happened. It was a warm, sunny day, the trees were blooming, and
the sidewalk was crowded with people coming and going. I had finished an
appointment and was on my way to my car.
As I passed a Starbucks, half thinking I might buy a coffee, I saw a beautiful woman
walking toward me. I'd never seen her before. But our eyes met, and as we passed
each other, our heads turned. I could see the beginning of a smile forming on her
face, and as we continued walking and turning, things began to get strange.
She stopped. I couldn't break the gaze, and I stopped, too. I faced her from 10 or 15
feet away. Time seemed to slow. The crowds surged around us, but my field of vision
narrowed. All I saw was her.
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I closed the distance between us, and now we were both smiling, both staring. "Who
are you?" I asked.
She said her name was Dori, and I introduced myself.
"What's going on?" she asked, and it was obvious that she meant this strange dance
we were doing.
"I don't know," I said. "I think we'd better go have coffee."
"Okay," she said.
Dori made eyes. She worked with eye doctors, and when someone lost an eye, Dori
would create a new one to replace it, hand-painting the iris to match the real one.
She was an ocularist, and we were gazing at each other intently.
We weren't conscious of it at the time, but now it seems obvious: We were far along
in a mating dance whose steps we all follow, but few of us understand. Certainly Dori
and I didn't understand it, but we were dancing as hard as we could that day.
As I would learn much later, gaze is extremely important as partners come together.
It starts at a very young age. Babies crave being gazed at by their mothers. A baby's
survival depends on his mother's paying attention, and all normal mothers find
gazing at their babies irresistible.
Later in life, we learn that gazing stimulates us sexually. Our pupils dilate, blurring
critical focus, and that makes us even more attracted to others.
As we gazed into each other's eyes, Dori touched my hand. That first contact was
electric, and a moment later, I found myself touching her arm. And we still couldn't
take our eyes off each other. Then I began to smell her. Or perhaps I'd been smelling
her all along and didn't know it.
The way we met baffled Dori and me for the longest time. But after a couple of
decades of research, I began to understand it. In fact, it is a complex process our
success as a species depends on, and, hence, is too important to entrust to our
conscious minds. That's why there's such mystery and aura associated
with attraction and love -- we literally are wired not to understand, just to act. By
the time the first words are spoken, a man and woman already know each other's
intentions. And verbal communication is the least of it.
The Evolution of Sex

As Dori and I sat there -- gazing, touching, smelling -- we were sending huge
amounts of information back and forth with our faces and bodies. We groped our
way deeper and deeper into each other.
What happened next was inevitable. After coffee, we found ourselves doing our
synchronized dance on the floor of her apartment overlooking the lake. We were the
crazy kids in the backseat, enjoying the ride, but clearly, something else very
powerful was driving.
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To get a general idea of how this works, let's take a quick trip through the
evolutionary history of sex.
There are lots of different life strategies represented in surviving species. Some of the
oldest creatures on Earth, for example, can't move at all. They are ancient trees, and
they're very successful, if you discount the effects the logging industry has had on
them. Reptiles represent another strategy. They can move around and eat things.
Crocodiles are among the oldest creatures on Earth, having lived before the age of
the great dinosaurs. Their brains are little more than dim lightbulbs on top of a spinal
cord, and accordingly, they're capable of only a rudimentary system of responses that
allows them to attack prey and to mate. They lay eggs, and when baby crocodiles
hatch, their first job is to get as far away from the mom as possible, since she will eat
them, too.
But a few hundred million years ago, a new creature came along and thrived,
because instead of eating its young, it cared for them. Some of the earliest ones laid
eggs, and had a pouch for carrying the infant and nipples for feeding it. These
evolved into creatures that, instead of laying eggs, gave birth to live young and took
care of them until they had developed relative independence.
But to have those kinds of interactions required a brain that was more than a dim
bulb. A new layer of brain material developed, which we call the limbic system, the
seat of emotional responses.
As these new creatures, called mammals, evolved further, the limbic system grew in
size and complexity. Mammals, like reptiles, had a range of instinctive responses to
the world, such as fight-or-flight reactions. But the limbic system gave them the
ability to learn all sorts of new responses and automate them. They had complex
memory. They could learn.
But the most remarkable ability the limbic system gave these creatures was the
ability to assess the internal state of another animal -- and to change it. Reptiles don't
play with each other. Mammals do.
Mammals and reptiles both make noises through which they can transmit
information, but mammals are capable of a much richer variety of language. They
also have a completely revolutionary means of communicating. They have faces.
It's the Biology, Stupid!

Facial expression is a universal form of communication among mammals. This silent,
secret communication system is made possible in part by the fact that facial muscles
are the only muscles in the body that attach directly to the skin, which allows for
infinite subtleties of expression.
Body language is nearly as expressive, with its infinite variety of attitudes to display
emotion. People are no exception. In fact, they're virtuosos at this type of
communication.
Most people recognize, at least on a gut level, that what you say is often far less
important than how you say it. And how you say it involves powerful and complex
messages sent by facial expression, body language, tone of voice, and even scent.
Any man who's ever seen his beloved roll her eyes at him knows what this means:
contempt. (It's one of the worst emotions she can display, and its presence in a
relationship is one of the best predictors of a coming divorce.)
Making this all the more difficult is the fact that much of this communication takes
place beyond the reach of our conscious awareness. We do it constantly, but we don't
know it.
We're all familiar with the sensation of instantly clicking with someone we meet.
Having "chemistry," we call it. We're familiar with the opposite feeling, too, when
being with someone makes us uncomfortable. The explanation for both lies in the
complex communications transmitted through facial expression, body language, and
other unconscious physical signals, including smell.
As you go up the evolutionary ladder, you find an increasing tendency among

mammals, especially primates, to mimic one another. This is done automatically and
unconsciously as a means of communication. We telegraph our emotional states
externally through facial expression, posture, and so on, and the researchers who
study this say that if we mimic the external signs of an emotion, we will feel it inside
as well.
As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational, we are far more physical and far
more influenced by the physical. As Paul Ekman, a famed researcher into nonverbal
communication, showed in his psychophysiological experiments, if you spend enough
time frowning, you'll begin to feel sad. If you stand up straight and walk with
purpose, you'll feel more confident.
Working out makes you feel good for quite a while afterward, because it forces you
into attitudes of confidence and power. It makes you feel big, even if you're not. It's
why gorillas beat their chests.
This has a basis in our evolutionary history, as cooperation increased the chances of
survival. To cooperate, you have to know -- and, more important, care about -- what's
going on with the others in your group. You have to first imitate what the other is
doing, which leads to feeling his emotional state.
That's where empathy comes from. Monkey see, monkey do, yes. But when one
monkey does what the other monkey is doing, he also feels what the other is feeling.
The development of emotion represents an enormous evolutionary leap.
Speak with Your Eyes

When two adults are communicating through this channel -- which is far more
powerful than words -- they not only catch each other's emotional state, but their
heart rates, breathing, speech patterns, and skin conductance all synchronize as well.
High-speed cameras demonstrate how this system works. Complete shifts in facial
expression -- from a happy smile to a horrified grimace and back to a smile -- can
take place within a fifth of a second, too quickly to register in our conscious minds.
Two people who are communicating in this way will synchronize their speech
patterns and rhythms within as little as a 20th of a second. As Elaine Hatfield, author
of Emotional Contagion, writes, "The number of characteristics people can mimic
simultaneously is staggering."
The better the synchrony, the better the rapport.
When it comes to men and women interacting like this, the effects can be profound,
and virtually irresistible. You don't even have to be open to romantic involvement to
be susceptible.
In one experiment, psychologists paired men and women and told them to gaze into
each other's eyes for 2 minutes. Afterward, they experienced greater feelings of
romantic love, attraction, interest, warmth, and respect than control groups felt.
You'll note that conversation wasn't part of the experiment. Indeed, maybe it just gets
in the way. When the possibility of sex or love is involved, emotional synchrony
coupled with evolutionary imperatives can quickly become a runaway train.
It's (Almost) All in the Hips

You are about as smart as all the other primates, and that means you sometimes
behave like a chimp. You have only one extra tool, one slim hope of salvation: It's a
layer of brain cells -- more developed in humans than in other animals that have it --
that would be about the size of a couple of big dinner napkins if removed from the
surface of your brain, unfolded, and laid out flat.
This layer of cells is unreliable, however, and crashes more often than your laptop.
It's called the neocortex, and it helps us conjure all the reasons we make up to
explain the moronic things we do, from wrecking the car to bedding the secretary. It's
the reason René Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," while the rest of the brain --
the part that's really in charge -- is the reason that old René was dead wrong.
As you flirt with the drunken bridesmaid at your brother's wedding, it's the neocortex
that asks, "Are you insane?" But it isn't influential enough to stop the rest of the
brain, which holds sway, especially if she's willing enough and you're drunk enough.
(Alcohol impairs the neocortex first, letting the limbic system run wild.)
The Genetics of Attraction

The problem stems from the cold facts of evolution. What we call civilization has
existed for a fraction of a second in evolutionary time. While social customs, culture,
and technology have been changing at breakneck speed, our brains and bodies have
been slaves to evolutionary time. They haven't had time to change in any significant
way during the few thousand years since we were all hunters and gatherers, when
our only job was survival.
Survival means one thing: staying alive long enough to reproduce, so that the next
generation can stay alive long enough to reproduce. Nothing else matters. Or at least
it didn't when our brains were designed. This job, reproduction, was a brutal affair --
and it still is.
Romantic love is a nice idea, but if you want to know what really motivates your
behavior -- as opposed to the fairy tales you and your girlfriend tell yourselves about
it -- then listen up. As the don of animal behavior, Richard Dawkins of Oxford
University, said when he first published his book The Selfish Gene, "We are survival
machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules

known as genes.
This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for
years, I never seem to get fully used to it."
Let's take a look at that selfish gene in action. You're walking along the street, just as
I was the day I met Dori. A stunningly beautiful woman walks past. Your head turns.
And something begins happening in your body. Your heart rate increases, and you
begin to sweat ever so slightly.
Glucocorticoids and norepinephrine begin zinging around in your bloodstream.

Blood pumps up your skeletal muscles -- so you look fit -- and your groin, in case she
buys the look. Tiny muscle fibers attached to each hair on your body contract so that
you have approximately 5 million erections. Something powerful has taken hold of
you. What's going on?
The first reason you think this woman is beautiful is that her thick mane of gleaming
hair and her fine, smooth skin tell you that she's healthy and probably isn't playing
host to any parasites -- say, a 20-foot tapeworm. You want -- or, I should say, the part
of the brain that controls your behavior wants -- to make sure that she'll survive a
pregnancy and bear healthy offspring.
The reason birds in the tropics are so colorful is that the tropics are parasite heaven.
A bird hosting parasites won't have sufficient metabolic resources to support that
colorful plumage, so it's easier to tell who's healthy enough for reproduction.
Hair is a visible record of not only a woman's health, but her history, too. It takes
about 3 years to grow shoulder-length hair, and since it's not essential to survival, it
suffers first if we're not well. Hair reveals our diet, our habits (drugs and smoking
affect hair quality), and our aesthetic choices.
You're a Dirty Old Man

In her book Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff points out that hair is one of the
most powerful sexual signals as well. Healthy hair has rich texture and color, and
fluid motion, and it smells good, too. The stimulating effect of hair is so profound
that many cultures throughout history have either made women cover their heads
after marriage or even cut off their hair.
And many a modern man in America has been baffled and saddened when his wife,
after a scant few months of marriage, has shorn the fabulous head of hair she had
when they met. There's a reason: She no longer needs it to attract a mate, and it's a
lot of work to keep that sexual flag waving.
The second reason the woman on the street captured your attention is that she's
young. This tells you she probably has not been pregnant before. When your brain
was fashioned by natural selection, the first man who impregnated a woman had a
good chance of dominating her reproductive years.
Some thousands of years ago, women were either pregnant or nursing almost
continuously from puberty until death (at around age 40, if they were lucky). Since
nursing inhibits ovulation, this reduced the chances of becoming pregnant.
The reason men of any age continue to like young girls is that we were designed to
get them pregnant and dominate their fertile years by keeping them that way. If we
could monopolize the reproductive years of more than one woman, all the better.
When your first wife has lost the overt signals of reproductive viability, you desire a
younger woman who still has them all. In many cultures, it's perfectly acceptable at
that point for a man to take a younger wife (and keep the first one). In our culture,
it's taboo, yet the advertisements for it are everywhere.
When the facial proportions of models in Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines were
analyzed, they turned out to be closest to those of a 7-year-old. That's a bit young,
but in most cultures for almost all of the history of Homo sapiens, a woman would
have her first child between the ages of 12 and 15, usually with a man around 18
years old. Only our opinions about that have changed, not our innate machinery.
The third reason you've been taken hostage by the woman on the street, according to
Etcoff, is that the woman's lips are full and red, which tells you that although she's
young, she is capable of reproduction. At puberty, estrogen causes girls' lips to swell
and flush, reaching their peak at age 14. It causes their vaginal lips to do the same,
which makes them more receptive to intercourse.
When their natural bloom fades, women wear lipstick, because this signal of their
ability to reproduce renders them more attractive. They've done so for perhaps
40,000 years. Certainly, the ancient Egyptians did.
Your Neocortex: Nature's Condom

Other signals of her reproductive capacity are her big breasts and the small waistline
that accentuates her hips, demonstrating that she can carry a child. Researchers have
found that women with the classic hourglass shape are twice as likely to become
pregnant as women with other shapes. The woman on the street has an hourglass
figure, and her clothing accentuates it. Her high heels also make her back arch,
emphasizing those curves.
And that brings us to the fourth reason you find that random girl on the street so
irresistible. If the first three do their jobs, you'll be close enough to perform the first
truly intimate, personal act of the mating dance. You will inhale her scent.
Smell is the biggest of the big guns when it comes to bringing men and women -- or
any animals -- together. We don't like to talk about smell. We think we're beyond that.
We've spent vast amounts of money and energy trying to deny that we're animals,
controlled by animal things. We spend billions trying to eradicate our natural odors.
And now the very cleverness that sets us apart through our inventions is revealing
our starkly shocking animal nature.
By now we've all heard of pheromones, hormones produced in the skin to sway
behavior in others. We're so arrogant that we denied for the longest time that we
even had a system for detecting pheromones. Now, we understand the function of the
human vomeronasal system, located alongside the nasal septum. Yes, we're
controlled by smell. And the most powerful scents are the ones that most of us can't
consciously detect.
Both men and women give off pheromones called androstenes, but men emit more of
them. Women secrete lipids known as copulins in their vaginas. Both are used as
powerful communication channels. Some people can detect them consciously, but
most can't. (It doesn't matter. The conscious part of our brain is all but irrelevant to
the most important work we do.)
When women are exposed to androstenes, they feel better and find that people look
better to them. When androstenes were applied to chairs in a theater and a dentist's
office, women chose those seats, while men rejected them. Of course, none of them
knew what was on the chairs or thought the chairs smelled one way or another.
The Power of a Woman's Scent

Astrid Jutte, a researcher who worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban
Ethnology, in Vienna, exposed men to a copulin that women give off when they're
ovulating and found that it increased the men's testosterone levels by 50 percent. The
test subjects also rated women's faces and voices as more attractive after the men had
smelled copulins, even though they either could not detect the smell or didn't find it
pleasant.
Since a woman's sense of smell is also most acute during ovulation, men and women
are biologically tuned to read each other by smell alone in such a way as to increase
the chances that they'll reproduce.
There are powerful and complex messages contained in those smells, which are
produced by our immune systems. We are sampling each other's genes when we take
in copulins and androstenes, particularly the genes of the so-called major
histocompatibility complex (MHC). MHC genes are the ones that detect foreign
organisms, like bacteria. This allows us to tell by smell alone how closely someone is
related to us.
Researchers have shown that people choose mates whose MHC is least like their own.
A Swiss researcher gave women T-shirts that had been slept in by men and asked
them if they liked the smell. The women preferred the ones from men who were
genetically different, and thought the others smelled like their brothers or fathers.
Of course, out there on the street, you have no thoughts about genetic compatibility
or childbearing. Probably the farthest thing from your mind is having a child with
that beautiful woman. But that doesn't matter. What you think counts for almost
nothing.
In the environment that crafted your brain and body, an environment in which you
might be dead within minutes of spotting this beauty, the only thing that counted
was that your clever neocortex -- your seat of higher reason -- be turned off so that
you could quickly select a suitable mate, impregnate her, and succeed in passing on
your genes to the next generation.
In one psychological experiment, men were shown photographs of beautiful women

who were nude. After viewing them, the men said they were less in love with their
wives. This makes perfect sense if Dawkins's theory is correct. The theory is that
everything animals -- including humans -- do has one ultimate and overwhelming
aim: to pass along our genes, and to do it as widely as possible. Your genes don't care
about your wife or girlfriend or what the neighbors will say.
So, when you look at that beautiful woman on the street (or at a party or at the
office), you're also primed for the next step in the process. Whether you want to, or
should, take that next step largely depends on your social circumstances --
circumstances that can be correctly assessed only through the use of your neocortex,
which survival forces urgently want to shut off.
If you're happily married and devoted to the offspring of that union, you clearly
should not act on your natural impulse. If you're a single man looking for a good
time or even a mate, you should act on it. It's the inability, coded into our DNA, to
match the circumstances to the impulse that leads men into scalding trouble.
Rationality Takes Over

Since the Enlightenment, we have embraced reason as the guiding principle in our
affairs. Although the pendulum has swung toward favoring emotion at times, the
mating of science and technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left us
with supreme confidence in ourselves as rational beings.
We firmly believe in the ultimate power of the neocortex over the reptilian brain.
Warning labels on everything from stepladders to baby carriages betray our belief
that all you have to do is tell people what makes the most sense and they'll behave
accordingly. Yet, read a few headlines and it's clear that's not how the world works.
The outpourings of neuroscience and psychology over the past 20 years, aided by
new technology that can look inside the brain and body while they do their urgent
work, is very clearly showing that our emotional systems, far more than our rational
thinking, control all behavior to an extent that is unsettling.
On the whole, this has been a good thing for our survival. In fact, these new
scientists have dignified it with a clever name: the adaptive unconscious, a hot area
of study. But that same system can also tie us in knots at times, especially when it
comes to adaptive mating behavior in a modern world.
Even so, hope does still lie in the workings of the neocortex. Reason and emotion
work like a seesaw. The higher the emotion (or any sort of stress), the more difficult
it becomes to reason. Although there are obvious advantages to the rational parts of
our brains, which allow us to plan and shape decisions, our emotional systems take
over when something urgent is at stake.
With an awareness of these systems, and with a lot of caution and practice, most of
us should be able to learn to tell the drunken bridesmaid, "My neocortex seems to
have gone down, which is one really good reason we shouldn't do this."
So, what happened between Dori and me?
It remains the strangest encounter either of us has ever had. We did not end up
staying together, but we certainly did have a lot of fun for a while. We're still friends
who feel something thrilling when we see each other. Our bodies weren't wrong; the
timing was.
The mating dance is one thing, but there's a whole world of social organization -- the
family, the community -- that lies beyond that dance floor. Chimpanzees may not
realize it, but we do. It's another of our genetic advantages: the emotional context we
pass on to our children. It ensures a better range of mating options than what you
just turn up on the street
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HEALTH ENTERTAINMENT FITNESS STYLE GROOMING

Why You're Drawn to Gorgeous Women

Making Eyes, Making Love

MORE FROM MEN'S HEALTH

She said her name was Dori, and I introduced myself.

"Okay," she said.

The Evolution of Sex

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

seat of emotional responses.

It's the Biology, Stupid!

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

As you go up the evolutionary ladder, you find an increasing tendency among

Speak with Your Eyes

The better the synchrony, the better the rapport.

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

It's (Almost) All in the Hips

The Genetics of Attraction

machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

Glucocorticoids and norepinephrine begin zinging around in your bloodstream.

You're a Dirty Old Man

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

Your Neocortex: Nature's Condom

The Power of a Woman's Scent

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

In one psychological experiment, men were shown photographs of beautiful women

Rationality Takes Over

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

So, what happened between Dori and me?

Want six-pack abs? Start here.

Enter your email address here. LET'S DO THIS.

ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

SURVIVAL OF THE HOTTEST

About Men's Health Newsletter

Customer Care E-prints, Reprints

Give a Gift Manage Email Preferences

Other Hearst Subscriptions Media Kit

Hearst Men's and

©2022 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

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