This week’s column at the Good Men Project is a slightly longer one, on a familiar theme: What Young Women Really Want From Older Men. I touch on Sean Penn and Scarlett Johansson, and on the work of evo-psych debunkers like Cordelia Fine and Martha McCaughey. The conclusion:
Part of being a good man is matching your language to your life, matching your desires and your values. Teen girls, and teen boys, need to see the older men in their lives as trustworthy and reliable. Like it or not, in the eyes of a young woman, you’ll never be trustworthy if you’re hitting on girls her age. You’ll be a “creep” and a “perv.” And you’ll have earned those names.
This isn’t about shaming adult men for doing a double-take at a cute high school cheerleader. It’s about gently reminding all of us that what looks so grown up isn’t. It’s about remembering that our libidos should be growing along with the rest of us. Most of us who are over 30 don’t have the same haircut or listen to the same music that we did when we were teens… shouldn’t we be attracted to a completely different age group than we were when we were too young to drive?
If we’re not fathers, we can still be role models. As I see in my own work every day, young people are so hungry for that comforting, steady male energy that only guys who won’t see 30 (or 40, or 50) again can provide. This isn’t about infantilizing young adults. It’s about building a culture where good, kind, and responsible men serve as guides and mentors to young people, boys and girls alike, who need our safety and our strength.
And I’m quoted in this post at Healthy is the New Skinny: Stop trying to steal our SPARKLE!. Commenting on the Abercrombie & Fitch decision to market a padded bikini top to 8 year-olds:
“As offensive as the pushup bikini is, we have to remember it’s part of a larger problem: the aggressive sexualization of children and teens. Girls are taught at an ever earlier age to perform sexiness. Girls are hungry for validation, and the marketers tell them the best way to get that validation is through pretending to be ready for something they barely even understand. Abercrombie and Fitch is part of the problem, but they didn’t create the problem; it’s not as if 8 year-olds can buy these clothes for themselves. The real problem is that we raise girls to believe that the only affirmation that matters is based on looks and desirability.”
Hugo,
Your conclusion is laudable, but your arguments about evolutionary biology are not.
In response to evolutionary based arguments, you suggest two publications.
The first is by Martha McCaughey, who is not a biologist and has not run any of her own experiments to back up her arguments. Instead she argues for a “framework” where the use of evolutionary biology by a few to justify poor behavior is somehow cause for throwing out the whole field. This is not unlike creationists arguing against evolution if they can find something that is not yet explained by the fossil record.
The second piece is by Fine, but her argument is that neuroscience is currently inconclusive, and many of the existing “conclusions” are just restated sexism.
But the key word there is inconclusive – Fine herself does not offer an alternative explanation, she simply says it is not yet available. This is VERY different from offering an evidence based conclusion that what men find attractive is entirely culturally-based.
When you argue that what people find attractive sexually is culturally based, you enter a dubious area – one long occupied by people who believe homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” rather than an innate attraction. If what men find attractive, in general, is determined solely by culture, it is but a baby step to assume that the difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality is likewise determined by culture, yet we know this to be patently false.
There is truth in evolutionary biology, please do not write it off so quickly.
You might be just joining us on this, Mike, but Hugo is not necessarily on board with the concept of homosexuality as innate, he just thinks that it’s not anyone else’s business to correct that sexuality. Heterosexual men’s sexuality, on the other hand, or perhaps any sexuality that too closely for comfort resembles a certain mustachioed cad menacing Pasadena Community College in years past, is apparently public property.
“Spare me the arguments from biology or evolutionary psychology, the ones that excuse predatory old guys from staring at ‘young firm flesh’ because that flesh belongs to a woman near the peak of her fertility. The great lengths to which countless men go to avoid fatherhood suggests that the continued evolutionary imperative to ‘spread one’s seed’ is oversold to the point of being illusory”
This counterargument doesn’t hold up at all. An evolved tendency to find younger women more attractive would make perfect sense even in the absence of any particular interest in fatherhood per se. If sex isn’t decoupled from fertilisation (as has been the case until, in evolutionary terms, extremely recently) then an interest solely the former is perfectly sufficient to ensure offspring. And if child-rearing is primarily a female occupation and/or it’s a more effective gene-passing strategy for males to try to sire as many offspring as possible rather than to devote lots of time to a small number, then a comparative indifference to child-rearing relative to sex would also make sense. The point isn’t that the above is necessarily what has happened, but that saying that attraction must be largely cultural because men are thinking “I’d like to have sex with her” not “I’d like to raise lots of children with her” is silly.
The point that a biological tendency towards some behaviour makes it neither necessarily uncontrollable nor a good idea is a valid one. As is the idea that to confidently state something is of biological origin requires a lot more evidence than a casual just-so story. But the same applies to ascribing it primarily to culture, and a poor, hand-wavy dismissal of the biological argument is not evidence for the cultural one.
Followup: So if people do try to justify pervy behaviour with “it’s in my genes”, the obvious fallacy is that this doesn’t mean it’s considerate, appropriate, moral or something they can’t refrain from, not that it’s obviously all down to culture instead.
Mike, the scare tactics really aren’t appropriate here. Or convincing, particularly when you present it as a dichotomy of 100% nature vs. 100% nurture.
Mythago, what “scare tactics” are you refering to?
I never presented it as 100% nature vs 100% nuture, changing beauty preferences across cultures can easily demonstrate that nuture plays a role.
My point is that nature ALSO plays a role. Biology is a real science, which runs real experiments, and has produced real results. Micro-evolution and its effect on mate choice among lower organisms can be demonstrated. Hugo asking us to “spare him” doesn’t make hard science go away.
To some degree, we are all drawn to certain mates because of evolution, whether we like it or not. Hugo is correct to argue that we need not act on it, but it is not fair for him to simply dismiss an entire field of inquiry because its results may be inconvenient.
Regarding the Abercrombie push-up, yesterday I was listening for s**ts and giggles to a man named Howie Chizek on the radio–basically northeast Ohio’s version of Rush Limbaugh. (Interestingly, Mr. Chizek is a registered Democrat, albeit a far-right one in the mold of Victor Davis Hanson, Orson Scott Card, Zell Miller, etc. much as Hugo was once a liberal Republican.)
Sure enough, he and a caller were both discussing how they thought that left-leaning states and individuals were the chief consumers of this product, and thus left-leaning parents hate their kids/don’t want to raise them correctly/support perversion, etc. Considering that Abercrombie has always seemed like a right-leaning organization in its clientele, and its employees seem to donate in a bipartisan manner, this seems like a bit of a stretch.