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With hair constantly in the news, I’ve been wondering again why long hair is usually perceived as a secondary sex characteristic.
The only cultures I can think of offhand where men wear their hair longer than women are two black ones: the famously photogenic Maasai of Kenya and Rastafarians of Jamaica.
My guess is that a lot of hubbub among black women over society’s attitudes toward their hair is caused by black hair being the shortest on average by far, which puts them at a disadvantage in competing with women of other races for men.
But among nonblacks, is the usual cultural preference for longer hair on women arbitrary or did the fashions emerge due to some natural difference in the average length of hair between the sexes?
For example, Peter Frost has documented that women tend to be a little more fair-skinned than men (as measured on the untanned inside of the upper arm) around the world, which is why English poets called them the fair sex. And then sets off a lot of culture-driven behavior by women to look fairer. Could something like this be going on with regard to hair length?
Back when the world wide web emerged in the 1990s, I saw the lecture notes online of a professor of physical anthropology who said that in a study (presumably of white students) where the participants did not get hair cuts for a long, that the average man’s hair grew to be 16 inches long before falling out and the average woman’s hair grew to be 28″ long.
But I’ve never been able to find that again.
So, does anybody know?
English
Arabic
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Hebrew
Hindi
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Persian
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Women don’t get pattern baldness.
In the early 2000s I briefly worked near a biological male who was transitioning to female and called herself 'Leticia' (Latinx). I don't mind saying, it freaked me out. Wore mid-length skirts with nylons, but with high-top tennis shoes. Mid-40s I would guess, and the pattern baldness on the crown was well underway. Oh, and pink lipstick. Leticia was well-liked, and certainly didn't run into any discrimination, and I'm sure a big part of that was Leticia did a very good job.
African hair frames the face poorly and the length cannot be seen since it scrunches together so much. It also looks unkempt unless it is braided. There are many reasons why African hair is unattractive beyond length and thickness. Still, Length and thickness are the major indicators of female beauty in historical literature because even among young pretty women of the same ethnicity, more hair generally makes the same girl look better. Hence so many celebrities get extensions to thicken their hair.
The caveat is that women DO get male pattern baldness, but at a lesser percentage, and generally to a lesser degree, than men, and usually only after their childbearing years are over, or if they’re particularly unhealthy or masculine.
This is egregiously false, and Peter Frost has never demonstrated that women’s skin is lighter than men’s. What he did do was compile data that suggested that women in equatorial countries have lighter skin than men.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:
And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294
None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast “blitzkrieg” of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_ceruse
Keep drinking that koolaid, baby.
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
And culturally ... "desirably" is the characteristics of the conqueror not the conquered. Having light male top-dog gods, and darker female gods, or depictions of lighter males conquering darker females does not settle the preference question. It suggests lightness was valued, more elite and ergo selection would select toward lightness. We had another such light on dark scenario on the Aryan invasion of India. Suffice it to say there's no cultural propagation of "must have dark women", but quite the reverse.
No the question is empirical. Does the set of physiological processes that make men men tend to darken or lighten the skin relative to those processes in women? Generally? In specific races?Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Anon, @Paperback Writer
Hair goes through a three stages of life cycle: anagen (growth), catagen (peak), and telogen (decline/shedding). Due to hormones, women tend to have much longer anagen periods than men. Testosterone speeds up male hair growth cycle and so men have shorter anagen periods. So all things being equal, reproduction-age women with lots of oestrogen flowing through the veins would tend to have longer hair than men.
On the other hand there is a reverse relationship between men and women for body hair, which again, is due to differing levels of testosterone.
And I’m not sure how this all works with black women who tend to have relatively high testosterone levels.
women tend to be a little more fair-skinned than men
I once asked a friend whether that could be true. He had the best biological education in my circle.
He said he didn’t know and didn’t even know how to reason about it from first principles.
So I won’t bother asking him about hair length.
Stray thought: how long did the jolly jack tars of Nelson’s day tend to wear their pigtails?
These are are the composite images:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1bd01c4d-d9a1-4a74-99d7-74124ff0f942/135fig1.jpg
The composite on the left is of the 10 women with the highest levels of estrogen. The one on the right is of the 10 women with the lowest levels.
The left composite has browner, ruddier skin, dark brown eyes, and a rounder face than the one on the right, which is light skinned and lighter eyed, with sharper facial contours. The left composite was also rated more attractive by the male participants of the study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560017/
So that tells you all you need to know about the biology of female skin, and why white women spend billions trying to get a tanner complexion.Replies: @anon, @Red Pill Angel
I don’t know whether female hair grows faster, but, historically, men in most civilizations had cut their hair shorter so they could not be grabbed by it in the battle. Alexander the Great applied the same policy to beards.
Any military that worked hard on hygiene usually did better than a military that did not care.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Villa_del_casale_13.jpgReplies: @donut, @Stan Adams
Also in societies that took hand to hand combat training very seriously, China and Japan, the men often had long hair anyway. Even if worn in a bun a Japanese top knot makes a great thing to grab.
Also warriors wore helmets, making hair length more irrelevant.
The point of another commenter that short hair prevents lice sounds reasonable, but again needs proof.
As a young man, I let my blond hair grow, and it basically stopped before it became shoulder length. My sister, though, another blondie, has had hair down to her ass forever.
Men’s beards are similar: I went through a period back then of just letting mine grow. It never became longer than that of a stereotypical mountain man (which I sort of was then) or major league baseball pitcher. My oldest friend now, on the other hand, has a beard so long he looks like Santa Claus. In fact, he plays Santa every year in his town. That never would have happened in my case.
Genetics, man.
I think that we should ignore old religious stuff & history as not pertinent to the issue now, and focus on newer, empirical reasons (TBC, WW1 & gas masks; on the other hand, “I protest” counter-cultural 60’s).
My opinion:
1. epic, patriarchal beards of the 19th C leading figures (Darwin, Marx, Maxwell, Dostoevsky, Engels, Tolstoy, Whitman, …) are gone for good. First, they somehow look unhygienic; then, there is something not simply masculine, but Biblical, patriarchal about them. They are not “sexy”; they are a symbol of male absolute, and especially spiritual authority, as well as maturity (even old age)- which is not a popular trend. Stefan Zweig, in his superb autobiography The World of Yesterday, wrote excellently about pre-WW1 mature looks mania.
2. smaller, trimmed beards are here to stay (Chekhov, Freud). Of course, well groomed.
3. hippies & beards- gone, dirty, not healthy New Age conformist life-style. Also, they suck. Smelly, unkempt, gross.
4. moustaches are even more endangered. There was a 19th C female saying: There is no real kiss without a moustache. Looks like they’re on the way of the dodo.
Let’s see about Western canonical culture re BQ (without the ancients, other cultures & the 20th C, which distort the image):
Visual arts (El Greco, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Duerer, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Rodin, Degas, Van Gogh, …- beards; Raphael, Goya, Watteau, ..-shaven). Beards clearly dominate
Music (Bach, Handel, Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, ..-shaven ; Palestrina, Monteverdi, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Franck, Verdi, Smetana, Bizet, Mussorgsky, .- beards). It is about 50/50, with slight preference to the shaven
Literature (Dante,Boccaccio, Milton, Blake, Swift, Racine, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Leopardi, Baudelaire, George Eliot (huh!), Heine,..-shaven ; Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Melville, Whitman, Stendhal, Moliere, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, .. – beards). Again 50/50, but this time, beards seem to have a slight preference
Mathematics & natural sciences (Copernicus, Boyle, Newton, Euler, Dalton, Leeuwenhoek, Cavendish, Thomas Young, Lavoisier, Pascal, Leibniz, Lagrange, Laplace, Hutton, Hamilton, Cauchy, Abel, Weierstrass, Mendel, Lobachevsky, Jenner, Liebig, ..-shaven; Galileo, Kepler, Fermat, Descartes, Gauss (?), Riemann, Cantor, Poincare, Lie, Dirichlet, Virchow, Boole, J.C. Maxwell, Joule, Darwin, Mendeleev, Kirchhoff, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Boltzmann ..-beards)
Seems to be 50/50Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
As a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, I lived in a world where any boy with pretensions of hipness or coolness or whatever had hair as long as possible. I suppose this was to indicate rebellion against parents, school, society, whatever.
(Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna has a section on how hair/beard styles switch back and forth, as each generation tries to rebel against "old guys": from Lincoln to whoever, big shots in the 19th century were as massively bearded or moustachioed as possible, then the clean shaved look became the standard; by the 60s, hair and beards were "rebellious". His point was to illustrate how Vienna went from Emperor Franz Joseph to Wittgenstein & Co, who were short haired and clean shaven to indicate the New Man, like Wittgenstein's brief aphorisms or Loos' war on ornaments in architecture).
It was absolutely impossible for me to grow my hair long. It would barely reach my collar, to say nothing of the over the shoulder look. At a certain point it would just get thicker and more raggedy, so I just had to have it trimmed and "thinned out" to look human, but it would not grown an inch more.
Of course, for the last ten years or so "thinning it out" would be a bad joke.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Faraday's Bobcat
It isn’t. A 2006 a study measured the estradiol levels (female sex hormones) of 20 women and took photographs of their faces.
These are are the composite images:
The composite on the left is of the 10 women with the highest levels of estrogen. The one on the right is of the 10 women with the lowest levels.
The left composite has browner, ruddier skin, dark brown eyes, and a rounder face than the one on the right, which is light skinned and lighter eyed, with sharper facial contours. The left composite was also rated more attractive by the male participants of the study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560017/
So that tells you all you need to know about the biology of female skin, and why white women spend billions trying to get a tanner complexion.
Why do women in India spend billions trying to get a paler complexion?Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
It seems like an unanswerable question. You’d need to get a (1) large enough (2) random sample of people willing to spend (3) two or three years not cutting their hair. It doesn’t lend itself to the normal college student study.
YouTube has taught me that women with very long hair nevertheless get it cut reasonably frequently. There are many examples, but here’s Australian-Hong Konger Kenneth Siu charging $Aus 250 for doing not much of anything:
The Spartans apparently wore their hair long. Plutarch says that Spartan women cut their hair short “close to the head” before the wedding ceremony, although he doesn’t specify that they did so permanently.
Of course, Plutarch was writing about a time as distant from his as the Third Crusade is from our own, 800-900 years.
The kouroi sculptures of the 7th-5th centuries b.c. show young (beardless) men with long hair. Contemporary depictions of women display hair that is no longer, however contemporary depictions of grown (bearded) men tend to display shorter hair.
Herodotus:
While they debated in this way, Xerxes sent a mounted scout to see how many there were and what they were doing. While he was still in Thessaly, he had heard that a small army was gathered there and that its leaders were Lacedaemonians, including Leonidas, who was of the Heracleid clan. [2] Riding up to the camp, the horseman watched and spied out the place. He could, however, not see the whole camp, for it was impossible to see those posted inside the wall which they had rebuilt and were guarding. He did take note of those outside, whose arms lay in front of the wall, and it chanced that at that time the Lacedaemonians were posted there. [3] He saw some of the men exercising naked and others combing their hair. He marvelled at the sight and took note of their numbers. When he had observed it all carefully, he rode back in leisure, since no one pursued him or paid him any attention at all. So he returned and told Xerxes all that he had seen.
Plutarch:
When someone inquired why the Spartans wore their hair long and cultivated beards, he said, “Because for a man his own adornment is the very beside and cheapest.”
Plutarch:
In time of war, too, they relaxed the severity of the young men’s discipline, and permitted them to beautify their hair and ornament their arms and clothing, rejoicing to see them, like horses, prance and neigh for the contest. Therefore they wore their hair long as soon as they ceased to be youths, and particularly in times of danger they took pains to have it glossy and well-combed, remembering a certain saying of Lycurgus, that a fine head of hair made the handsome more comely still, and the ugly more terrible.
Plutarch:
For their marriages the women were carried off by force, not when they were small and unfit for wedlock, but when they were in full bloom and wholly ripe. After the woman was thus carried off, the bride’s-maid, so called, took her in charge, cut her hair off close to the head, put a man’s cloak and sandals on her, and laid her down on a pallet, on the floor, alone, in the dark.
IIRC, hair is like a record of health over time. So a substantial length of silky, full hair without greys is evidence that the woman hasn’t suffered an illness or other stress for several years, thereby serving as proof of good health and fertility.
I think it is similar to the male lion’s mane – evidently they only grow full manes if they’re well fed, and they can lose their manes due to stress (i.e., losing a fight with another male lion that they nevertheless survive). With lion dummies, scientists have shown that female lions prefer to mate with male lions which have full, dark manes.
It’s all a social construct, Steve. There is no real hair difference between the sexes and races, regardless of what your lyin’ eyes tell you.
A review of ancient Greek anatomical theory might explain this as far as Western traditions go. Why hair is significant to Africans or Asians is another question, I suppose.
https://bycommonconsent.com/2006/05/01/for-long-hair-is-given-to-her-instead-of-a-testicle/
My working theory is that women are the givers of pattern baldness.
In the early 2000s I briefly worked near a biological male who was transitioning to female and called herself ‘Leticia’ (Latinx). I don’t mind saying, it freaked me out. Wore mid-length skirts with nylons, but with high-top tennis shoes. Mid-40s I would guess, and the pattern baldness on the crown was well underway. Oh, and pink lipstick. Leticia was well-liked, and certainly didn’t run into any discrimination, and I’m sure a big part of that was Leticia did a very good job.
The short hair for men in militaries is more to do with hygiene that battle. Body hair was a place for lice and other insects to live and breed. Short time also works better in hot climates where sweaty hair under a helmet feels horrible.
Any military that worked hard on hygiene usually did better than a military that did not care.
Beard is a great topic.
I think that we should ignore old religious stuff & history as not pertinent to the issue now, and focus on newer, empirical reasons (TBC, WW1 & gas masks; on the other hand, “I protest” counter-cultural 60’s).
My opinion:
1. epic, patriarchal beards of the 19th C leading figures (Darwin, Marx, Maxwell, Dostoevsky, Engels, Tolstoy, Whitman, …) are gone for good. First, they somehow look unhygienic; then, there is something not simply masculine, but Biblical, patriarchal about them. They are not “sexy”; they are a symbol of male absolute, and especially spiritual authority, as well as maturity (even old age)- which is not a popular trend. Stefan Zweig, in his superb autobiography The World of Yesterday, wrote excellently about pre-WW1 mature looks mania.
2. smaller, trimmed beards are here to stay (Chekhov, Freud). Of course, well groomed.
3. hippies & beards- gone, dirty, not healthy New Age conformist life-style. Also, they suck. Smelly, unkempt, gross.
4. moustaches are even more endangered. There was a 19th C female saying: There is no real kiss without a moustache. Looks like they’re on the way of the dodo.
Let’s see about Western canonical culture re BQ (without the ancients, other cultures & the 20th C, which distort the image):
Visual arts (El Greco, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Duerer, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Rodin, Degas, Van Gogh, …- beards; Raphael, Goya, Watteau, ..-shaven). Beards clearly dominate
Music (Bach, Handel, Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, ..-shaven ; Palestrina, Monteverdi, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Franck, Verdi, Smetana, Bizet, Mussorgsky, .- beards). It is about 50/50, with slight preference to the shaven
Literature (Dante,Boccaccio, Milton, Blake, Swift, Racine, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Leopardi, Baudelaire, George Eliot (huh!), Heine,..-shaven ; Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Melville, Whitman, Stendhal, Moliere, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, .. – beards). Again 50/50, but this time, beards seem to have a slight preference
Mathematics & natural sciences (Copernicus, Boyle, Newton, Euler, Dalton, Leeuwenhoek, Cavendish, Thomas Young, Lavoisier, Pascal, Leibniz, Lagrange, Laplace, Hutton, Hamilton, Cauchy, Abel, Weierstrass, Mendel, Lobachevsky, Jenner, Liebig, ..-shaven; Galileo, Kepler, Fermat, Descartes, Gauss (?), Riemann, Cantor, Poincare, Lie, Dirichlet, Virchow, Boole, J.C. Maxwell, Joule, Darwin, Mendeleev, Kirchhoff, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Boltzmann ..-beards)
Seems to be 50/50
After I shaved mine off, though, I got a lot more dates.Replies: @Desiderius
How about some of our old Indian tribes? The men wore long braided pigtails. Check out images of Sitting Bull. If Indians are going into battle, then braided pigtails look like the best way to keep your manly mane from getting you into trouble. Hair in pigtails, then tying with cloth or twine securing the ends. Just to make sure the pigtails don’t come undone and get you (the Indian) killed.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
Women are the dingers of the world
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that hair length between young men and women differed, but given the historical record confirming that it’s a feminine feature, it’s not surprising that long hair is indeed produced by a mix of feminine hormones.
But historical descriptions fair skin on women has always seemed strange to me, unless it is interpreted simply as a sign they didn’t have to work in the fields. Simply as a symbol of class rather than a physiological advantage.
It’s true that European chivalric literature from the Middle Ages depicts beautiful maidens as fair skinned ones, but it’s a bit puzzling that fairness as an inherent trait would be prized in nations where all the women are light skinned Caucasians. An English poet in the 14th century who prized fair skin only ever saw a range of skin tones going from Shirley Manson to Elizabeth Hurley. Its hard to understand why the difference would be so important as a sign of beauty, but fairness was one of the most common ways of describing beautiful women at the time.
Ask some Sikhs. Many never cut their hair.
Black women’s hair characteristics, including maximum length, predate any interracial mating environment (basically, the last half century) that might trigger evolutionary/genetic adaptation or sexual selection. That goes for the other races too. Hair differences between men and women may have been selected for, but not the fact that “black hair is the shortest on average by far,” (when not stretched out and de-helixed, at least).
It would be interesting if somebody would check on natural hair length, IQ, and other mental qualities. Chinese people have very long hair, and some Jewish people have that Einstein thing going on. Black people have bushiness, but no length. Native American men associated their long hair with tracking ability, and claimed they lost it when their hair was cut. What race has the longest hair? I suspect Asians, but then there are an awful lot of bald Jewish men. Is male pattern baldness associated with high IQ? Hmmm. So many questions so early in the morning.
You were warned.
I have read (but cannot currently find) a hypothesis that long hair suggests good protein intake and processing (or some similar attribute) that provided the evolutionary basis that made long hair in women attractive to men.
Off topic:
Steve
Roger Staubach’s daughter….Jennifer Staubach Gates…is a Dallas Politician. If you go to her politician Facebook page…a tribute to the life of George Floyd…
I hope NFL Football was worth it.
Jennifer Staubach is the daughter of a billionaire…
Surely you must have read this? Everyone else has!
All I know is Farrah Fawcett looked hawt in the 1970’s as I was coming of age. But the girls were going crazy for Andy Gibb as well.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
“a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans”
Thanks, but got any links/documentation for this assertion?
“the preference among European women for tanning”
Certainly not true in the UK, where a tanned skin was associated with outdoor work, and female farm labourers went to great efforts to keep the sun off their skin, as did women generally.
The parasol was a standard bit of Victorian female garb.
Only after the 1950s, when a tan was associated with “the jet set”, did UK women think it fashionable, and a couple of generations of women who were never going to tan did serious damage to their skin in the attempt.
On the other hand there is a reverse relationship between men and women for body hair, which again, is due to differing levels of testosterone.
And I'm not sure how this all works with black women who tend to have relatively high testosterone levels.Replies: @anon
Therefore long hair in a Eurasian woman is a signal indicating overall health & thus reproductive fitness. As with a waist / hip ratio of 0.6 to 0.7, these signals are unconsciously detected by men as “attractiveness”, although they can be modulated by cultural norms.
OT
https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence
City Journal has a long review-of-the-literature-style piece on “Do Masks Work.” It distinguishes between observational studies and randomized control trials, claims that observational studies are not useful, and then looks at over a dozen RCT studies and finds that masks aren’t so effective, for the most part.
This is depressing to me. The author is clearly anti-mask. On the other hand, he has an interesting resume. He created some sort of college football sabermetrics ranking thing. He taught at the Air Force Academy. He’s a Claremont polysci Ph.D. But most interesting is that until just a short time ago, for four years he was the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So he’s not just an anti-mask yokel. On the other hand, he doesn’t have a STEM background.
https://www.ojp.gov/archives/about/jeffrey-anderson
I’m still going to wear my mask.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
Women are lighter-skinned than men in all human populations because of differing levels of melanin and blood circulation in the skin. This sex difference is larger in populations of medium skin color and smaller in light-skinned and dark-skinned populations. In very fair-skinned populations, male skin and female skin are both squeezed up against the ceiling of skin depigmentation.
The strongest evidence for this sex difference comes from digit ratio studies and from studies on male castrates. The digit ratio (length of the index finger divided by length of the ring finger) is a measure of the ratio of estrogens to androgens in body tissues during development. The higher the ratio, the more the tissues have been feminized. The lower the ratio, the more they have been masculinized. A British research team found that the digit ratio correlates with lightness of skin in women but not in men.
Manning, J.T., P.E. Bundred, and F.M. Mather. (2004). Second to fourth digit ratio, sexual selection, and skin colour. Evolution and Human Behavior 25(1): 38-50.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin:
“One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument.”
Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal.
Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer.
in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
(sigh) … Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they’re from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it’s because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve’s question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).
Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.
Just as European Woman's obsession with tanning invalidates the pale = feminine hypothesis.
Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.Replies: @puttheforkdown, @James J O'Meara, @anon
The rate of growth would be virtually irrelevant. The determining factor is how long the hair gets before it breaks off.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15484271Again, right back to square one. Female sex hormones darken skin. You can't explain sex differences in pigmentation based on testosterone alone. See also, "the mask of pregnancy" (pregnant women display pigmentary darkening that no male achieves with his male sex hormones, including exogenous steroid use).
Regarding HBD and hair, I’ve always been curious about facial hair - especially since I grew my lockdown beard. It’s certainly not cold weather, as Black Africans can often grow full beards while Eskimos are one of the most hairless races, along with Southeast Asians that have spent the last 5,000 years in the tropics. Maybe it’s just sexual selection and genetic drift?
Evolution of Long Head Hair in Humans
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=60916
This is some serious HBD over-stretch into “Just So” story nonsense.
Sikh men, who should all carry knives to cut up rivals, are not meant to cut any hair from any part of their own body, including their head. The Vikings also liked to have long hair and seemed to have prized their combs almost as much as the axes they butchered their enemies with.
Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.
Both Masaii and Rastas also have warrior culture attributes.
You’re reading far too much into this. Black people’s hair is a lot harder to maintain. This means that for black women to have longer hair, which is often expected, it can take an hour a day to look after, or more. Even keeping your arms above your head for that long is exhausting and hurts, nevermind the pain on your scalp from de-knotting. This is enough to make anyone mad.
He’s wrong. Untanned European men are fairer than untanned European women.
You’re also wrong with your etymology of the word “fair.” Fair to mean beautiful or handsome was used long before the term “fairer sex,” which originally just meant better looking, which is unsurprising since “fairer sex” was a term coined by men, of whom 95% think women are better looking than men. Had it been termed and amplified through a female dominated public sphere, it would have been the other way around.
The conflation of fairness, in the modern sense, with beauty is also basic. Blond(e) and blue eyes are more beautiful, sorry to everyone else, but facts are facts and those two characteristics are only a small part of the picture anyway. People like bright colours. They are fun!
The conflation of this with femininity is just because male perspectives on what constituted good looking, meaning women, were more likely to be shared and become part of the culture. Women’s use of make-up, because their looks were so often their way for getting resources due to the division of public and private life, compounds this, but men are naturally just as good looking as women, and, with gym culture, we can see that the cult of male beauty is never held down for long.
e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstylesThe same can be seen in Qin Terracotta warriors, who all have buns and short hair.
https://imgur.com/9JAx34kReplies: @Triteleia Laxa, @ringo starr search
I examine this in the context of the Wild West and Oscar Wilde's famous Western tour:
https://counter-currents.com/2012/09/wild-boys-vs-hard-men/
The book it's reprinted in is banned by Amazon (Bezos is one of the baldheaded bastards) but you can get it through Unz.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_(hairstyle)#Queue_orderReplies: @Triteleia Laxa
Well, the prostate supplements I have been taking for many years have the benefit of thwarting hair loss, so at age 64 I have a luxuriant dark mane that would make even Fabio envious. Many have accused me of using hair dyes, and also with some hostility asking why I am so thin. It’s from my reduced sugar intake. And here’s another tip : suspenders. I am not pulling your leg – they will cause your testosterone to skyrocket. Why we have this habit of cinching our pants with a belt and thus hanging the weight (along with our EDC gear) off our bladders is a baffling mystery. It could account for why Arabs may overwhelm us as they tend to wear those natty caftans.
Roman hair followed that policy, certainly; pretty much as soon as widespread haircutting tools became affordable, the short hair became widespread across the entire cultural group. Beards were actually prohibited from senators.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
I am struggling to take you seriously after you said this. Women may remove hair from their armpits, but they most certainly don’t tan them. They are scared of even exposing them, in case they haven’t removed the little hair recently enough. Many women even try to remove the darkness from that area, in case it gets confused with hair.
So the difference is completely meaningless, which obviates the hypothesis.
Just as European Woman’s obsession with tanning invalidates the pale = feminine hypothesis.
Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.
Put down the thesaurus toots. The fact that women are paler than men is obvious enough...Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
I agree with this so much that I just wanted to point out that this is not me writing under a pseudonym.
In my Amazon-banned book, I point out that in addition to "think they will be gay," the promotion of bleks as hyper-masculine factors in as well. Black hair is so bad that many black males will just give up and shave it off entirely (you'll note that even some women do as well), thus the shaved head = masculine idea (e.g., bulked up Bezos, Breaking Bad, etc.)Replies: @Not Raul, @Feryl
Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.
Both Masaii and Rastas also have warrior culture attributes.You're reading far too much into this. Black people's hair is a lot harder to maintain. This means that for black women to have longer hair, which is often expected, it can take an hour a day to look after, or more. Even keeping your arms above your head for that long is exhausting and hurts, nevermind the pain on your scalp from de-knotting. This is enough to make anyone mad.He's wrong. Untanned European men are fairer than untanned European women.
You're also wrong with your etymology of the word "fair." Fair to mean beautiful or handsome was used long before the term "fairer sex," which originally just meant better looking, which is unsurprising since "fairer sex" was a term coined by men, of whom 95% think women are better looking than men. Had it been termed and amplified through a female dominated public sphere, it would have been the other way around.
The conflation of fairness, in the modern sense, with beauty is also basic. Blond(e) and blue eyes are more beautiful, sorry to everyone else, but facts are facts and those two characteristics are only a small part of the picture anyway. People like bright colours. They are fun!
The conflation of this with femininity is just because male perspectives on what constituted good looking, meaning women, were more likely to be shared and become part of the culture. Women's use of make-up, because their looks were so often their way for getting resources due to the division of public and private life, compounds this, but men are naturally just as good looking as women, and, with gym culture, we can see that the cult of male beauty is never held down for long.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Prosa123, @James J O'Meara, @TGGP
Civilization-building societies seemed generally quite intent that male focus on vanity was inappropriately feminine; this wasn’t necessarily the case with some ancient cultures, but they often lacked cheap tools for proper grooming anyway and so braided as a necessary compromise. But pretty much where cheap tools were available and organized warfare in ranks was the norm, short hair was widespread for men.
e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstyles
The same can be seen in Qin Terracotta warriors, who all have buns and short hair.
https://imgur.com/9JAx34k
When men control the resources of the public sphere, women are well-incentivised to use their bodies and charms to get fed. From this point, "beauty" often becomes associated as a feminine trait, when it clearly is not.
This effect was amplified because rich men made the public culture, and rich women could spend all day idling, with their slaves or servants, on their looks.Short hair for men, in battle, was practical, as it always is, but it was also often ignored by less practical armies, such as the Russians as late as before Potemkin's reforms. Practicality is more a public sphere virtue than a private sphere one. You can see this in home decoration versus office decoration. Offices that looks as impractical but beautiful as a home are a status symbol of those who are so successful thay they can signal a luxurious affect of impracticality, like Elon Musk smoking weed and going on Joe Rogan. The barrier between the private and public can be forgone.
Notice also that Potemkin didn't follow suit with his cookie-cutter grunts. He was, like Musk, important, and he had an Empress's favour to maintain. Officers in modern Western armies also tend to have much longer hair than the soldiers. You want to look good if you are leading.
Trump may not have achieved quite what he was going for aesthetically, but he spent a tremendous amount of time trying to look good, and he gets PR.
https://images.app.goo.gl/RZvNAyEgYaQwyuR88
Perhaps the public sphere does work most "efficiently" if beauty and sex are sublimated out of it, but humans like beauty and sex and will, if they have a choice, prefer the presence of them in the sphere where they are. This means that as soon as the public sphere is big enough to include everyone and has a surplus, the less "efficient" human desires and needs like beauty, will "invade."
Perhaps fewer widgets will be produced but only extreme and increasing repression will avoid this. If people have enough of their basic physical need met and are unworried by external threats, they will choose emotional needs over widgets every time.
Something, something Maslow.
Buns are long hair. Samurai also had long hair. I assume they tied it up for the same reason that women athletes tie up their hair, but they could easily have cut it much shorter, they had quite a few sharp implements around.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
“longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_ceruse
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
The fact that ‘which sex is innately lighter’ even has to be debated is evidence of the problem of believing that fairness in women is an inherently valuable secondary sex characteristic rather than a cultural artifice produced by the demands of agrarian societies.
No one is debating whether or not women have wider hips relative to their waists. Or that they have more delicate brow lines. But the inherent difference between male and female skin color of the same ethnic group is so minute that it’s not even perceptible by normal pattern recognition. It requires specialized scientific studies which apparently do not produce consistent results. Why would a difference that is so minute it is barely perceptible be of great value? Everything else men widely value in female appearance is completely obvious- youth, slender frames, wide hips. Lighter skin has no obvious value once we restrict the analysis to women within an ethnic group. Are darker European women better looking than lighter ones? Doesn’t seem like there is any obvious consensus around that. If we remove all recent Eurasian admixture, are darker Bantu women worse looking than lighter ones? Doesn’t seem like the answer is obvious there either. But let’s try this question- are younger European women better looking than older ones? Obviously yes. Are fatter European women worse looking than thinner ones? Again, obviously yes, because thinness and youth are important indicators of feminine beauty. Fairness not so much.
(Baron Kaldian - who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)Replies: @Spangel226, @anon
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGAReferencesBruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5779Russell, R., P. Sinha, I. Biederman, and M. Nederhouser. (2006). Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception 35: 749-759.
https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126 Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It's Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016Replies: @anon, @Spangel226, @Spangel226, @Agitprop
‘…the average man’s hair grew to be 16 inches long before falling out and the average woman’s hair grew to be 28″ long…’
It could be. I grew up in Berkeley in the Sixties — and needless to say, saw a lot of long-haired men.
Now that I think back on it, there were a lot of pony tails reaching to the upper back or so — but waist-length tresses were rare to non-existent among men.
My hair is long…gone. There was a local homeless guy who walked the streets of nearby Williamsville, NY. His hair was matted, sort of rasta style, and touched the ground. Maybe not washing or combing your hair helps to keep it from falling out. Most of the blacks athletes with long hair probably have extensions and soon their names will be across the bottom of their shirts so you can read it.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
‘…As for Steve’s question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men)…’
The rate of growth would be virtually irrelevant. The determining factor is how long the hair gets before it breaks off.
Just as European Woman's obsession with tanning invalidates the pale = feminine hypothesis.
Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.Replies: @puttheforkdown, @James J O'Meara, @anon
>obviates the hypothesis
Put down the thesaurus toots. The fact that women are paler than men is obvious enough…
Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.
Both Masaii and Rastas also have warrior culture attributes.You're reading far too much into this. Black people's hair is a lot harder to maintain. This means that for black women to have longer hair, which is often expected, it can take an hour a day to look after, or more. Even keeping your arms above your head for that long is exhausting and hurts, nevermind the pain on your scalp from de-knotting. This is enough to make anyone mad.He's wrong. Untanned European men are fairer than untanned European women.
You're also wrong with your etymology of the word "fair." Fair to mean beautiful or handsome was used long before the term "fairer sex," which originally just meant better looking, which is unsurprising since "fairer sex" was a term coined by men, of whom 95% think women are better looking than men. Had it been termed and amplified through a female dominated public sphere, it would have been the other way around.
The conflation of fairness, in the modern sense, with beauty is also basic. Blond(e) and blue eyes are more beautiful, sorry to everyone else, but facts are facts and those two characteristics are only a small part of the picture anyway. People like bright colours. They are fun!
The conflation of this with femininity is just because male perspectives on what constituted good looking, meaning women, were more likely to be shared and become part of the culture. Women's use of make-up, because their looks were so often their way for getting resources due to the division of public and private life, compounds this, but men are naturally just as good looking as women, and, with gym culture, we can see that the cult of male beauty is never held down for long.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Prosa123, @James J O'Meara, @TGGP
Rastafarians are far from a warrior culture.
You have never posted a single source that supports this contention, and in your own reply to Madrigal and Kelly (2007) you more honestly acknowledged that most sources show that, in Western European populations, men have lighter skin than women.
You have misunderstood the digit ratio phenomenon. It does not imply differences in adult or adolescent hormone levels, but in the pre-natal stage of development. It also doesn’t correlate with “feminine” or “masculine” features. Manning’s research is too narrow in focus and pre-dates understanding of global variation in digit ratio to be of any relevance here. You would need a more thorough review of this kind of research than Manning’s paper, which you have cherry picked to suit your dead hypothesis.
And? The female sex hormones estradiol has an even stronger darkening effect than testosterone, which is very modest. You’re not finding support for your theory based on evidence from castrates, because hypogonadal women also have very light skin and application of very small amounts of estradiol darkens their skin.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-4362.1995.tb04383.x
International Journal of DermatologyVolume 34, Issue 1 p. 61-66 HYDROALCOHOLIC HUMAN PLACENTAL EXTRACT: SKIN PIGMENTING ACTIVITY AND GROSS CHEMICAL COMPOSITION
Furthermore, see Facial appearance is a cue to oestrogen levels in women
Biol Sci. 2006 Jan 22; 273(1583): 135–140:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16685728/
The composite on the left, of the women with the higher estradiol levels, is darker and ruddier, and was rated more attractive by the participants (contrary to your theory that men prefer lighter women).
So we’re back to square one, here. Estrogen darkens human skin, and women with darker skin are more attractive. Your study on castrates from the 1940s tells us nothing, because castrates are not normal males. Extreme conditions can cause all kinds of pathologies; light skinned men are not light skinned because of their testosterone levels.
You have not provided any evidence of that and there’s nothing about that in your paper. Do you really feel confident tarnishing your real public identity by making these kinds of comments? Let me know hòw European women’s fetish for darkening themselves fits with your theory, btw.
[[citation needed]]
The inside of the upper arm has a ton of fat on it, Pete. This is one of the prime target areas for liposuction.
That’s not what that GWAS study on European skin color said.
…there is a demonstratable sex difference in European eye color expression, which explains why European women are more likely to have dark eye colors even when they have similar allele frequencies to male test subjects:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23601698/
…because as we already know, European men have lighter skin than European women. So yeah if the hormones are doing anything, it’s darkening white women’s features.
And sure, the medieval Bavarian women in that study were from a different population and had a considerable amount of East Asian and Southeastern European ancestry. It’s just another piece of evidence that goes against your theory that humans, especially European men, preferred lighter women. In medieval Germany they clearly preferred dark women, to the extent of actually replacing indigenous fair women with darker foreign ones. That’s the point.
Lol. Though women seem to grow hair longer and faster innately, I don’t that really captures why long thick hair is valued in women. Not all attributes valued in women are more pronounced in women. Thinness is valued in women, but men have less body fat inherently. Thinness in women is valued because it is a sign of youth and fertility and demonstrates the relative value of a woman among other women. The same is largely the case for hair. Women’s hair is not taken as a sign of beauty because women have more or better hair than men, but because women who have thicker longer hair are generally more youthful and having that hair is a sign of the woman’s health relative to other women. No one really cares how a woman’s hair compares to some man’s.
African hair frames the face poorly and the length cannot be seen since it scrunches together so much. It also looks unkempt unless it is braided. There are many reasons why African hair is unattractive beyond length and thickness. Still, Length and thickness are the major indicators of female beauty in historical literature because even among young pretty women of the same ethnicity, more hair generally makes the same girl look better. Hence so many celebrities get extensions to thicken their hair.
It’s hard to feel any joy after the congressional Republicans caved, but the sound clip of Gavin Newsom berating his interviewer before collapsing into Jebbish whining is pretty funny. I hadn’t heard him speak before, and here he has the same vapid, childlike affect as Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Chickenfather. Is there some arrested development characteristic to modern communist politicians?
Also good thing you got vaccinated because now you have to be tested every week.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Stanford-becomes-one-of-the-first-universities-to-16380702.php
e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstylesThe same can be seen in Qin Terracotta warriors, who all have buns and short hair.
https://imgur.com/9JAx34kReplies: @Triteleia Laxa, @ringo starr search
Civilisation-building societies are the societies which generate a big public sphere. Women rarely took part in this because women tended to be pregnant a lot of the time. Ever since reliable contraception has been brought in, this pattern has been balancing out.
When men control the resources of the public sphere, women are well-incentivised to use their bodies and charms to get fed. From this point, “beauty” often becomes associated as a feminine trait, when it clearly is not.
This effect was amplified because rich men made the public culture, and rich women could spend all day idling, with their slaves or servants, on their looks.
Short hair for men, in battle, was practical, as it always is, but it was also often ignored by less practical armies, such as the Russians as late as before Potemkin’s reforms. Practicality is more a public sphere virtue than a private sphere one. You can see this in home decoration versus office decoration. Offices that looks as impractical but beautiful as a home are a status symbol of those who are so successful thay they can signal a luxurious affect of impracticality, like Elon Musk smoking weed and going on Joe Rogan. The barrier between the private and public can be forgone.
Notice also that Potemkin didn’t follow suit with his cookie-cutter grunts. He was, like Musk, important, and he had an Empress’s favour to maintain. Officers in modern Western armies also tend to have much longer hair than the soldiers. You want to look good if you are leading.
Trump may not have achieved quite what he was going for aesthetically, but he spent a tremendous amount of time trying to look good, and he gets PR.
https://images.app.goo.gl/RZvNAyEgYaQwyuR88
Perhaps the public sphere does work most “efficiently” if beauty and sex are sublimated out of it, but humans like beauty and sex and will, if they have a choice, prefer the presence of them in the sphere where they are. This means that as soon as the public sphere is big enough to include everyone and has a surplus, the less “efficient” human desires and needs like beauty, will “invade.”
Perhaps fewer widgets will be produced but only extreme and increasing repression will avoid this. If people have enough of their basic physical need met and are unworried by external threats, they will choose emotional needs over widgets every time.
Something, something Maslow.
Buns are long hair. Samurai also had long hair. I assume they tied it up for the same reason that women athletes tie up their hair, but they could easily have cut it much shorter, they had quite a few sharp implements around.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
Another source regarding the effects of female sex hormones on adult males:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15484271
Again, right back to square one. Female sex hormones darken skin. You can’t explain sex differences in pigmentation based on testosterone alone. See also, “the mask of pregnancy” (pregnant women display pigmentary darkening that no male achieves with his male sex hormones, including exogenous steroid use).
Not in their, admittedly deluded, self-conception. They also strongly believe in the subordination of women and in displays of masculinity.
Hair, skin and nails — all directly impacted by hormone levels. Pregnant women tend to have the best examples of all three, unless they’re malnourished, which implies to me that ideas of femininity are grounded in the ideal of healthy maternity. Not sure how this relates to black and white hormonal differences though…
Now here’ s my chance to contribute to World War Hair!
As a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, I lived in a world where any boy with pretensions of hipness or coolness or whatever had hair as long as possible. I suppose this was to indicate rebellion against parents, school, society, whatever.
(Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna has a section on how hair/beard styles switch back and forth, as each generation tries to rebel against “old guys”: from Lincoln to whoever, big shots in the 19th century were as massively bearded or moustachioed as possible, then the clean shaved look became the standard; by the 60s, hair and beards were “rebellious”. His point was to illustrate how Vienna went from Emperor Franz Joseph to Wittgenstein & Co, who were short haired and clean shaven to indicate the New Man, like Wittgenstein’s brief aphorisms or Loos’ war on ornaments in architecture).
It was absolutely impossible for me to grow my hair long. It would barely reach my collar, to say nothing of the over the shoulder look. At a certain point it would just get thicker and more raggedy, so I just had to have it trimmed and “thinned out” to look human, but it would not grown an inch more.
Of course, for the last ten years or so “thinning it out” would be a bad joke.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Villa_del_casale_13.jpgReplies: @donut, @Stan Adams
Not contradicting you but those are young boys in that mosaic .
Lets consider biological reasons. Women’s bodies had to make the care and feeding of infants their priority consideration when evolving in the distant past. Breastfeeding and pre-chewing of solid food required hair not to interfere with this function. Also, long hair protected the infant from insects and direct sun exposure while being so nurtured. Consider this, almost ALL body hair on humans is precisely in sensitive areas where you don’t want any insect intrusion. A man’s hair adequately protects his scalp, eyes, ears, and nose. His beard protects his mouth and nose and neck while allowing for movement of the head. A woman needs a smooth face and chest to provide maximum comfort and utility for a snuggling and feeding baby. Also, young babies learn early to grasp a mother’s hair for security. A mother’s hair can cover her entire face and upper body, and her infant, like a big sunscreen and insect screen combined. Mother Nature, or God, take your pick, doesn’t waste resources on assuaging human vanity.
Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.
Both Masaii and Rastas also have warrior culture attributes.You're reading far too much into this. Black people's hair is a lot harder to maintain. This means that for black women to have longer hair, which is often expected, it can take an hour a day to look after, or more. Even keeping your arms above your head for that long is exhausting and hurts, nevermind the pain on your scalp from de-knotting. This is enough to make anyone mad.He's wrong. Untanned European men are fairer than untanned European women.
You're also wrong with your etymology of the word "fair." Fair to mean beautiful or handsome was used long before the term "fairer sex," which originally just meant better looking, which is unsurprising since "fairer sex" was a term coined by men, of whom 95% think women are better looking than men. Had it been termed and amplified through a female dominated public sphere, it would have been the other way around.
The conflation of fairness, in the modern sense, with beauty is also basic. Blond(e) and blue eyes are more beautiful, sorry to everyone else, but facts are facts and those two characteristics are only a small part of the picture anyway. People like bright colours. They are fun!
The conflation of this with femininity is just because male perspectives on what constituted good looking, meaning women, were more likely to be shared and become part of the culture. Women's use of make-up, because their looks were so often their way for getting resources due to the division of public and private life, compounds this, but men are naturally just as good looking as women, and, with gym culture, we can see that the cult of male beauty is never held down for long.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Prosa123, @James J O'Meara, @TGGP
“Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.”
I examine this in the context of the Wild West and Oscar Wilde’s famous Western tour:
https://counter-currents.com/2012/09/wild-boys-vs-hard-men/
The book it’s reprinted in is banned by Amazon (Bezos is one of the baldheaded bastards) but you can get it through Unz.com
Just as European Woman's obsession with tanning invalidates the pale = feminine hypothesis.
Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.Replies: @puttheforkdown, @James J O'Meara, @anon
“Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.”
I agree with this so much that I just wanted to point out that this is not me writing under a pseudonym.
In my Amazon-banned book, I point out that in addition to “think they will be gay,” the promotion of bleks as hyper-masculine factors in as well. Black hair is so bad that many black males will just give up and shave it off entirely (you’ll note that even some women do as well), thus the shaved head = masculine idea (e.g., bulked up Bezos, Breaking Bad, etc.)
How much of hair length preference is a result of available cutting and styling technology? Sure you could samurai sword your hair short, but it would look dumb. Did male hair length decrease with the availability of good shears and understanding of the importance of symmetry in attractiveness? For instance, have you ever tried to successfully cut your own hair? Even with modern electric technology it is easier said than done.
As a non-colored man of exquisite hair length and sheen, I find the reactions of the sexes to be that men feel uncomfortable and insecure in their masculinity (especially true in more masculine cultures like the Southern US and South America), while women often ask how I keep get it so straight and shiny (answer: as an uncouth barbarian, it is often unwashed). Of course, the reason I keep my hair long is because it gives me the strength of Samson.
Finally, having strong opinions about how long a man’s hair should be is kind of gay. For what it’s worth, I like an afro on a black gal. Extensions weird me out and don’t get me started on bizarre acrylic fingernails. Oh no, purge the impure thoughts…
Women, on the other hand, usually don't mind longer hair on guys. Even if they aren't thrilled, they aren't going to be as overtly hostile as insecure men are.
WRT masculinity standards, it's ironic that gate-keepers are so fixated....On other men. Real men adhere to the code of "I'll mind my own business if you mind yours". However, these "hyper-masculine" cultures usually are marked by heavy insecurity and status climbing. So bitchy put-downs on "not being man enough" are jabs to pummel a competitor.
When men control the resources of the public sphere, women are well-incentivised to use their bodies and charms to get fed. From this point, "beauty" often becomes associated as a feminine trait, when it clearly is not.
This effect was amplified because rich men made the public culture, and rich women could spend all day idling, with their slaves or servants, on their looks.Short hair for men, in battle, was practical, as it always is, but it was also often ignored by less practical armies, such as the Russians as late as before Potemkin's reforms. Practicality is more a public sphere virtue than a private sphere one. You can see this in home decoration versus office decoration. Offices that looks as impractical but beautiful as a home are a status symbol of those who are so successful thay they can signal a luxurious affect of impracticality, like Elon Musk smoking weed and going on Joe Rogan. The barrier between the private and public can be forgone.
Notice also that Potemkin didn't follow suit with his cookie-cutter grunts. He was, like Musk, important, and he had an Empress's favour to maintain. Officers in modern Western armies also tend to have much longer hair than the soldiers. You want to look good if you are leading.
Trump may not have achieved quite what he was going for aesthetically, but he spent a tremendous amount of time trying to look good, and he gets PR.
https://images.app.goo.gl/RZvNAyEgYaQwyuR88
Perhaps the public sphere does work most "efficiently" if beauty and sex are sublimated out of it, but humans like beauty and sex and will, if they have a choice, prefer the presence of them in the sphere where they are. This means that as soon as the public sphere is big enough to include everyone and has a surplus, the less "efficient" human desires and needs like beauty, will "invade."
Perhaps fewer widgets will be produced but only extreme and increasing repression will avoid this. If people have enough of their basic physical need met and are unworried by external threats, they will choose emotional needs over widgets every time.
Something, something Maslow.
Buns are long hair. Samurai also had long hair. I assume they tied it up for the same reason that women athletes tie up their hair, but they could easily have cut it much shorter, they had quite a few sharp implements around.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
Nah. Urbanized societies, even ancient ones, had women who were surprisingly not very pregnant. There are some gruesome relics from this.
A cache of infant skeletons beneath a bath house probably points to a Roman brothel in the biblical city of Ashkelon nearly 2,000 years ago, Israeli archeologists reported Wednesday…The babies were of both sexes, indicating they were not victims of the common Roman practice of female infanticide, the researchers wrote in a letter to the science journal Nature. Instead, they probably were dumped soon after birth by prostitutes, Oppenheim said.
Practicality tends to win, and winning tends to produce positive emotions. “People gravitate to the strong horse.”
Not really with those, its technically “long hair” but extremely brief in doing so; its a compromise to minimally keep long hair as an aesthetic while keeping it functional.
Samurai had extremely short “knotted hair” during their practical eras of late Sengkou and Imjin of genuine nonstop warfare. At other times, they were announcing their family names before fighting in individual duels during battle, so practicality was really quite moot as a whole though notably the sword-saint Mushashi had short hair too.
https://imgur.com/N72Pbfq
He was a devotee of practicality, though. He won many of his duels by bringing a quarterstaff-like weapon to overwhelm swords, and advised at times of hiding with corpses in battle to surprise enemies. He was good at what he did, perhaps the deadliest man of his nation; what he did wasn’t pretty. Ish. He’s one of the few who was able to dual-wield katanas in a practical manner, so that’s pretty.
Where once science was bent to produce a surplus of food, shelter and security, it is now bent to produce a surplus of egotistical validation. Everyone has to get a medal and everyone has to get representation, even if a new form of obesity has arisen. I look forward to when this is satisfied and people can move onto connection etc, as as their defensive pain is soothed away.
Furthernore, if everyone has the basic needs that previous wars were often fought over, then future wars will be fought over higher level ones. But given the change in what is being fought over, the way warfare will be conducted will change radically too. Developed countries have low level civil wars of feelings and validation going on within them. Perhaps these will internationalise or perhaps these wars can only be fought without true regard to nation. We will see.
The only reason why this pattern is obscured is because only part of the world contains people whose basic needs are easily met. This is changing everywhere but Africa. People and movements who prepare for the last war will lose.Replies: @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @The Alarmist
1 Corinthians 11
15 But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.
16 But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.
head coverings for women in church-always,
Additionally, Pregnancy exacerbates hair and nail growth.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
I don’t necessarily think there is a cultural preference for darker women, but I think you’re right that among Northwest and Central European women are darker-complected on average than men. I am thinking in terms of eye/hair color more than skin color, since for average whites skin color is more an indicator of how often they are outdoors than anything else. I have always noticed higher prevalence of *natural* blond hair and blue eyes among white men than women, at least in my area. Thinking of various couplings in my family, the woman is almost always darker than the man.
Origin? Well, it could be that blonde barbarian DNA is more present in European men. Isn't male DNA more Northern sourced relative to female DNA in both Europe and Asia? Or it could be that blonde hair and reddish pale skin puts people at ease (because you can't hide as easily?) , and blonde men were better at gaining and maintaining trust which they used to social advantage. Women don't need any special trait to be trusted, and moreover, they didn't need to persuade anyone to join their army or hunting expedition, work on their farm, guard their flock, or whatever.
Notable that prejudice against red-heads exists (and red hair is more common among females), while nothing similar exists against blonde males. At some point in European history light hair became a social lubricant.Replies: @anonymous
I’ve heard that the reason human females have long hair is that so that an infant has something to grab onto (humans lacking the body hair that serves the same purpose for lower primates). Of course one could argue that protruding breasts (again, absent in lower primates) serve the same purpose.
As I was walking this morning, I saw a 6yo girl waiting with her father for the school bus…Her long straight hair was only a few inches short of her waistline….Women’s hair is definitely longer, probably related to sexual attraction, and maybe a sign of health in primitive societies…
Meanwhile, in the real world:
Regarding “the fair sex.” I don’t know whether women are the fair sex in terms of pigmentation, but I believe that they are the fair sex in terms of fairmindedness. Relief from the subjectivity of the competitive unfairmindedness of testosterone-driven maleness. I’ve had a few Secret Sharers in my cabin during my life, helping me improve upon fairness. (Among other things.)
Your example seems to support my point.
Practicality, once people have achieved a level of development, shifts in meaning to vaguely accord to higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, and other of what are traditionally seen as impractical needs. You can see this in the winning political movements in the societies that have achieved that level.
Where once science was bent to produce a surplus of food, shelter and security, it is now bent to produce a surplus of egotistical validation. Everyone has to get a medal and everyone has to get representation, even if a new form of obesity has arisen. I look forward to when this is satisfied and people can move onto connection etc, as as their defensive pain is soothed away.
Furthernore, if everyone has the basic needs that previous wars were often fought over, then future wars will be fought over higher level ones. But given the change in what is being fought over, the way warfare will be conducted will change radically too. Developed countries have low level civil wars of feelings and validation going on within them. Perhaps these will internationalise or perhaps these wars can only be fought without true regard to nation. We will see.
The only reason why this pattern is obscured is because only part of the world contains people whose basic needs are easily met. This is changing everywhere but Africa. People and movements who prepare for the last war will lose.
NOT.
You are overlooking what “hierarchy” means.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41233558Replies: @Spangel226, @Triteleia Laxa
My take is that if there isn’t some degree of adversity in life in the form of meeting basic needs, a civilisation turns on itself and eats itself from within. BLM and the warm embrace given it by White America and Europe is evidence that we are doing that in spades.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
This doesn’t make any sense. Why would an incursion of light-skinned people from the Steppe lead to a cultural preference for “darker women” among Europeans? And why would any skin differences persist between the sexes after millenia of endogamous procreation between the Steppe people and the other group?
Light male + darker female is how Europe (and much of Asia) was born, and re-born over and over again. Old traditions die hard.
Where once science was bent to produce a surplus of food, shelter and security, it is now bent to produce a surplus of egotistical validation. Everyone has to get a medal and everyone has to get representation, even if a new form of obesity has arisen. I look forward to when this is satisfied and people can move onto connection etc, as as their defensive pain is soothed away.
Furthernore, if everyone has the basic needs that previous wars were often fought over, then future wars will be fought over higher level ones. But given the change in what is being fought over, the way warfare will be conducted will change radically too. Developed countries have low level civil wars of feelings and validation going on within them. Perhaps these will internationalise or perhaps these wars can only be fought without true regard to nation. We will see.
The only reason why this pattern is obscured is because only part of the world contains people whose basic needs are easily met. This is changing everywhere but Africa. People and movements who prepare for the last war will lose.Replies: @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @The Alarmist
Because each need in Maslow’s hierarchy is equally pressing whether it is up or down the hierarchy, and therefore human beings are as apt to sacrifice for one as for the other.
NOT.
You are overlooking what “hierarchy” means.
Put down the thesaurus toots. The fact that women are paler than men is obvious enough...Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Learn to read better. I can’t be bothered to explain to you your misunderstanding.
Anyway, I console myself with the fact that you are but merely posting into the void, so that your "corrections" have no real world effect, whereas Frost's work is published and authoritative. I've actually already started to forget you... Cheers, you no doubt homely lass!Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia, @Triteleia Laxa
According to the Bible , it’s a shame for a man to have hair as long as a woman ( to be mistaken as a woman…which is all the way to your butt ) 🙂 I’m guessing it’s about the same for either gender… Chainsmokers often have long hair…which could be why bikers don’t have fabulously long hair . I’ve only gone 2 years without a haircut…so I don’t know .. probably genetics involved . But if there’s a difference…why would the Bible bring it up ? The apostle Paul taught men to cut their hair if it caused a distraction in the church. It could all be down to genetics with the hair growth stuff .
Where once science was bent to produce a surplus of food, shelter and security, it is now bent to produce a surplus of egotistical validation. Everyone has to get a medal and everyone has to get representation, even if a new form of obesity has arisen. I look forward to when this is satisfied and people can move onto connection etc, as as their defensive pain is soothed away.
Furthernore, if everyone has the basic needs that previous wars were often fought over, then future wars will be fought over higher level ones. But given the change in what is being fought over, the way warfare will be conducted will change radically too. Developed countries have low level civil wars of feelings and validation going on within them. Perhaps these will internationalise or perhaps these wars can only be fought without true regard to nation. We will see.
The only reason why this pattern is obscured is because only part of the world contains people whose basic needs are easily met. This is changing everywhere but Africa. People and movements who prepare for the last war will lose.Replies: @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @The Alarmist
It does not. The brothel is indicative of women in normal society not being pregnant; Roman fertility increasingly dropped as it urbanized. Gaius only had two siblings; the fact that laws were increasingly being passed to encourage childbirth and explicit complaints about it all show that birth rates had plummeted. I actually believe at some stage, the Rome population was only able to sustain itself via immigration.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41233558
I get your point though. What were Roman women doing if not pregnant? Or were they often engaging in infanticide like the prostitutes? Were they running households of slaves? It is a strange world to understand. I suppose it was also wildly different across class and time.
I believe that women didn't get involved publically in politics, though the usual family intrigues must have been common.
By the time the birth rate had dropped, domestic politics seems to have essentially been a military endeavour and, without modern technology, women make extremely poor fighters. Even with it, women are not great, though far more equal. It would, therefore, be strange for any women to be able to publically participate in this.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
NOT.
You are overlooking what “hierarchy” means.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Where do these thickheaded anonymous commenters spring from? I acknowledged the hierarchy part in my comment. The point is that the base of the pyramid is easily met in developed societies, and even now in quite poor ones, so conflict has moved onto higher levels.
It is a hierarchy of needs, meaning that the needs at one end of the pole are more significant than at the other end. In other words, the benefit of satisfying the needs diminishes as you move toward the other end of the pole. The risk reward tradeoff to conflict becomes less favorable and we should expect conflict to diminish, not remain constant.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Because the Europeans were darker pigmented that the invading Steppe nomads, and the nomads took the European women as wives.
Light male + darker female is how Europe (and much of Asia) was born, and re-born over and over again. Old traditions die hard.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
lmao.
Keep drinking that koolaid, baby.
I think it is similar to the male lion's mane - evidently they only grow full manes if they're well fed, and they can lose their manes due to stress (i.e., losing a fight with another male lion that they nevertheless survive). With lion dummies, scientists have shown that female lions prefer to mate with male lions which have full, dark manes.Replies: @The Alarmist
Good point … I’m going to have to pay attention to the hair of the young women in my office to see how they’re faring after their death jabs. A couple of them were knocked out for a week after shot one, and still went back for shot two because someone told them being knocked flat on your back means the vaxx is working.
these are the questions mossad wants the goyim to think about.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41233558Replies: @Spangel226, @Triteleia Laxa
Ive read info that aligns with your view. Childbirth was taxing and potentially lethal for women, so they and their families avoided it more than one would think. Generally in pre modern times for both the hunter gatherer and agrarian period, women tried not to undergo much more than 7 full pregnancies even though their fertile years would have allowed them to live through a couple dozen if they tried for the maximum and lived through all of them. In pre modern times, women wanted to live and men didn’t want them to die and leave the children they had with no one to care for them. This means that most women spent the vast majority of their childbearing years not pregnant.
Where did you read that info?Replies: @Spangel226
This is also the leading theory for why women in traditional societies don’t get breast cancer: during their fertile years they’re either pregnant or nursing. This protects them from the constant hormone fluctuations caused by a menstrual cycle. But Western women are rarely pregnant or nursing and the hormone fluctuation increase breast cancer risk. Feminism and progress!Replies: @Steve Sailer, @anonymous
I think that we should ignore old religious stuff & history as not pertinent to the issue now, and focus on newer, empirical reasons (TBC, WW1 & gas masks; on the other hand, “I protest” counter-cultural 60’s).
My opinion:
1. epic, patriarchal beards of the 19th C leading figures (Darwin, Marx, Maxwell, Dostoevsky, Engels, Tolstoy, Whitman, …) are gone for good. First, they somehow look unhygienic; then, there is something not simply masculine, but Biblical, patriarchal about them. They are not “sexy”; they are a symbol of male absolute, and especially spiritual authority, as well as maturity (even old age)- which is not a popular trend. Stefan Zweig, in his superb autobiography The World of Yesterday, wrote excellently about pre-WW1 mature looks mania.
2. smaller, trimmed beards are here to stay (Chekhov, Freud). Of course, well groomed.
3. hippies & beards- gone, dirty, not healthy New Age conformist life-style. Also, they suck. Smelly, unkempt, gross.
4. moustaches are even more endangered. There was a 19th C female saying: There is no real kiss without a moustache. Looks like they’re on the way of the dodo.
Let’s see about Western canonical culture re BQ (without the ancients, other cultures & the 20th C, which distort the image):
Visual arts (El Greco, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Duerer, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Rodin, Degas, Van Gogh, …- beards; Raphael, Goya, Watteau, ..-shaven). Beards clearly dominate
Music (Bach, Handel, Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, ..-shaven ; Palestrina, Monteverdi, Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Franck, Verdi, Smetana, Bizet, Mussorgsky, .- beards). It is about 50/50, with slight preference to the shaven
Literature (Dante,Boccaccio, Milton, Blake, Swift, Racine, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Leopardi, Baudelaire, George Eliot (huh!), Heine,..-shaven ; Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Melville, Whitman, Stendhal, Moliere, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, .. – beards). Again 50/50, but this time, beards seem to have a slight preference
Mathematics & natural sciences (Copernicus, Boyle, Newton, Euler, Dalton, Leeuwenhoek, Cavendish, Thomas Young, Lavoisier, Pascal, Leibniz, Lagrange, Laplace, Hutton, Hamilton, Cauchy, Abel, Weierstrass, Mendel, Lobachevsky, Jenner, Liebig, ..-shaven; Galileo, Kepler, Fermat, Descartes, Gauss (?), Riemann, Cantor, Poincare, Lie, Dirichlet, Virchow, Boole, J.C. Maxwell, Joule, Darwin, Mendeleev, Kirchhoff, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Boltzmann ..-beards)
Seems to be 50/50Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
When I had a beard, my saying was that a woman likes a man’s beard because it tickles her thighs.
After I shaved mine off, though, I got a lot more dates.
Where once science was bent to produce a surplus of food, shelter and security, it is now bent to produce a surplus of egotistical validation. Everyone has to get a medal and everyone has to get representation, even if a new form of obesity has arisen. I look forward to when this is satisfied and people can move onto connection etc, as as their defensive pain is soothed away.
Furthernore, if everyone has the basic needs that previous wars were often fought over, then future wars will be fought over higher level ones. But given the change in what is being fought over, the way warfare will be conducted will change radically too. Developed countries have low level civil wars of feelings and validation going on within them. Perhaps these will internationalise or perhaps these wars can only be fought without true regard to nation. We will see.
The only reason why this pattern is obscured is because only part of the world contains people whose basic needs are easily met. This is changing everywhere but Africa. People and movements who prepare for the last war will lose.Replies: @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @The Alarmist
Self-actualisation run amok.
My take is that if there isn’t some degree of adversity in life in the form of meeting basic needs, a civilisation turns on itself and eats itself from within. BLM and the warm embrace given it by White America and Europe is evidence that we are doing that in spades.
Or, everyone can just return to daydreaming about an apocalypse that will return humanity to scrabbling around in the dirt just so that their "realist" philosophy can be relevant.
Not that their "realism" would be recognised by Machiavelli, for whom it would appear macho peasant self-delusion.
"Food production over feelings"
"But everyone is obese and feels bad"
"Shut up woman, now watch me plough."
You couldn’t be bothered to explain anything because you were wrong. Women are fairer in both hair color and skin pigmentation the world over (within race, of course), and humanity’s collective unconscious has been recognizing this in the form of various “masculine = dark, feminine = pale” stereotypes since time immemorial. The perception has repeatedly popped up across various cultures throughout human history.
Anyway, I console myself with the fact that you are but merely posting into the void, so that your “corrections” have no real world effect, whereas Frost’s work is published and authoritative. I’ve actually already started to forget you… Cheers, you no doubt homely lass!
Frost's work is not authoritative and has been demolished by Madrigal and Kelly. Frost basically retired as a lead author after that, and has since spent most of his time writing on his blog and on controversial sites like this.
And no, men are not darker than women in every population, and there is not an association of "pale = feminine" in every culture. In most cultures light colors tend to be associated with male deities, dark colors are female. In Europeans men are the fairer sex, in both skin, eye and hair pigmentation.
Back when the world wide web emerged in the 1990s, I saw the lecture notes online of a professor of physical anthropology who said that in a study (presumably of white students) where the participants did not get hair cuts for a long, that the average man’s hair grew to be 16 inches long before falling out and the average woman’s hair grew to be 28″ long.
Per this article, it would appear that female hair is thicker per strand hence less likely to break /fall out.
https://medcraveonline.com/FRCIJ/FRCIJ-08-00333.pdf
As a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, I lived in a world where any boy with pretensions of hipness or coolness or whatever had hair as long as possible. I suppose this was to indicate rebellion against parents, school, society, whatever.
(Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna has a section on how hair/beard styles switch back and forth, as each generation tries to rebel against "old guys": from Lincoln to whoever, big shots in the 19th century were as massively bearded or moustachioed as possible, then the clean shaved look became the standard; by the 60s, hair and beards were "rebellious". His point was to illustrate how Vienna went from Emperor Franz Joseph to Wittgenstein & Co, who were short haired and clean shaven to indicate the New Man, like Wittgenstein's brief aphorisms or Loos' war on ornaments in architecture).
It was absolutely impossible for me to grow my hair long. It would barely reach my collar, to say nothing of the over the shoulder look. At a certain point it would just get thicker and more raggedy, so I just had to have it trimmed and "thinned out" to look human, but it would not grown an inch more.
Of course, for the last ten years or so "thinning it out" would be a bad joke.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Faraday's Bobcat
Mine thinned out so much on top I converted to the Buzz cut.
Men in the 1970s at that stage in life went with ridiculous comb overs:
e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstylesThe same can be seen in Qin Terracotta warriors, who all have buns and short hair.
https://imgur.com/9JAx34kReplies: @Triteleia Laxa, @ringo starr search
When I visited the terracotta warriors in Xian some years ago, my Chinese hosts continually pointed out to me (to their amusement or befuddlement) that all of these 20- to 40-year old ancient Chinese warriors sported pretty prominent moustaches and chin beards, something that now is pretty difficult for most Chinese men in that age group to exhibit. Reason? Nutrition? Genes have drifted? Environmental hormone interference?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41233558Replies: @Spangel226, @Triteleia Laxa
Your example was of women killing their birthed babies, so I took that as a sign of a lot of unwanted pregnancy.
I get your point though. What were Roman women doing if not pregnant? Or were they often engaging in infanticide like the prostitutes? Were they running households of slaves? It is a strange world to understand. I suppose it was also wildly different across class and time.
I believe that women didn’t get involved publically in politics, though the usual family intrigues must have been common.
By the time the birth rate had dropped, domestic politics seems to have essentially been a military endeavour and, without modern technology, women make extremely poor fighters. Even with it, women are not great, though far more equal. It would, therefore, be strange for any women to be able to publically participate in this.
https://twitter.com/henrykleeKTVU/status/1424903792156315666?s=20Replies: @J.Ross
When will the yellow man escape the black nightmare of white supremacy?
THAT is why scalp hair, including long scalp hair, is considered a female trait, although not quite a secondary or tertiary sex characteristic, not because women’s hair grows longer ( I believe it does not).
The caveat is that women DO get male pattern baldness, but at a lesser percentage, and generally to a lesser degree, than men, and usually only after their childbearing years are over, or if they’re particularly unhealthy or masculine.
After I shaved mine off, though, I got a lot more dates.Replies: @Desiderius
It probably had more to do with you cutting back on the cunninglingus jokes than the shaving. My wife likes the goatee. And the closely trimmed hair.
But it’s still a cliche that in males, “tall dark and handsome” is the ideal – blond not so much, whereas it’s the ne plus ultra in women.
When I was a young man in England, at school and later out there in what’s sometimes called “the sexual marketplace”, there was a lot more competition for blondes than for dark-haired beauties who actually had better facial structure. The bottle blonde is blonde for a reason.
Blond men always seem a tad more feminine – admittedly this guy is playing it up a lot.
(Baron Kaldian – who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)
Still, from what I’ve read, surveys show that men prefer brunettes for marriage and blondes for flings. Blonde isn’t necessarily a symbol of universal beauty. It could simply signify sexual availability somehow, possibly simply because of cultural artifices.
In my view, facial structure, youth and and physique determine about 98% of female beauty. Coloring has very little to impact after that point.Replies: @Spangel226
Ok, whatever, dude.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/29/0c/5f290cfbc5e4017c17d1b068bcda6299.jpg
http://slackjawpunks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/vlad1.jpg
(Baron Kaldian – who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)
Probably David Bowie.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
In contrast to “the fair sex” we have “tall dark and handsome” for men.
Regarding HBD and hair, I’ve always been curious about facial hair – especially since I grew my lockdown beard. It’s certainly not cold weather, as Black Africans can often grow full beards while Eskimos are one of the most hairless races, along with Southeast Asians that have spent the last 5,000 years in the tropics. Maybe it’s just sexual selection and genetic drift?
Men have shorter hair than women, on average, because they cut it. I don’t think women genetically or hormonally can grow their hair longer than men. If you read Julius Caesar’s |De Bello Gallica”, he describes Celtic and Germanic male warriors as uniformally long-haired, and usually with braided hair. In fact, the modern custom of men having short hair comes from Roman tradtion. Before the first Punic War, Roman men also had long hair. The Roman King, Ancus Marcius, was described as having long auburn hair. When the Roman legionnaires went to North Africa, diseases like lice infestation became a problem due to the hot weather. Shaving the hair off clean was a quick and easy solution. After the war, many politicians and Senators kept their hair short. It was a way of stating that they had served the country in the military. So the custom took on.
When the barbarii sacked Rome and Rome fell, long hair once again became the norm for men. The barbarian kings and nobles of Middle Age Europe had long hair.
When the Industrial Revolution came, long hair tended to cause a lot of problems as it tends to get caught in the machines, cause infestations of parasites, etc. So the factory owners, the capitalists, demanded that their workers keep their hair short above the ears to avoid these problems. So short hair once again became a fashion for men.
Many people in the dating community call short hair in men “beta male hair”. Because short hair is utilitarian. It is easy to keep, easy to clean and doesn’t get in the way of things.
If you look at romance novels for women, the hunks in the cover always have hair that is at least shoulder length or longer. Growing long hair demands protein and biological investment, and male hormones, contrary to popular belief, actually makes hair grow. Long hair is a trait of “sexual exuberance”.
When a man wears his hair short, he is signaling that he is not a hunk or a stud, but he is a stable provider that can bring home a paycheck. His short hair signals that he is there to work and provide resources.
In the 1960’s, teenage boys in America, inspired by Scandinavian and Germanic customs, rebelled agains the school mandates that boys must have thir hair cropped above the ears. American boys of German and Scandinavian ancestry rebelled against it, with the full support of their parents, as in these cultures it is acceptable for males to have long hair if they want to. In the conservative past, only girls were allowed to keep their hair long. Boys were forced to keep their hair short so as to get used to their utilitarian role or working, serving the military and providing for a family. Industry in America demanded that the public school system force boys to keep their hair short for them to get used to their future role as workers. The rebellion of teenage boys was their way of saying:
“I am a human being in ownership of my body, and not a product to be used by American industry.”
Even today in more conservative red states, like Texas, public schools still force boys to wear their hair above their ears. Girls, conversely, can wear their hair as long as they want.
It’s funny that long hair in American Society, traditionally, is considered “effeminate”, because throughout history there hasn’t been this association between long hair and femininity. The Spartan warriors, for instance, took great pride in their long hair, and would comb it before battle so that, if they die, they would look great at their funeral. In Germanic cultures, women showed a proference for warriors with longer hair, which was actually seen as a sign of virility.
The ‘fair’ in ‘the fair sex’ has never meant ‘light-skinned’; the original etymological meaning of ‘fair’ is ‘beautiful’ generally. ‘Fair’ has only meant ‘light-skinned’ since the 13th century; it’s always been an ancillary definition, and the causation is all the other way – possibly because the Norman high class had lighter skin than the then-still-significantly-Celtic commoners. (Compare descriptions of the Welsh and even relatively modern descriptions of backwater populations with more pre-Saxon ancestry – they’re always considered dark.) Historically, the use of these words wasn’t always as “gendered” as it is today (that is to say, at some times, a man can easily be called ‘fair’ in the sense of beautiful without too much implication of femininity), so it’s not even safe to assume that the transfer of ‘fair’ to ‘light-skinned’ was ever even talking about women.
Historical sources with which I’m familiar generally tend to support the contention by Anon[118] above that women were both assumed and preferred to be slightly darker than men on average.
As for the discussion of hair taking place in some earlier comments, long hair on men has at various times been a prestige symbol of some significance, including among the ancient Gauls (whom the Romans found appallingly vain) and the Merovingian dynasty, among whom cutting the hair was a punishment because it was seen to render one unfit to rule. This doesn’t speak to whether long hair in general is a feminine trait, only that it could in some contexts be seen as masculine; however, it more or less explodes the “practicality” argument. Only fools and leftists (redundant) look at the world as they think it is now and project it back indefinitely.
Men go bald, and a horseshoe of long hair looks ridiculous. A few wispy tufts up top grown long look even more ridiculous.
Long hair tends to catch more light than short hair, making it glow, and there are many more bottle BLONDES than bottle BLONDS.
black folks’ hair, however long, twists and turns, making it seem shorter. Even wavy/curly hair on whites takes longer to get to a given LINEAR length than straight hair
So many environmental factors affect hair and skin color, the true test of a sex link is eye color, and I know of no such link.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1421199340308242437
I wish “Anon” would answer my question about “European cultural preference for darker women” – AFAIK women have been using (usually) lead-based creams and pastes as light make-up since at least Roman times.
Wasn’t one of Claudius’ female relatives banished to an island where she learned to swim and got very tanned, and on her return persuaded her female intimates to do the same, implying it was unusual?
I get your point though. What were Roman women doing if not pregnant? Or were they often engaging in infanticide like the prostitutes? Were they running households of slaves? It is a strange world to understand. I suppose it was also wildly different across class and time.
I believe that women didn't get involved publically in politics, though the usual family intrigues must have been common.
By the time the birth rate had dropped, domestic politics seems to have essentially been a military endeavour and, without modern technology, women make extremely poor fighters. Even with it, women are not great, though far more equal. It would, therefore, be strange for any women to be able to publically participate in this.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
You mean, what do women do when not pregnant? Funny question. They live all of the various aspects of life as normal not pregnant.
They engaged in a lot of beautification.
All from one household for one particular woman. Also jars of makeup, chemicals and so on. Poisons, so they were engaged in a certain type of violent domestic politics…
Beyond that, they ran the household so that meant different things for different classes: caring for children or family, commanding slaves and servants, and with women in civilizations from times immemorial, always heavily associated with textile making and various domestic craft goods. It was seen as a virtuous thing even for upper class women to be able to sew and produce clothes, and some upper-class women did so in order to flaunt their virtue. Frost has also written about this: as men’s production of food increased, women’s association with household craftmanship increased.
Along with familial politics, they were pretty important and influential in the social context which can be surprising given that technically speaking, they did not actually have their own first names, e.g. Julia(Caesar’s sister) received her name because was born in the Julius family. To distinguish them, an elder sister would be Julia Major, and the younger one would be Julia Minor.
Birth rates probably dropped due to the usual issues with status investment in children: as Roman “modernized”, children did indeed become increasingly expensive as the “idealized childhood” became ever more complicated and with removal from agricultural work, children did not add economic benefit. So legitimate children became fewer, women increasingly used early contraception methods(silphium, etc) and men slaked their lusts in brothels and the like. And for all of its polish, urban living was hazardous – centers of disease, of fire, industrial and chemical contamination, and later on, increasingly of riots and mobs, etc.
supposedly tanning your testicles causes testosterone to increase too – no joke
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Villa_del_casale_13.jpgReplies: @donut, @Stan Adams
I feel bad for the bunny.
Most of the Iberian sagas (Romances of El Cid, Troubadour ballads of the Catalan Princes of Barcelona, Santiago de Compolesta priory’s copy of Orlando Furioso, etc.) all have pasty white Knights claiming a swarthy Moorish woman (not black, but certainly Berber or Andalusian) as a wife from their defeated enemies.
Not my taste personally (I prefer Turkic-Asian types to the point of marrying one) but Iberia certainly had a lot more going on in terms of high arts than dreary Britain in the medieval era.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
Is the hypothesis that this is a purely incidental side effect of women’s fat levels and hormones? Or might this be an adaptation to increase Vitamin D production for fetal development and breast feeding?
This sounds plausible but I would need to see real proof since the argument can go the other way. Ancient and tribal warriors fought with weapons far more than hand to hand so hair grabbing would not have been a big part of combat (spear jabbing and sword hacking would be).
Also in societies that took hand to hand combat training very seriously, China and Japan, the men often had long hair anyway. Even if worn in a bun a Japanese top knot makes a great thing to grab.
Also warriors wore helmets, making hair length more irrelevant.
The point of another commenter that short hair prevents lice sounds reasonable, but again needs proof.
Peter Frost has consistently sought to minimize a lot of data going all the way back to the 1960s suggesting that, in Europeans, men are lighter skinned than women.
Quoting Frost in his reply to Lorena Madrigal after she dispelled his theory:And recent research again independently confirmed that, in Europeans, men are lighter than women:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048294None of this should come as any surpeise given that we now know from ancient DNA that the genetic material for lightening European pigmentation came in a fast "blitzkrieg" of male migration from the cultures associated with the Western Steppe Herders from Eastern Europe, as shown by the work of Pehti Saag in Science magazine. And in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3494
This, along with multiple descriptions from antiquity of Indo-European societies in which women are notably darker pigmented than men, are entirely consistent with a longstanding cultural preference for darker women among Europeans, and also the preference among European women for tanning.
Not to mention the various Eurasian indigenous religions in which male deities and spiritual entities are universally associated with lighter pigmentation, females with dark coloring.Replies: @AndrewR, @Spangel226, @YetAnotherAnon, @Peter Frost, @YetAnotherAnon, @S. Anonyia, @Anonymous, @R.G. Camara, @AnotherDad
I’ll nod at actual empirical data, but this paragraph is obvious irrelevant when it comes to the point at hand.
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
And culturally … “desirably” is the characteristics of the conqueror not the conquered. Having light male top-dog gods, and darker female gods, or depictions of lighter males conquering darker females does not settle the preference question. It suggests lightness was valued, more elite and ergo selection would select toward lightness. We had another such light on dark scenario on the Aryan invasion of India. Suffice it to say there’s no cultural propagation of “must have dark women”, but quite the reverse.
No the question is empirical. Does the set of physiological processes that make men men tend to darken or lighten the skin relative to those processes in women? Generally? In specific races?
https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/europe/britain-prince-william-india/index.htmlPlease face it, my friend. Frost got it brutally and horribly wrong, and you fell for it... Hook line and sinker.
Elite men prefer women of color.Replies: @anon
That’s one epic bunbun of those are very small children, you have to admit.
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
And culturally ... "desirably" is the characteristics of the conqueror not the conquered. Having light male top-dog gods, and darker female gods, or depictions of lighter males conquering darker females does not settle the preference question. It suggests lightness was valued, more elite and ergo selection would select toward lightness. We had another such light on dark scenario on the Aryan invasion of India. Suffice it to say there's no cultural propagation of "must have dark women", but quite the reverse.
No the question is empirical. Does the set of physiological processes that make men men tend to darken or lighten the skin relative to those processes in women? Generally? In specific races?Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Anon, @Paperback Writer
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
The Turks and Arabs “solved” this, they “just” castrated all their male African slaves, and the male offspring of their female African slaves. So the slaves became lighter and more like the rest of the Turks over the generations, and Turkey doesn’t have lots of obviously African-descended people.
I don’t know if they castrated their European slaves, I would have thought the Janissaries would not have been much of a fighting force absent testes, but I could be wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary
When the barbarii sacked Rome and Rome fell, long hair once again became the norm for men. The barbarian kings and nobles of Middle Age Europe had long hair.
When the Industrial Revolution came, long hair tended to cause a lot of problems as it tends to get caught in the machines, cause infestations of parasites, etc. So the factory owners, the capitalists, demanded that their workers keep their hair short above the ears to avoid these problems. So short hair once again became a fashion for men.
Many people in the dating community call short hair in men "beta male hair". Because short hair is utilitarian. It is easy to keep, easy to clean and doesn't get in the way of things.
If you look at romance novels for women, the hunks in the cover always have hair that is at least shoulder length or longer. Growing long hair demands protein and biological investment, and male hormones, contrary to popular belief, actually makes hair grow. Long hair is a trait of "sexual exuberance".
When a man wears his hair short, he is signaling that he is not a hunk or a stud, but he is a stable provider that can bring home a paycheck. His short hair signals that he is there to work and provide resources.
In the 1960's, teenage boys in America, inspired by Scandinavian and Germanic customs, rebelled agains the school mandates that boys must have thir hair cropped above the ears. American boys of German and Scandinavian ancestry rebelled against it, with the full support of their parents, as in these cultures it is acceptable for males to have long hair if they want to. In the conservative past, only girls were allowed to keep their hair long. Boys were forced to keep their hair short so as to get used to their utilitarian role or working, serving the military and providing for a family. Industry in America demanded that the public school system force boys to keep their hair short for them to get used to their future role as workers. The rebellion of teenage boys was their way of saying:
"I am a human being in ownership of my body, and not a product to be used by American industry."
Even today in more conservative red states, like Texas, public schools still force boys to wear their hair above their ears. Girls, conversely, can wear their hair as long as they want.
It's funny that long hair in American Society, traditionally, is considered "effeminate", because throughout history there hasn't been this association between long hair and femininity. The Spartan warriors, for instance, took great pride in their long hair, and would comb it before battle so that, if they die, they would look great at their funeral. In Germanic cultures, women showed a proference for warriors with longer hair, which was actually seen as a sign of virility.Replies: @Anonymous
Growing hair may demand protein investment but whether it is cut long or short, it grows just the same.
(Baron Kaldian - who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)Replies: @Spangel226, @anon
How long has that cliche been around? Hugh Hefner, who clearly preferred blondes, said his preference related back to seeing how blonde hair looked striking on the silver screen. It could be that the general description of blondes as sexy is something relatively recent and due to how it looked in the black and white photo era.
Still, from what I’ve read, surveys show that men prefer brunettes for marriage and blondes for flings. Blonde isn’t necessarily a symbol of universal beauty. It could simply signify sexual availability somehow, possibly simply because of cultural artifices.
In my view, facial structure, youth and and physique determine about 98% of female beauty. Coloring has very little to impact after that point.
As a teenager in the late 60s/early 70s, I lived in a world where any boy with pretensions of hipness or coolness or whatever had hair as long as possible. I suppose this was to indicate rebellion against parents, school, society, whatever.
(Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna has a section on how hair/beard styles switch back and forth, as each generation tries to rebel against "old guys": from Lincoln to whoever, big shots in the 19th century were as massively bearded or moustachioed as possible, then the clean shaved look became the standard; by the 60s, hair and beards were "rebellious". His point was to illustrate how Vienna went from Emperor Franz Joseph to Wittgenstein & Co, who were short haired and clean shaven to indicate the New Man, like Wittgenstein's brief aphorisms or Loos' war on ornaments in architecture).
It was absolutely impossible for me to grow my hair long. It would barely reach my collar, to say nothing of the over the shoulder look. At a certain point it would just get thicker and more raggedy, so I just had to have it trimmed and "thinned out" to look human, but it would not grown an inch more.
Of course, for the last ten years or so "thinning it out" would be a bad joke.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Faraday's Bobcat
I hear you. I stopped cutting my hair for a full year once, for reasons I would be embarrassed to recount. About six months in, it got to a sort of Vinnie Barbarino length, but then refused to get any longer.
You may have “acknowledged” the hierarchy, but you do not understand the hierarchy.
It is a hierarchy of needs, meaning that the needs at one end of the pole are more significant than at the other end. In other words, the benefit of satisfying the needs diminishes as you move toward the other end of the pole. The risk reward tradeoff to conflict becomes less favorable and we should expect conflict to diminish, not remain constant.
I agree with this so much that I just wanted to point out that this is not me writing under a pseudonym.
In my Amazon-banned book, I point out that in addition to "think they will be gay," the promotion of bleks as hyper-masculine factors in as well. Black hair is so bad that many black males will just give up and shave it off entirely (you'll note that even some women do as well), thus the shaved head = masculine idea (e.g., bulked up Bezos, Breaking Bad, etc.)Replies: @Not Raul, @Feryl
Didn’t Yul Brynner and/or Telly Savalas start that trend?
Still, from what I’ve read, surveys show that men prefer brunettes for marriage and blondes for flings. Blonde isn’t necessarily a symbol of universal beauty. It could simply signify sexual availability somehow, possibly simply because of cultural artifices.
In my view, facial structure, youth and and physique determine about 98% of female beauty. Coloring has very little to impact after that point.Replies: @Spangel226
And besides, if we are to take the cliche of tall, dark and handsome as evidence, the what of the “tall, tan and blonde” cliche. The ideal seems to be more young Heidi klum than Elle fanning.
These are are the composite images:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1bd01c4d-d9a1-4a74-99d7-74124ff0f942/135fig1.jpg
The composite on the left is of the 10 women with the highest levels of estrogen. The one on the right is of the 10 women with the lowest levels.
The left composite has browner, ruddier skin, dark brown eyes, and a rounder face than the one on the right, which is light skinned and lighter eyed, with sharper facial contours. The left composite was also rated more attractive by the male participants of the study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560017/
So that tells you all you need to know about the biology of female skin, and why white women spend billions trying to get a tanner complexion.Replies: @anon, @Red Pill Angel
So that tells you all you need to know about the biology of female skin, and why white women spend billions trying to get a tanner complexion.
Why do women in India spend billions trying to get a paler complexion?
Maybe when white women tan, it looks more like this and maybe when Indian women pale, it does too.
Or, you know, tanning just reduces skin blemishes but being too dark stops people from so easily seeing your features. Occam's Razor over Darwinian Just So stories.
Ive read info that aligns with your view.
Where did you read that info?
Claiming 7 pregnancies were the norm for Europe in medieval times.
Anyway, I console myself with the fact that you are but merely posting into the void, so that your "corrections" have no real world effect, whereas Frost's work is published and authoritative. I've actually already started to forget you... Cheers, you no doubt homely lass!Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia, @Triteleia Laxa
LOL! The butthurt is strong with this one.
Frost’s work is not authoritative and has been demolished by Madrigal and Kelly. Frost basically retired as a lead author after that, and has since spent most of his time writing on his blog and on controversial sites like this.
And no, men are not darker than women in every population, and there is not an association of “pale = feminine” in every culture. In most cultures light colors tend to be associated with male deities, dark colors are female. In Europeans men are the fairer sex, in both skin, eye and hair pigmentation.
According to Adam Smith, the highland Scottish men are almost completely useless and their women have fifteen or twenty pregnancies, but the babes mostly die due to poor nutrition, leaving them with perhaps four or five children each.
It was an interesting notion. I also think that Mr. Smith might be a little biased against his highland kin.
(Baron Kaldian - who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)Replies: @Spangel226, @anon
Blond men always seem a tad more feminine
Ok, whatever, dude.
(Baron Kaldian – who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)
Probably David Bowie.
*shows pictures of actors from warrior movie*
That proves it!
How about a few pics of butt-kicking babes to prove that women are more aggressive than men?Replies: @anon
I think all the commenters so far have been missing the point. The long hair of the female is not so much a secondary sex characteristic as it is a sign of sexual availability.
Men get aroused at the sight of long female hair because it looks inviting, it looks like it feels good. It makes you want to touch the woman and caress her and nuzzle her, and that obviously leads to sexual activity. In order to avoid the perception of promiscuity, women in public were supposed to keep their hair covered or at least pinned up with barrettes or something. Women in professional settings still do this.
The expression “let your hair down” means to drop formalities, to have some fun, maybe have a drink and dance a little bit—all obvious preludes to sex. Even today, film directors who want to eroticize a female character will include a framing shot of her unbundling her tresses. It is the wantonness of the gesture that creates the arousal. A woman no longer bound by the strictures of formality is now a sexual object, someone you can do the deed with. A chaste woman would reserve this sort of show for her husband. Modern women who let their hair flow freely in every setting all look somewhat like scamps.
Black women’s hair does not have the ability to send this signal, so they fell unappreciated and have to resort to more obvious maneuvers like shaking their butts.
On the other side, what if she does desire those things? Then the touching and caressing and nuzzling isn’t creating the desire for sexual activity. The desire is already there.
Hey, Joe Biden! What are you doing here of all places?
Only God knows.
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
And culturally ... "desirably" is the characteristics of the conqueror not the conquered. Having light male top-dog gods, and darker female gods, or depictions of lighter males conquering darker females does not settle the preference question. It suggests lightness was valued, more elite and ergo selection would select toward lightness. We had another such light on dark scenario on the Aryan invasion of India. Suffice it to say there's no cultural propagation of "must have dark women", but quite the reverse.
No the question is empirical. Does the set of physiological processes that make men men tend to darken or lighten the skin relative to those processes in women? Generally? In specific races?Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Anon, @Paperback Writer
Not so. Epigenetic imprinting can affect a shift in phenotypical variation, particularly if the “light on dark” invasions keep happening (as they did Europe).
Wrong again.
Well, you’re not doing much to answer your own question here. “Selection” has nothing to do with sexual preference. The DNA evidence suggests that most human populations today descend from darker women who reproduced with lighter men. Lighter women were apparently not important to the fate of any society.
Not at all. India was repeatedly invaded from the north by lighter men for thousands of years, who all took part in orgies and intermarriages with the local, darker women. This spanned from the Aryan invasions to the Turkic invasions and the British colonization of India, which also affected the British royalty:
Prince William and his brother Charles both carry a South Indian mitochondrial haplogroup.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/europe/britain-prince-william-india/index.html
Please face it, my friend. Frost got it brutally and horribly wrong, and you fell for it… Hook line and sinker.
Elite men prefer women of color.
Why is John Plywood now posting as Anon?Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Spangel226
Tans were fashionable among the privileged classes as early as WWI. The very pretty (and doomed) Romanov sisters tanned regularly in their teenage years, much to the chagrin of their Victorian mother. Also Coco Chanel made tanning a craze by the 1920s. My greatest generation grandparents were very tanned/ruddy in B & W photos from the late 1930s and 40s when they were teenagers. They weren’t the “jet set” they were reasonably wealthy children of shopkeeers in the Deep South. The cool kids had tans in 1942.
Say the Chinese decide to hand their male surplus problem by sending them to invade Africa. They kill the men, and enjoy the women. Light on dark. Peachy. But then in the next generation both sexes have the mixed genes. The only way this continues to propagate genetically over the generations is if one of the lightening genes is on the Y-chromosome. This is not the case.
And culturally ... "desirably" is the characteristics of the conqueror not the conquered. Having light male top-dog gods, and darker female gods, or depictions of lighter males conquering darker females does not settle the preference question. It suggests lightness was valued, more elite and ergo selection would select toward lightness. We had another such light on dark scenario on the Aryan invasion of India. Suffice it to say there's no cultural propagation of "must have dark women", but quite the reverse.
No the question is empirical. Does the set of physiological processes that make men men tend to darken or lighten the skin relative to those processes in women? Generally? In specific races?Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Anon, @Paperback Writer
Skin color genes are polygenetic and not carried only on the Y chromosome. There are 23 pairs. Various loci are on different chromosomes. You can look them up on Wikipedia. They give the chromosome locations of the 378 different alleles implicated in skin color.
And you’re focusing too much on sexual selection. There’s also natural selection. There’s a good reason why sub-Saharan Africans are dark.
God. He’s the biggest #&#$^&%#& of them all.
Anyway, I console myself with the fact that you are but merely posting into the void, so that your "corrections" have no real world effect, whereas Frost's work is published and authoritative. I've actually already started to forget you... Cheers, you no doubt homely lass!Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia, @Triteleia Laxa
Women do not have lighter hair/skin among Northern Europeans, although they might among darker populations. The general rarity of blonde hair among women is probably why it’s so prized (plus it’s bright!). Perhaps you are confused because so many of us dye our hair. I wasn’t even blonde as a child, but a few years ago I had fairly artificial golden highlights on top of my dark brown hair (not even a full blonde dye job). When I dyed my hair back closer to my natural color several of my co-workers who had only seen me with the highlighted hair were genuinely confused and said “I thought you were blonde, why’d you darken your hair?” I’m somewhat tan with dark eyes so it’s hilarious they thought it was natural. Also even in the Middle Ages women dyed their hair blonde. Blondeness being attractive in women doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more common among women.
OT
Yesterday I read that former NY Times columnist Bari Weiss was married to a guy, had children, and then went lesbo. Today I read that actress Catherine Bell was married to a guy, had children, and then went lesbo.
This seems like the converse of the Caitlin Jenner story: guys married to women, have children, then “Honey, I’m a woman trapped in a …”
Two examples do not make a trend, but how common is this “wife turns lesbo” thing?
OT
If you’re a California voter …
David Cole wrote a column in Taki’s a week and a half ago titled “With Friends Like MAGA…” It was a meandering 2,000-word mess, recounting his high school days and then various right-wing demonstrations. In paragraph 64, almost at the end, he hints at his point:
His point is that most right-wing activism has been ineffective, but that getting the right to agree to coalesce on Larry Elder, versus, say, Jenner (or Steve Sailer as a write-in 😉), and as long as the left splits its vote, pays more attention to No on Gavin than to If Yes on Gavin, Then Yes for [Candidate X] would actually accomplish something useful.
I was looking at the former mayor of San Diego as a less goofy choice, but his immigration views are open borders, pathway to citizenship, so Elder it is.
Cary Grant was tall, dark, and handsome due, in part, to tanning.
I agree with this so much that I just wanted to point out that this is not me writing under a pseudonym.
In my Amazon-banned book, I point out that in addition to "think they will be gay," the promotion of bleks as hyper-masculine factors in as well. Black hair is so bad that many black males will just give up and shave it off entirely (you'll note that even some women do as well), thus the shaved head = masculine idea (e.g., bulked up Bezos, Breaking Bad, etc.)Replies: @Not Raul, @Feryl
The “bald badass” trope only came about in the 1990’s when (often balding) men gave up on hair care and just shaved it off. But pre-1990, you had Yul Brynner and that was about it. In the 70’s and 80’s, balding men often went to embarrassing extremes to give the impression of fuller hair. The emphasis on full hair also extended to blacks; afros and jheri curls being the iconic male black hairdos of those decades. Generationally, I think late Boomers and Gen X suddenly thought that the 70’s/80’s fixation with good male hair was indulgent and a little, um, fruity. Then again, how much of this was balding men being jealous of guys who could show off?
http://www.blaxploitation.com/images/movie_gifs/movie_truck_turner_11.gifReplies: @JMcG, @Feryl
He’s a bigger #&#$^&%#& than you or I can fathom.
Women in hunter-gatherer societies space their children via breastfeeding. (Data from hunter-gatherers and cross comparisons with other apes based on certain predictive data both suggest a natural human breastfeeding period of roughly three years).
This is also the leading theory for why women in traditional societies don’t get breast cancer: during their fertile years they’re either pregnant or nursing. This protects them from the constant hormone fluctuations caused by a menstrual cycle. But Western women are rarely pregnant or nursing and the hormone fluctuation increase breast cancer risk. Feminism and progress!
https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/14/world/europe/britain-prince-william-india/index.htmlPlease face it, my friend. Frost got it brutally and horribly wrong, and you fell for it... Hook line and sinker.
Elite men prefer women of color.Replies: @anon
Elite men prefer women of color.
Why is John Plywood now posting as Anon?
Ah, Williamsville, mi ricordo. Home of Dr. Payne, DDS, and the Amigone Funeral Home.
As a non-colored man of exquisite hair length and sheen, I find the reactions of the sexes to be that men feel uncomfortable and insecure in their masculinity (especially true in more masculine cultures like the Southern US and South America), while women often ask how I keep get it so straight and shiny (answer: as an uncouth barbarian, it is often unwashed). Of course, the reason I keep my hair long is because it gives me the strength of Samson.
Finally, having strong opinions about how long a man's hair should be is kind of gay. For what it's worth, I like an afro on a black gal. Extensions weird me out and don't get me started on bizarre acrylic fingernails. Oh no, purge the impure thoughts...Replies: @Feryl
Men who notice, and especially comment on, the hair or clothes worn by another guy are typically very insecure or close-minded. This doesn’t apply to physique, however, since a guy’s size and conditioning are all matters of practical concern.
Women, on the other hand, usually don’t mind longer hair on guys. Even if they aren’t thrilled, they aren’t going to be as overtly hostile as insecure men are.
WRT masculinity standards, it’s ironic that gate-keepers are so fixated….On other men. Real men adhere to the code of “I’ll mind my own business if you mind yours”. However, these “hyper-masculine” cultures usually are marked by heavy insecurity and status climbing. So bitchy put-downs on “not being man enough” are jabs to pummel a competitor.
Not dogs, not dogs, I told you, not dogs ahhh, I &#@%^-¤■》▪︎ I Hate Dogs, Not dogs, ahhhhhh.
Long hair has frequently meant wild, warrior and masculine, not civilised and feminine; but modern culture saw wild as feminine, so wild hairstyles were seen as feminine too. Men, who obsessed over their masculinity, built modern public society, so feminity was alienated from it.
Both Masaii and Rastas also have warrior culture attributes.You're reading far too much into this. Black people's hair is a lot harder to maintain. This means that for black women to have longer hair, which is often expected, it can take an hour a day to look after, or more. Even keeping your arms above your head for that long is exhausting and hurts, nevermind the pain on your scalp from de-knotting. This is enough to make anyone mad.He's wrong. Untanned European men are fairer than untanned European women.
You're also wrong with your etymology of the word "fair." Fair to mean beautiful or handsome was used long before the term "fairer sex," which originally just meant better looking, which is unsurprising since "fairer sex" was a term coined by men, of whom 95% think women are better looking than men. Had it been termed and amplified through a female dominated public sphere, it would have been the other way around.
The conflation of fairness, in the modern sense, with beauty is also basic. Blond(e) and blue eyes are more beautiful, sorry to everyone else, but facts are facts and those two characteristics are only a small part of the picture anyway. People like bright colours. They are fun!
The conflation of this with femininity is just because male perspectives on what constituted good looking, meaning women, were more likely to be shared and become part of the culture. Women's use of make-up, because their looks were so often their way for getting resources due to the division of public and private life, compounds this, but men are naturally just as good looking as women, and, with gym culture, we can see that the cult of male beauty is never held down for long.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Prosa123, @James J O'Meara, @TGGP
For a long time the Han Chinese had a rule against men cutting any of their hair. This derived from the Confucian belief that your parents give you your hair, and while they can cut it while you are a child, once as an adult to cut it would be to disrespect them. So they bound their hair up in topknots and under hats. When the Manchu conquered them, they legally required men to cut their hair into Manchu queues as a public display of accepting the new order. Many refused to shave the fronts of their heads at all and were killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_(hairstyle)#Queue_order
This is also the leading theory for why women in traditional societies don’t get breast cancer: during their fertile years they’re either pregnant or nursing. This protects them from the constant hormone fluctuations caused by a menstrual cycle. But Western women are rarely pregnant or nursing and the hormone fluctuation increase breast cancer risk. Feminism and progress!Replies: @Steve Sailer, @anonymous
Nuns get breast cancer a lot.
This goes back to the "disposable soma" theory of the evolution of ageing. The younger you breed, the more you signal your genes that you are disposable, and that rellocating biological resources to the maintanance of the body is not needed since your DNA has already survived through breeding.
The children born to older fathers have longer telomeres than the children of younger fathers, as sperm telomeres get longer with age(the telomeres of somatic cells get shorter with age, but in sperm cells, the oppsoite happens: they get longer.) This is because the enzyme, telomerase, is active in undifferentiated spermatogonia, but shut down in all other cells types. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29335366/Conservatives are in denial about this, but breeding is actually pretty bad for you, especially for women, and breeding at an early age means giving your kids a shorter lifespan. Even though children of older parents have a higher genetic burden of mutations, most of it happens when the mother is over 40, and the father, over 70. And even then, the burden of mutations is relatively small compared to the benefit of longer telomeres. Telomere length, more than epigenetics or the ability to repair DNA strand breaks, is the "biological clock of life". Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get down to 5,000 bases, the cell goes into cell cycle arrest, and into senescence. They stop replicating, stop funcioning and turn on an inflammatory program that poisons the cells around it. When enough cells runs out of telomeres, your organs fall apart due to a lack of functioning cells, and your whoel body turns into an inflammation machine that kills you. This is what we call a "natural death". If you can avoid accidents and violent deaths and the two main killers, cancer and heart disease, this is what you die from. A somewhat higher number of children born to mothers over 40 and fathers over 70 have Down's Syndrome, epilepsy, colorblindness and other developmental diseases caused by gene mutations or deletions in old germ cells. But the number of such children is still really, really small. AND the children are born uniformly with with extremely long telomeres, superb immune and cardiovascula heatlh, extremely low levels of inflammation and they are several times more likely to reach the age of 100 or older than children born to parents in their twenties and early thirties. Breed like rabbits, die like rabbits. The Greenland Shark, for instance, the longest lived vertebrate, with a lifespan of 400 years, only starts breeding at age 150.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @res
I got an error message when I first tried to post my reply to Triteleia and then posted the same thing in reply to you, but since you both brought up Sikhs it works either way. There doesn’t seem to be a way to delete double-posts like this.
Why is John Plywood now posting as Anon?Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Spangel226
He needs to change things up to get the bites.
Outside of the Northeast US, white guys are frequently Aryan looking. Hair is sandy brown, dishwater blonde, strawberry blonde,to yellow blonde). Skin is pale to ruddy, often freckled, unless it’s summer and they work outdoors. Eyes are green, deep blue, or slate grey blue (greenish blue being much rarer); the lighter the hair, the lighter the eye color. Blonde hair and blue eyes are much more rare among women, and when it does occur naturally these women usually have pale skin and frizzy hair in comparison to their dark counterparts.
Origin? Well, it could be that blonde barbarian DNA is more present in European men. Isn’t male DNA more Northern sourced relative to female DNA in both Europe and Asia? Or it could be that blonde hair and reddish pale skin puts people at ease (because you can’t hide as easily?) , and blonde men were better at gaining and maintaining trust which they used to social advantage. Women don’t need any special trait to be trusted, and moreover, they didn’t need to persuade anyone to join their army or hunting expedition, work on their farm, guard their flock, or whatever.
Notable that prejudice against red-heads exists (and red hair is more common among females), while nothing similar exists against blonde males. At some point in European history light hair became a social lubricant.
Where did you read that info?Replies: @Spangel226
Well there is this- https://www.google.com/amp/www.kyrackramer.com/2019/03/25/medieval-fertility-rates/amp/
Claiming 7 pregnancies were the norm for Europe in medieval times.
Men get aroused at the sight of long female hair because it looks inviting, it looks like it feels good. It makes you want to touch the woman and caress her and nuzzle her, and that obviously leads to sexual activity. In order to avoid the perception of promiscuity, women in public were supposed to keep their hair covered or at least pinned up with barrettes or something. Women in professional settings still do this.
The expression "let your hair down" means to drop formalities, to have some fun, maybe have a drink and dance a little bit---all obvious preludes to sex. Even today, film directors who want to eroticize a female character will include a framing shot of her unbundling her tresses. It is the wantonness of the gesture that creates the arousal. A woman no longer bound by the strictures of formality is now a sexual object, someone you can do the deed with. A chaste woman would reserve this sort of show for her husband. Modern women who let their hair flow freely in every setting all look somewhat like scamps.
Black women's hair does not have the ability to send this signal, so they fell unappreciated and have to resort to more obvious maneuvers like shaking their butts.Replies: @Anon, @anon
What exactly leads to sexual activity? What if she doesn’t have a particular desire for you to touch her, and caress her, and nuzzle her? Then what?
On the other side, what if she does desire those things? Then the touching and caressing and nuzzling isn’t creating the desire for sexual activity. The desire is already there.
If you're a California voter ...
David Cole wrote a column in Taki's a week and a half ago titled "With Friends Like MAGA…" It was a meandering 2,000-word mess, recounting his high school days and then various right-wing demonstrations. In paragraph 64, almost at the end, he hints at his point:His point is that most right-wing activism has been ineffective, but that getting the right to agree to coalesce on Larry Elder, versus, say, Jenner (or Steve Sailer as a write-in 😉), and as long as the left splits its vote, pays more attention to No on Gavin than to If Yes on Gavin, Then Yes for [Candidate X] would actually accomplish something useful.
I was looking at the former mayor of San Diego as a less goofy choice, but his immigration views are open borders, pathway to citizenship, so Elder it is.Replies: @Anon
Steve should run for something.
This is also the leading theory for why women in traditional societies don’t get breast cancer: during their fertile years they’re either pregnant or nursing. This protects them from the constant hormone fluctuations caused by a menstrual cycle. But Western women are rarely pregnant or nursing and the hormone fluctuation increase breast cancer risk. Feminism and progress!Replies: @Steve Sailer, @anonymous
Does breastfeeding suppress a woman’s fertility?
Is this the reason? “Fair” can also mean “attractive” or “just”. In Welsh, the term for “fairies” translates as “the fair family”: the idea is that you shouldn’t mention them without paying them a compliment, in case they are listening. Does “the fair sex” have a similar origin?
Origin? Well, it could be that blonde barbarian DNA is more present in European men. Isn't male DNA more Northern sourced relative to female DNA in both Europe and Asia? Or it could be that blonde hair and reddish pale skin puts people at ease (because you can't hide as easily?) , and blonde men were better at gaining and maintaining trust which they used to social advantage. Women don't need any special trait to be trusted, and moreover, they didn't need to persuade anyone to join their army or hunting expedition, work on their farm, guard their flock, or whatever.
Notable that prejudice against red-heads exists (and red hair is more common among females), while nothing similar exists against blonde males. At some point in European history light hair became a social lubricant.Replies: @anonymous
Where has it been demonstrated that blond men were better at gaining and maintaining trust?
If I know my poets, when poets called women “the fair sex” they did not mean “the just sex.”
Yes.
Men get aroused at the sight of long female hair because it looks inviting, it looks like it feels good. It makes you want to touch the woman and caress her and nuzzle her, and that obviously leads to sexual activity. In order to avoid the perception of promiscuity, women in public were supposed to keep their hair covered or at least pinned up with barrettes or something. Women in professional settings still do this.
The expression "let your hair down" means to drop formalities, to have some fun, maybe have a drink and dance a little bit---all obvious preludes to sex. Even today, film directors who want to eroticize a female character will include a framing shot of her unbundling her tresses. It is the wantonness of the gesture that creates the arousal. A woman no longer bound by the strictures of formality is now a sexual object, someone you can do the deed with. A chaste woman would reserve this sort of show for her husband. Modern women who let their hair flow freely in every setting all look somewhat like scamps.
Black women's hair does not have the ability to send this signal, so they fell unappreciated and have to resort to more obvious maneuvers like shaking their butts.Replies: @Anon, @anon
It makes you want to touch the woman and caress her and nuzzle her, and that obviously leads to sexual activity.
Hey, Joe Biden! What are you doing here of all places?
Oh for the days when women tried hard to look white instead of black
Why is John Plywood now posting as Anon?Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @Spangel226
Whoever this is might have a personal bias, but look at the pictures of the 2006 study on estradiol levels that he posted. The left is clearly better than the right. If the difference is caused by the hormone that darkens female skin, then I think the argument that paler skin is an attractive secondary sex characteristic among women is down for the count. Has this study been replicated or followed up on?
Interesting, thanks.
I just watched “Wind River” and the part of the non-white grieving father, played by a tribal leader guy whose name I unfortunately can’t spell correctly even with paleface copy-paste technology, had impressively long Fabio-esque hair, which can definitely work if you’re also tall.
It also has a pretty half-Chinese actress who — per Wikipedia Junior Voluntary Fact-Check League — dropped her surname Chow when she began taking Amerindian roles, they say.
Actually, many people can’t grow their hair long at all, dummy. Ever heard of wigs? They sell well for a reason.
And women who conceive at an early age have fastened telomere shortening and accelerated ageing.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29486-4
This goes back to the “disposable soma” theory of the evolution of ageing. The younger you breed, the more you signal your genes that you are disposable, and that rellocating biological resources to the maintanance of the body is not needed since your DNA has already survived through breeding.
The children born to older fathers have longer telomeres than the children of younger fathers, as sperm telomeres get longer with age(the telomeres of somatic cells get shorter with age, but in sperm cells, the oppsoite happens: they get longer.) This is because the enzyme, telomerase, is active in undifferentiated spermatogonia, but shut down in all other cells types. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29335366/
Conservatives are in denial about this, but breeding is actually pretty bad for you, especially for women, and breeding at an early age means giving your kids a shorter lifespan.
Even though children of older parents have a higher genetic burden of mutations, most of it happens when the mother is over 40, and the father, over 70. And even then, the burden of mutations is relatively small compared to the benefit of longer telomeres. Telomere length, more than epigenetics or the ability to repair DNA strand breaks, is the “biological clock of life”. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get down to 5,000 bases, the cell goes into cell cycle arrest, and into senescence. They stop replicating, stop funcioning and turn on an inflammatory program that poisons the cells around it. When enough cells runs out of telomeres, your organs fall apart due to a lack of functioning cells, and your whoel body turns into an inflammation machine that kills you. This is what we call a “natural death”. If you can avoid accidents and violent deaths and the two main killers, cancer and heart disease, this is what you die from.
A somewhat higher number of children born to mothers over 40 and fathers over 70 have Down’s Syndrome, epilepsy, colorblindness and other developmental diseases caused by gene mutations or deletions in old germ cells. But the number of such children is still really, really small. AND the children are born uniformly with with extremely long telomeres, superb immune and cardiovascula heatlh, extremely low levels of inflammation and they are several times more likely to reach the age of 100 or older than children born to parents in their twenties and early thirties.
Breed like rabbits, die like rabbits. The Greenland Shark, for instance, the longest lived vertebrate, with a lifespan of 400 years, only starts breeding at age 150.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151/#:~:text=Medawar%20and%20George%20C.,mathematically%20formalized%20by%20William%20D.
I'm not sure where you pulled the "very very small" from, its more than 1% for age 40.Replies: @Nick Diaz
The first link discusses the cost to women of reproducing, but AFAICT does not relate it to reproducing at different ages (I would expect the negative effect of the stress to be greater with increased age and/or decreased starting health). Here is the abstract.In the second we see:Though Figure 2 (in particular, panel b) seems to indicate the MAC effect is smaller than the PAC effect. I wonder what is up with reference 41. It is an extreme outlier in those plots.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s1090-5138(03)00082-5
Low levels of testosterone, as seen in male castrates, are associated with very pale skin: "One of the outstanding characteristics of a human male castrate is the paleness of the skin. After treatment with androgenic hormone, however, the individual takes on a darker and more ruddy hue. This observation suggests that the skin of the castrate is deficient in melanin and blood, and that the androgenic hormone increases the content of these substances in the integument."Edwards, E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
In the past, skin color was routinely measured on the unexposed skin of the upper inner arm. In recent years, however, it has become popular, especially among young women, to shave the underarm area and deliberately tan it. This was the case with the recent study of skin color in young adults from Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Portugal. Another problem with underarm measurement of skin color is that the upper inner arm has very little subcutaneous fat and is consequently unrepresentative of skin over the entire female body. In women, lightness of skin color correlates with thickness of subcutaneous fat, most likely because fatty tissues are known to contain an enzyme (aromatase) that converts an androgen (androstenedione) into an estrogen (estrone). A thicker layer of fat produces more estrogen and thus feminizes the adjacent skin to a greater degree, making it softer, smoother, and fairer. in ancient DNA samples from Bavaria, men are lighter pigmented than women in both skin, hair and eye color:(sigh) ... Men and women have the same alleles for skin color, unless they're from different populations. The sex difference in skin color is due to the sex hormones interacting with those alleles. If men and women have different alleles, it's because the sample size is too small (and thus unrepresentative) or because they come from different populations.
As for Steve's question, Valkovic (1988) found that women have a slightly faster growth rate of scalp hair (0.53 inches/month vs. 0.52 inches/month per men).Vlado Valkovic. 1988. Human Hair. Vol. 1. Fundamentals and methods for measurement of elemental composition. Boca Raton, Florida, CRC Press, p. 6.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa, @Spangel226, @Colin Wright, @Anon, @Anonymous Jew, @Hypnotoad666, @res
Peter, any reason you did not mention this 2015 paper of yours? It seems quite relevant to Steve’s post.
Evolution of Long Head Hair in Humans
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=60916
For long-term liaisons, men universally/generally prefer women with lighter skin than their own.
Watch any tv show or movie with a black couple, the female is almost always considerably lighter skinned.
20 years the explanation for this in the ev-psych crowd was lighter skin looked more youthful (as does blonde hair) and that lighter skin was probably more helpful in locating skin based parasites.
https://imgur.com/Akwpmb7
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=bSELVb1dkFkC&pg=GBS.PA58&hl=en
This goes back to the "disposable soma" theory of the evolution of ageing. The younger you breed, the more you signal your genes that you are disposable, and that rellocating biological resources to the maintanance of the body is not needed since your DNA has already survived through breeding.
The children born to older fathers have longer telomeres than the children of younger fathers, as sperm telomeres get longer with age(the telomeres of somatic cells get shorter with age, but in sperm cells, the oppsoite happens: they get longer.) This is because the enzyme, telomerase, is active in undifferentiated spermatogonia, but shut down in all other cells types. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29335366/Conservatives are in denial about this, but breeding is actually pretty bad for you, especially for women, and breeding at an early age means giving your kids a shorter lifespan. Even though children of older parents have a higher genetic burden of mutations, most of it happens when the mother is over 40, and the father, over 70. And even then, the burden of mutations is relatively small compared to the benefit of longer telomeres. Telomere length, more than epigenetics or the ability to repair DNA strand breaks, is the "biological clock of life". Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get down to 5,000 bases, the cell goes into cell cycle arrest, and into senescence. They stop replicating, stop funcioning and turn on an inflammatory program that poisons the cells around it. When enough cells runs out of telomeres, your organs fall apart due to a lack of functioning cells, and your whoel body turns into an inflammation machine that kills you. This is what we call a "natural death". If you can avoid accidents and violent deaths and the two main killers, cancer and heart disease, this is what you die from. A somewhat higher number of children born to mothers over 40 and fathers over 70 have Down's Syndrome, epilepsy, colorblindness and other developmental diseases caused by gene mutations or deletions in old germ cells. But the number of such children is still really, really small. AND the children are born uniformly with with extremely long telomeres, superb immune and cardiovascula heatlh, extremely low levels of inflammation and they are several times more likely to reach the age of 100 or older than children born to parents in their twenties and early thirties. Breed like rabbits, die like rabbits. The Greenland Shark, for instance, the longest lived vertebrate, with a lifespan of 400 years, only starts breeding at age 150.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @res
Your theory of evolution and aging is not accurate.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151/#:~:text=Medawar%20and%20George%20C.,mathematically%20formalized%20by%20William%20D.
I’m not sure where you pulled the “very very small” from, its more than 1% for age 40.
I was walking down the street behind a couple of a black women and they passed a middle age American Indian man with hair down well past his shoulder blades. They politely waited until they were out of earshot of the man, and then began lamenting to the Lord that He’d given hair they’d die for to a man.
Watch any tv show or movie with a black couple, the female is almost always considerably lighter skinned.
20 years the explanation for this in the ev-psych crowd was lighter skin looked more youthful (as does blonde hair) and that lighter skin was probably more helpful in locating skin based parasites.Replies: @Daniel Chieh
I haven’t seen anyone mention this for some reason, but lighter skin was associated with higher status due to it typically involving someone who was not working the fields. And there does seem to be some sort of selection for it, because it is seen even in Africans that tribes called themselves white as a sign of superiority:
https://imgur.com/Akwpmb7
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=bSELVb1dkFkC&pg=GBS.PA58&hl=en
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151/#:~:text=Medawar%20and%20George%20C.,mathematically%20formalized%20by%20William%20D.
I'm not sure where you pulled the "very very small" from, its more than 1% for age 40.Replies: @Nick Diaz
You clearly can’t read, idiot. I specifically said that genetic mutations increase with age in germ cells, but they are compensated by increased telomere length. Also, I said that this phenomenon is specifically restricted to male germ cells.
Ok, whatever, dude.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/29/0c/5f290cfbc5e4017c17d1b068bcda6299.jpg
http://slackjawpunks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/vlad1.jpg
(Baron Kaldian – who said “kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt”?)
Probably David Bowie.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
“Ok, whatever, dude.”
*shows pictures of actors from warrior movie*
That proves it!
How about a few pics of butt-kicking babes to prove that women are more aggressive than men?
Mine fell out without growing, and never returned.
Baldness is also a male thing it looks like (thankfully).
I said it’s a possibility, not confirming anything. But to me it’s sensible that blonde (including sandy brown hair) men had some type of social and strategic advantage that contributed to success while female hair color remained irrelevant so women’s hair color remains darker within the European pop.
Nothing grows faster than a man’s nose, eyebrow and ear hair after the age of 60. It’s as fast as the growth rate of Zuccinis! If they could harness the energy behind that, they’d solve mankind’s energy crisis.
These are are the composite images:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/asset/1bd01c4d-d9a1-4a74-99d7-74124ff0f942/135fig1.jpg
The composite on the left is of the 10 women with the highest levels of estrogen. The one on the right is of the 10 women with the lowest levels.
The left composite has browner, ruddier skin, dark brown eyes, and a rounder face than the one on the right, which is light skinned and lighter eyed, with sharper facial contours. The left composite was also rated more attractive by the male participants of the study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1560017/
So that tells you all you need to know about the biology of female skin, and why white women spend billions trying to get a tanner complexion.Replies: @anon, @Red Pill Angel
After reading all the very interesting comments, conclusion: All cultures, whether they prefer tanned or light skin on women, prefer healthy skin with rosiness. Same with men – ruddiness is preferable over sallowness. Even black skin can look ashy or healthy with reddish undertones.
Both composite women have exactly the same dark brown eyes. I cannot see any difference even when I blow up the screen. Not to be bitchy, but High Estrogen Girl looks slightly dumber for some reason. Low Estrogen Girl needs blusher. Is it possible we’re looking at where they are on their menstrual cycles, at least partly?
My theory is that it doesn’t matter if a woman’s beauty is fake or real; female willingness to augment beauty with eye-catching and colorful finery might itself be a marker for fertility and desirability. We humans seem to have that in common with those species of birds where the males collect shiny stuff to attract females.
Very likely. You win the prize for being the first to articulate that, therefore you are not a typical Unz commenter. Congrats!Replies: @Daniel Chieh
*shows pictures of actors from warrior movie*
That proves it!
How about a few pics of butt-kicking babes to prove that women are more aggressive than men?Replies: @anon
That proves it!
Sure does. The original statement: Blond men always seem a tad more feminine
What actors do is “seem” to be some other person. So pix of actors who do not “seem” a tad more feminine? Good enough.
How about a few pics of butt-kicking babes to prove that women are more aggressive than men?
“Seem” and “prove” are not synonyms. Shouldn’t you be busy cultivating your moustache?
What did they use to avoid getting pregnant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
It is a hierarchy of needs, meaning that the needs at one end of the pole are more significant than at the other end. In other words, the benefit of satisfying the needs diminishes as you move toward the other end of the pole. The risk reward tradeoff to conflict becomes less favorable and we should expect conflict to diminish, not remain constant.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
You’re almost stating my point.
As conflict has moved away, in the developed world, from challenges at the base of the hierarchy, the risk tradeoff reward has diminished, so conflict has diminished and taken on less extreme forms.
In these new forms of low grade civil war with lower risks and lower rewards, the conservative side has been unwilling to move on from an “how many tractors can your feelings build” style of argument. But tractors are aplenty and people are fighting over other things. This is why they have a 50 year record of extreme losing.
Anyway, I console myself with the fact that you are but merely posting into the void, so that your "corrections" have no real world effect, whereas Frost's work is published and authoritative. I've actually already started to forget you... Cheers, you no doubt homely lass!Replies: @Anon, @S. Anonyia, @Triteleia Laxa
The hypothesis I described that was obviated was Steve’s one about long hair. As I said, learn to read, and certainly do so before you decide to try to discern what is in the collective unconscious.
High Estrogen Girl looks slightly dumber for some reason. Low Estrogen Girl needs blusher. Is it possible we’re looking at where they are on their menstrual cycles, at least partly?
Very likely. You win the prize for being the first to articulate that, therefore you are not a typical Unz commenter. Congrats!
My take is that if there isn’t some degree of adversity in life in the form of meeting basic needs, a civilisation turns on itself and eats itself from within. BLM and the warm embrace given it by White America and Europe is evidence that we are doing that in spades.Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
You’re not going to return a degree of adversity to life suitable to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, so you, and everyone, will have to get used to conflict relating to the higher levels and the ways in which those conflicts will be fought.
Or, everyone can just return to daydreaming about an apocalypse that will return humanity to scrabbling around in the dirt just so that their “realist” philosophy can be relevant.
Not that their “realism” would be recognised by Machiavelli, for whom it would appear macho peasant self-delusion.
“Food production over feelings”
“But everyone is obese and feels bad”
“Shut up woman, now watch me plough.”
But the inherent difference between male and female skin color of the same ethnic group is so minute that it’s not even perceptible by normal pattern recognition.
There is actually a substantial literature on the role of facial color in sex recognition. Subjects can use the hue and luminosity of a face to tell whether it is male or female, even if the image is blurred and provides no other useful information. This cue has two components: hue (degree of brownness and ruddiness) and luminosity (degree of contrast between lightness of facial skin and darkness of lip/eye area). Hue is the fast channel for gender recognition. If the face is too far away or the lighting too dim, the mind will switch to the slower but more accurate channel of luminosity.
In general, darkness is associated with men and lightness with women, as shown by a series of experiments using Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish participants. In the first one, personal names were identified by gender faster when male names were presented in black and female names in white than with the reverse combination. In the second experiment, briefly appearing black and white blobs had to be classified by gender; the former were classified predominantly as male and the latter as female. Finally, in an eye-tracking experiment, observation was longer and fixation more frequent when a dark object was associated with a male character and a light object with a female character.
I understand that most Unz Review readers live in Western societies where the sex difference in pigmentation is overwhelmed by ethnic differences. In addition, this sex difference has been reduced or even reversed by the suntanning fad that began in the 1920s. Nonetheless, that sex difference has structured the way we view skin color.
I don’t believe that light female skin is “sexy” — at least, not in the way that most people seem to define that word nowadays. Women have lighter skin for the same reason that they have smoother more malleable skin, a more “babyish” face, and a higher pitch of voice. These are traits that the female body has adopted to alter male behavior, generally in the direction of reducing aggressive tendencies and inducing feelings of care.
A few other points:
– Yes, estrogen darkens skin pigmentation but the effect is much weaker than that of testosterone (and other androgens). In addition, the fatty layer of female skin contains an enzyme that converts androgens into estrogens (yes, women have androgens in their body). The net effect is to reduce skin pigmentation in areas that have large accumulations of subcutaneous fat.
– Women are indeed tanning their underarms. It’s called “full body tanning” and the aim is to banish tan lines
If you are interested, I invite you to read the following papers. I also invite you to look at the following picture. This is an averaging of 150 female faces and 150 male faces by Dupuis-Roy et al. (2009). The subjects are of the same ethnic background (French Canadian):
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA
References
Bruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803
Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006
Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10
Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161
Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101
Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331
Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.
Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252
Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5779
Russell, R., P. Sinha, I. Biederman, and M. Nederhouser. (2006). Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception 35: 749-759.
https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490
Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126
Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It’s Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337
Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.
Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016
The Wikipedia sources that are referenced for the fact that women are darker among northern and Southern Europeans (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color ) show that this research was done to explain why men have higher risk for melanoma. Given that, it’s again hard to explain how these supposedly innately lighter women who also tan so much they become darker than their menfolk are not the ones getting melanomas.Replies: @plannumber 9
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGAReferencesBruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5779Russell, R., P. Sinha, I. Biederman, and M. Nederhouser. (2006). Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception 35: 749-759.
https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126 Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It's Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016Replies: @anon, @Spangel226, @Spangel226, @Agitprop
Gold box.
Thanks
This goes back to the "disposable soma" theory of the evolution of ageing. The younger you breed, the more you signal your genes that you are disposable, and that rellocating biological resources to the maintanance of the body is not needed since your DNA has already survived through breeding.
The children born to older fathers have longer telomeres than the children of younger fathers, as sperm telomeres get longer with age(the telomeres of somatic cells get shorter with age, but in sperm cells, the oppsoite happens: they get longer.) This is because the enzyme, telomerase, is active in undifferentiated spermatogonia, but shut down in all other cells types. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29335366/Conservatives are in denial about this, but breeding is actually pretty bad for you, especially for women, and breeding at an early age means giving your kids a shorter lifespan. Even though children of older parents have a higher genetic burden of mutations, most of it happens when the mother is over 40, and the father, over 70. And even then, the burden of mutations is relatively small compared to the benefit of longer telomeres. Telomere length, more than epigenetics or the ability to repair DNA strand breaks, is the "biological clock of life". Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get down to 5,000 bases, the cell goes into cell cycle arrest, and into senescence. They stop replicating, stop funcioning and turn on an inflammatory program that poisons the cells around it. When enough cells runs out of telomeres, your organs fall apart due to a lack of functioning cells, and your whoel body turns into an inflammation machine that kills you. This is what we call a "natural death". If you can avoid accidents and violent deaths and the two main killers, cancer and heart disease, this is what you die from. A somewhat higher number of children born to mothers over 40 and fathers over 70 have Down's Syndrome, epilepsy, colorblindness and other developmental diseases caused by gene mutations or deletions in old germ cells. But the number of such children is still really, really small. AND the children are born uniformly with with extremely long telomeres, superb immune and cardiovascula heatlh, extremely low levels of inflammation and they are several times more likely to reach the age of 100 or older than children born to parents in their twenties and early thirties. Breed like rabbits, die like rabbits. The Greenland Shark, for instance, the longest lived vertebrate, with a lifespan of 400 years, only starts breeding at age 150.Replies: @Daniel Chieh, @res
Thanks for the interesting links, but I’m not sure they support your points as well as you think.
The first link discusses the cost to women of reproducing, but AFAICT does not relate it to reproducing at different ages (I would expect the negative effect of the stress to be greater with increased age and/or decreased starting health). Here is the abstract.
In the second we see:
Though Figure 2 (in particular, panel b) seems to indicate the MAC effect is smaller than the PAC effect. I wonder what is up with reference 41. It is an extreme outlier in those plots.
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGAReferencesBruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5779Russell, R., P. Sinha, I. Biederman, and M. Nederhouser. (2006). Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception 35: 749-759.
https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126 Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It's Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016Replies: @anon, @Spangel226, @Spangel226, @Agitprop
You have mentioned some studies that indicate that lightness is more associated with femininity than darkness, but some of these don’t even seem to involve human skin. In any case, I am not claiming that is confirmed that women’s skin is darker than men of the same ethnicity, I am only seeing that their is sufficient evidence to state that women are not lighter skinned enough to claim it is an attractive secondary sex characteristic. You may have some evidence that shows women are lighter, but the fact is that there are several studies showing them to be darker, which means that the results are mixed.
Mixed is not good enough. For it to be a valuable secondary sex characteristic, men actually have to be able to see it easily with their naked eye, not through the prism of a controlled experiment which yields a marginal difference.
And the tanning excuse is not helpful. If women become darker by tanning a little more, then it means the average of skin tone of the two sexes is so close that the ranking is easily reversed by normal behavior. Look at the other sex related traits people find attractive- either the average is not anywhere near being able to overlap, or it is not a valued sex related characteristic. Women like strong jaws. Men have much stronger jaws than women. Men like an hour glass figure. Women have a much lower waist to hip ratio than men. Men do value neotany in women, but women demonstrate it through traits where they are nowhere close to the male average- smaller brow ridge, hairless face etc.
The value of a trait difference which is so small even experiments get an inconsistent result on it is negligible in world where there is substantial variance on traits that are consistently demonstrated to have large impact like waist-hip ratio.
That said, there are many highly valued traits of female attractiveness that are not sex related. Youth, for example, is possessed equally by each sex when they are young. But given the skin darkening effects of female reproductive hormones, it is not likely that very fair skin is subconsciously desired at all.
if I am to look at the present world, it looks like there is an ideal skin tone which is widely accepted culturally across the globe, and this skin tone is like a Caucasian with a very deep tan. It is as if there is a small range of complexion that white women try to tan towards and dark women try to skin lighten towards. If anything is the inherently preferred complexion, it is this one that real people are showing they idealize- between Salma Hayek and Kim kardashian on her darker days.
Now maybe that ideal is not innate, and is only cultural for reasons unknown. But if that’s the case then the subconscious ideal skin tone has very very weak pull indeed, such that it easily gets eclipsed by cultural norms.
I compliment you for the clever troll, but consequentialism of 10% chance of living 2 more years is not “compensated” by 200x more likelihood of having Down’s Syndrome(among other things) at average IQ of 50.
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGAReferencesBruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5779Russell, R., P. Sinha, I. Biederman, and M. Nederhouser. (2006). Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation. Perception 35: 749-759.
https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126 Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It's Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016Replies: @anon, @Spangel226, @Spangel226, @Agitprop
Also, if the fat layer is supposed to mute the darkening effects of female hormones, why is the composite picture of the high estradiol woman markedly darker than the low estrogen one? Doesn’t seem like the fat layer is a useful buffer where it would count most, the face.
The Wikipedia sources that are referenced for the fact that women are darker among northern and Southern Europeans (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color ) show that this research was done to explain why men have higher risk for melanoma. Given that, it’s again hard to explain how these supposedly innately lighter women who also tan so much they become darker than their menfolk are not the ones getting melanomas.
Silphium, which went extinct from overuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_(hairstyle)#Queue_orderReplies: @Triteleia Laxa
Imagine a time-travelling NYT professional black woman going to have adventures in Manchu China.
I knew a Greek mama, and she had a better moustache than me. Does that count for anything? Actually, here we see a lot of hairy faced older aboriginal women, but I’ve seen really hairy younger black females as well with very hairy arms.
Probably depends on whom she kisses.
I knew a Greek mama, and she had a better moustache than me. Does that count for anything?
Probably depends on whom she kisses.
Very likely. You win the prize for being the first to articulate that, therefore you are not a typical Unz commenter. Congrats!Replies: @Daniel Chieh
I mean, she is female so she is of course not typical.
You should send the question into the Jolly Heretic and have him answer it for you.
Why do women in India spend billions trying to get a paler complexion?Replies: @Triteleia Laxa
Estrogen relaxes, smooths and dilates blood vessels so blood flow increases.
Maybe when white women tan, it looks more like this and maybe when Indian women pale, it does too.
Or, you know, tanning just reduces skin blemishes but being too dark stops people from so easily seeing your features. Occam’s Razor over Darwinian Just So stories.
https://arvo.silverchair-cdn.com/arvo/content_public/journal/jov/933532/jov-9-2-10-fig002.jpeg?Expires=1631855076&Signature=pc4UwEzOfHvpVcOOsQeqmRgxJM-jGZzrJ~rPevoGKiD4eqBpfeCvOGZsq4cUXifb9b1v-WqwgVcunMNkWMrJ7pWZj~6QZnaQbvuWA4OkP-DHbcRpe-7cTy4rsG80xSD58ODmK52yhTj6W4N7P6b6Z7UI6HENzJqPCwZT9vkBjma7l16hFpL3s60z5C2FrFIx47bKEsgDO7hkKAGM-7LZRjZvZNudNLPRl-FFRk-o00niPKI-pXggInTxsK08c0HnseJaT2BDgfafRixd8HOY7fE4ehI7lBZJOXBR8P0ugoClfXJ9WzxBzX3md5-NZ-1dZXKW5dBQyyzlCa8kFjtHLA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGAReferencesBruce, V., and S. Langton. (1994). The use of pigmentation and shading information in recognising the sex and identities of faces. Perception 23(7): 803-822.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p230803Carrito, M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I. Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces. Evolution and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-133.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.09.006Dupuis-Roy, N., I. Fortin, D. Fiset, and F. Gosselin. (2009). Uncovering gender discrimination cues in a realistic setting. Journal of Vision 9(2): 10, 1-8.
https://doi.org/10.1167/9.2.10Hill, H., V. Bruce, and S. Akamatsu. (1995). Perceiving the sex and race of faces: The role of shape and colour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 261(1362): 367-373.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1995.0161Russell, R. (2003). Sex, beauty, and the relative luminance of facial features. Perception 32(9): 1093-1107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5101Russell, R. (2009). A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception 38(8): 1211-1219.
https://doi.org/10.1068/p6331Russell, R. (2010). Why cosmetics work. In R.B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, and S. Shimojo (Eds.) The Science of Social Vision, (pp. 186-203). New York: Oxford.Russell, R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
https://dx.doi.org/10.3758%2FPBR.16.2.252Russell, R. and P. Sinha. (2007). Real-world face recognition: The importance of surface reflectance properties. Perception 36(9): 1368-1374.
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https://doi.org/10.1068%2Fp5490Semin, G.R., T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126 Tarr, M.J., D. Kersten, Y. Cheng, and B. Rossion. (2001). It's Pat! Sexing faces using only red and green. Journal of Vision 1(3): 337, 337a.
https://doi.org/10.1167/1.3.337Tarr, M. J., B. Rossion, and K. Doerschner. (2002). Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: Behavioral and neural correlates of face sexing using color. Journal of Vision 2(7): 598, 598a,
http://journalofvision.org/2/7/598/
https://doi.org/10.1167/2.7.598.Tegner, E. (1992). Sex differences in skin pigmentation illustrated in art. The American Journal of Dermatopathology 14(3): 283-287.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00000372-199206000-00016Replies: @anon, @Spangel226, @Spangel226, @Agitprop
This is your evidence? The conceptual equivalent of an implicit bias test? The systematic collapse of the implicit bias research should have demonstrated that features like recognition speed and gaze fixation are useful only to tell pseudoscientific fairy tales. You don’t want to back up your assertion about human skin tones with even a single study actually pertaining to human skin?
Mr T. in 1982’s Rocky III.
Then Michael Jordan.
Isaac Hayes, 1974.
http://www.blaxploitation.com/images/movie_gifs/movie_truck_turner_11.gifReplies: @JMcG, @Feryl
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=Rtf4WsK2&id=F458D6DC8672A8F10152D3CC4021ECE6D59C794D&thid=OIP.Rtf4WsK2ftBzc4WyX74JgwHaFN&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F4c%2F97%2Fb6%2F4c97b679a5365581749f2e0b058a9db9.jpg&cdnurl=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.46d7f85ac2b67ed0737385b25fbe0983%3Frik%3DTXmc1ebsIUDM0w%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0&exph=617&expw=878&q=dirty+harry+sw+29+clint+eastwood&simid=608013751147659208&form=IRPRST&ck=97948D5379EDDEA678D1DE718AFA5A69&selectedindex=4&vt=4&sim=11
http://www.blaxploitation.com/images/movie_gifs/movie_truck_turner_11.gifReplies: @JMcG, @Feryl
Shaven heads existed in the 70’s, but were very rare. Guys were supposed to have hair, and hair-pieces, combovers, and fairly grown out thinned hair were quite common among the follically challenged. The 70’s were a brutal decade for balding men. Very few emulated Brynner or Isaac Hayes.
Salma Hayek and KK on her “darker days?” Really? Nah. More like a Tuscan Titian blonde with a peach gold complexion. Egyptians always did the male figures darker and the females pale, btw.
The Wikipedia sources that are referenced for the fact that women are darker among northern and Southern Europeans (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color ) show that this research was done to explain why men have higher risk for melanoma. Given that, it’s again hard to explain how these supposedly innately lighter women who also tan so much they become darker than their menfolk are not the ones getting melanomas.Replies: @plannumber 9
What are your stats? I know many women with skin cancer.
Just as European Woman's obsession with tanning invalidates the pale = feminine hypothesis.
Modern women tend to look after themselves better than modern men, because many modern men are stupid and think they will be gay if they look after themselves, rather than recognising that it will make people like them more and give them more opportunity. This means that modern women are more likely to display both the characteristics of femininity and of being better looking, which leads some hapless HBD obsessives to conflate the two. This is all rather silly.Replies: @puttheforkdown, @James J O'Meara, @anon
No, it doesn’t, Rosie.
First, tanning is highly culture-dependent. It was not that long ago, historically, that White women assiduously avoided gettng tan, and carried parousels with them to shield their fair skin, because a tan was a mark of low class.
More relevant to the modern era of anti-depressants as a food group, sunshine is a well-studied mood lifter. Many modren women are anxious, stressed, and depressed, and sit in the sun for hours to absorb the sun’s natural happiness rays.
It’s not the shortness, Steve, it’s the texture.
As Howard Stern, impersonating Ted Danson in blackface, once joked, before he became woked: “I wanna run my fingers through that barbed wire, Whoopie!”