during a critical period in between—from two weeks to two months of age—and then it will learn to sing correct-ly; after that period it never modifies its song by imitation:'
It is not hard to find examples of critical-period learning in people: Few people change their accents after the age of about twenty-five, even if they move from, say, the United States to Britain: But if they move at ten or fifteen, they quickly adopt a British accent: They are just like white-crowned sparrows, which sing with the dialect of the place where they lived at two months old:9 Likewise, children are remarkably good at picking up foreign languages just by exposure to them, whereas adults must laborious-ly learn them: We are not chicks or chaffinches, but we still have
critical periods during which we acquire preferences and habits that are fairly hard to change.
This concept of the critical period is presumably what lies behind the Westermarck incest-avoiding instinct: We become sexually indifferent to those with whom we were reared during a critical period. Nobody is certain exactly what constitutes the critical period, but it is a plausible guess that it lasts from, say, eight to fourteen, the years before puberty. Common sense dictates that sexual orientation must be decided in such a fashion: A genetic predisposition meets examples during a critical period. Recall the fate of the baby chaffinch. For six weeks it is sensitive to learning chaffinch song. But during those six weeks of sensitivity, it hears all sorts of things: cars, telephones, lawn mowers, thunder, crows, dogs, sparrows, starlings. Yet it only imitates the song of chaffinches. It has a predilection to learn chaffinch song. (If it were a thrush or a starling, it could indeed imitate some of the other things. One bird in Britain learned the call of a telephone, causing havoc among backyard sunbathers.)'° This is often the case with learning: Ever since the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Peter Marler in the 1960s, it has been well known that animals do not learn anything and everything; they learn what their brains ' want' to learn: Men are instinctively attracted to women thanks to the interaction of their genes and hormones, but that tendency is much influenced in a critical period by role models, peer pressure, and free will: There is learning, but there are predispositions.
A heterosexual man emerges from puberty with more than a general sexual preference for all women: ,He emerges with a distinct notion of beauty and ugliness. He is 'stunned ' by some women, indifferent to others, and finds others sexually repulsive. Is this, too, something that he acquired by a mixture of genes, hormones, and social pressure? It must be, but the interesting question is how much of each. If social pressure is everything, then the images and lessons we give to the youth of both sexes, through films, books, advertisements, and by example, are crucially important: If not, then the fact that men prefer, say, thin women is fixed by the genes and hormones and not a passing fad.
THE USES OF BEAUTY
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Suppose you were a Martian interested in studying people as William Thorpe studied chaffinches. You want to know how men learn their standards of beauty, so you keep boys in cages. Some you expose to endless films of plump men admiring and being admired by plump women, while thin men and thin women are reviled; others you keep in total ignorance of womanhood so that their existence comes as a shock at the age of twenty.
It is revealing to speculate on what you think the outcome of the Martian 's experiment would be because what follows is an attempt to piece together from much inferior experiments and facts the same result: What kind of woman would the men who had never seen women prefer once they got over the shock of seeing women for the first time? Old ones or young ones, fat ones or thin ones? And would the men reared to believe that fat was beautiful really prefer plump women to skinny models?
Bear in mind the reason we are concentrating on male preferences. As we saw in the last chapter, men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa, and for good reason: Youth and health are better clues to women's value as a mate and potential mother than to a man's: Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.
SKINNY WOMEN
But fashions change: If beauty is subject to fashion, however despotic, it can change. Consider a case where the definition of beauty does seem to have changed drastically in recent years: thinness. Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of 'Windsor, is credited with the remark that a woman 'can never be too rich or too thin, '
but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern model: In the words of Roberta Seid, thinness became a 'prejudice' in the 1950s, a ' myth' in the 1960s, an
' obsession' in the 1970s, and a 'religion' in the 1980s.' Tom Wolfe coined the term 'social X rays ' for New York society women
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who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas falls steadily year after year. So does that of
One thing is painfully obvious: There is no preference for the average. Even allowing for the fact that abundant, cheap, refined food makes the average woman much plumper than was normal a millennium or two ago, women must go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the fashionable reedlike shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available: Today, as in the Pleistocene period, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: A woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only 10—15 percent below normal: Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family: But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive:'
If the male preference for thinness is paradoxical, how much more puzzling is the fact that it seems to be new. There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin, and from sculpture and painting as far back as the Renaissance that beautiful women were plump women: There are exceptions: Nefertiti 's neck was that of a thin, elegant woman: Botticelli 's Venus was not exactly overweight. And for a time, Victorians worshiped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that some women allegedly removed a pair of ribs to make their waists slimmer. Lillie Langtry could enclose her eighteen-inch waist with two hands, but even the slimmest of today 's models are twenty-two inches around the waist. And it is implausible that a Renaissance man would have found them ugly. Yet we need not rely only on our own culture for evidence that plump women can be more attractive than thin ones. There is a willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned: THE USES OF BEAUTY
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