Yet another "duh' article from New Scientist. Well, sort of, I guess. It's not big surprise that men preform for each other. Feminists wrote about this decades ago with the whole "homoerotic triangle" thing: the idea being that much of male womanizing is for the sake of other males, rather than the woman in question. All you have to do is watch men look at each other for approval and you can see what's happening.
But part of me distrusts the article. No rational woman would say "yes, I think it's hot when a guy does a backflip off a swing." but you've got to admitt that it's cool when you see it. And you can't help but be impressed. Or, I can't, I guess.
But then again (watch, as rebecca argues with herself in blog form), in one particularly blissful event in my recent past, I was surrounded with 5 guys, all hot, all wanting to make out with me, as we swang on the swings under the stars at a park in Victoria. One of them showed us all how to do backflips and we all tried and it was lovely. And then we had a contest to see who could jump the farthest off the swings. Except one guy didn't participate in this plumage flaunting, was thuroughly disgusted by the whole affair, and let me know it the next day. We dated for 6 months. So maybe there is some truth to it.
But for the record, I could jump the farthest.
"WHETHER it's driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.
Futile risk-taking might seem to have little going for it in Darwinian terms. So why were our rash ancestors not replaced by more cautious contemporaries?
One idea is that risk-takers are advertising their fitness to potential mates by showing off their strength and bravery. This fits with the fact that men in their prime reproductive years take more risks. To test this idea, William Farthing of the University of Maine in Orono surveyed 48 young men and 52 young women on their attitudes to risky scenarios. Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men (Evolution and Human Behaviour, vol 26, p 171).
“Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men”Reckless thrill-seekers might be trying a more subtle route to women's affections. Men say they prefer their same-sex friends to be risk-takers, and women prefer high-status males. "So if he has higher status among other men, women might like him for his status, even though they don't like the risk-taking in itself," Farthing says."
Posted by bluprnt at April 16, 2005 06:34 PM