SEXUAL ATTRACTION: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Many of us have been brought up to believe that the ‘ideal’ relationship starts with a glance across a crowded room. The eyes meet, it’s love, and the couple live happily ever after. This can in fact occur, depending on how one defines ‘love’, because we can train ourselves to make up our minds about people on the slimmest of information. Almost all of us stereotype people and, using the flimsiest of information, make instant judgements about their personalities and characters. We meet many people in everyday life and we cannot get to know them all in depth. We therefore have to use some kind of quick sorting method.
Unfortunately, stereotypes can be harmful and can make us miss a good opportunity to get to know someone. This is especially true when it comes to occupations. Some men assume that women in certain occupations or jobs are promiscuous, so that the large numbers who are not either have to act up to their image or wait for a man who does not believe the stereotype and finds the woman attractive in herself. We have all heard that ‘gentlemen prefer blondes’ but in fact dark men seem to prefer brunettes and blond men’s preferences spread equally between blondes and brunettes. The majority of young women say they prefer dark men, with the exception of artificial blondes, who, according to one survey, do not care what colour hair a man has.
Once over our visual stereotypes we start judging people on their personalities. We tend to believe that people who get on well with others are intrinsically more attractive (or whatever we feel is important in life). In this way we link personal attributes to each other so as to build up a comfortable picture we think we can live with. So we arrive at suppositions such as ‘a man who is this kind to children must also be . . .’ Add to this a list of personal theories about people from past acquaintance (I once went out with a girl with long fingernails and she was awful, so this one with long fingernails probably will be too), and the field of choice one gives oneself soon begins to narrow. Some studies have shown that certain men assess women according to how similar or dissimilar they are to their own mothers.
Our reliance on judgements based on stereotypes can have unfortunate negative effects because we tend to behave in a way which fulfils our prophecies (and we all like that to happen). Studies have found, for example, that lovely clothes enhance women’s social and sexual status. Even other women imagine well-dressed women to be more passionate, free, romantic, thrilling, approachable, adventurous, flirtatious and sexy than unfashionably dressed women. Media advertisements showing women in glamorous settings with attractive men, confirm their view. One survey found that wearers of fashionable clothes were thought to have different dating patterns, sexual morals, and smoking and drinking patterns. But this can mean that unfashionable or unattractive women can find it very difficult to behave sexily, adventurously, romantically and so on simply because the rest of us do not see them in that sort of role. So the unattractive and the unfashionably dressed are not encouraged to behave in these ways, and so they do not, which is then seen as proving that they are all the things they are generally held to be. This sort of self-fulfilling prophecy approach kills off perfectly possible partners at the starting post before we really know what they are like.
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Tags: Men’s Health
This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 4:38 am and is filed under Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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