I was talking to one of my friends about how I thought I had much higher standards of beauty for white people than I did anyone else, and I tried to explain that I'd seen so many pretty white people on TV that it was easier for me to decide which white people conformed to the Hollywood standard of beauty. On, say, the people-of-Asian-descent end, all I get is Sandra Oh, who is not considered a world beauty, and John Cho, who looks too angry in most of his pictures to be considered a dazzlingly hot person. Around the same time, I also got tired of referencing this really awful source that framed trends of attraction in terms of masculine and feminine facial features because I realized that it raised more questions than it answered, and that it was written about random samplings of white people in England, which is all well and good but isn't really pertinent to anything I'm really interested in, as the unfortunate reality is that my ancestors were from China and my facial features are doughy and androgynous and I have too much malar fat in the wrong places and I like boys.

Another unfortunate reality is that Berkeley's 97% some-sort-of-Asian population is not representative of the rest of the U.S., which is sobering, in that the chance of meeting another gay nonwhite boy while doing something I actually like is slim to none, but that is another story for another time.

So, back to what I was supposed to be talking about. Attraction, as a rule, is something we all aspire to in one way or another because it's built into us. The innate frustration with not being found attractive leads to lots of issues that expressly point into you being a genetic failure since nobody wants your jankyass genes. Thus, there are many ways in which people cope with not being attractive. My way will be blogging. I'm going to reinvent a wheel that has about 30 sides as opposed to smooth curvature by talking about "what's attractive?" using flimsy reasoning and wikipedia, because none of the articles on google scholar are free.

Author's note: The following is mostly male-centric and I'm sorry to all the females that feel miffed. More it's that I chose males as a case study to try and show my explanation of trends.

The points.

1. What is physical attractiveness?

At the root of it all, attractiveness should be classified as a biological and evolutionary process which eventually ends in procreation. In this vein, the popular view of what governs attractiveness should be the environmental fitness of a person's genes and his or her nurturant parenting skills. Let me pause and back up a moment and go "Hmm," because I'm not actually sure if I should assume this in regard to man-on-man-lovin'. Does an innate difficulty (or unwillingness) to procreate fundamentally change the meaning of attraction? I'm going to venture that since we all happen to be humans that have been successfully created mostly through a man and a woman bumping uglies, this sort of mentality is inescapable, in that it is built into us in one way or another.

2. How do physical qualities relate attractiveness to an individual?

The commonly held belief is that there are two roles that categorize how a great many animals interact and copulate.

The burnout:
Men are sperm packets: they procreate, (and sometimes protect and hunt,) and then die.

Attractive males look physically capable. This entails
-Thriving despite handicap properties (see peacocks, lyrebirds, and testosterone, discussed later)
-Physical strength and size

The oven:
Women look fertile and sturdy so it looks like they could keep their kids from running off and so they can try not to die during childbirth.

This means that attractive qualities should include
-Good childbearing equipment
-Attachment to young
-Healthiness

3. Now, how did these attributes manifest physically, and is this the entire picture?

In human females, higher levels of hormones associated with fertility are correlated with the hourglass figure.

In human males, the production of testosterone is reported to cause 2 things.
-Increased growth of cheekbones and jawbones
-A suppressed immune system

I'm going to accept these two things on faith, because I don't have the data to prove otherwise. This suggests that faces that are considered more masculine have differently shaped cheek and jaw bones. As a result, these faces are considered to have better genes and are thus the most appealing, as the males that possess them are still alive and kickin' despite their slight suppression in their immune systems. Big males are also favored, because they appear more physically apt, and strength can be correlated with the triangular shape of a torso, signaling upper body strength. Facial and bodily symmetry is a sign of health in both sexes, because, unequal weighting can result in bad things like curvature of the spine, and you don't want some crazy's mutant genes to turn your babies all sideways.

So attractive women have hourglass figures and wide birth tunnels and men are tall and triangular and have good big cheekbones and jaws. The end.

Just kidding.

There are other mechanisms at work, of course, which explain how my parents got together to produce this chimpy-faced asshole.

There's a lot of diversity in the animal world, and, annoyingly, our species has become pro-social, meaning that it's not about how well we can defend our bananas, it's about how many friends we can swindle into helping us defend our bananas (or how we can convey the illusion of having a whole monkey army armed with lasers to defend our bananas for us). Some of our monkey relatives work inside a society where sexual selection is within a social hierarchy, which enforces dominance through support in numbers based on smaller acts, such as grooming, as well as one-on-one physical intimidation. To learn more about silly horny male animals, watch this episode of Nature.

Now that I'm done talking about monkey sex...

4. Is attraction completely a sociological concern? Are there things that are considered innately or universally attractive?

I think it's uncharitable to say that attraction is solely culturally bound--i.e. "oh he just wants my Chinese genes because he likes the exotic implications of it (and I want that in my spawn)" or "he just likes white people because they symbolize upward social mobility or the ruling class (and I want that in my spawn)."

What I've been trying to say is that sociology works alongside individual concerns. On the one hand, since a very long time ago, good mates have been strong and fertile. This appears to have a high precedence and it would be unfair to discount this completely. On the other, there are always new rules and regulations as to what else a mate has to be in order to survive. My hypothesis is that because different environments choose to make different factors attractive, (say, dark pigmentation nearer to the equator where there's far too much sun for it to be very nice, and you will probably die of sunburns if you move there from Norway) humans undergo a stage of high neural plasticity when they are very small that helps them adapt to what seems to be attractive given their current situation. The question of what these qualities are is the domain of sociology, but murmuring somewhere amongst it all is a base or bias of biology that favors one quality over another.

4a. (Aside) How important is a gendered approach to attraction?

Essentially because humans undergo sexual dimorphism, it's suggested that men and women really were made to look attractive to one another.

When we talk about how gayness arises, we ultimately run into the sex problem, and what failing occurs where in our development to cause this state. There is a research about the gay gene in fruit flies, but I'd like to think, at least, that human sexuality is a little bit more complicated than that (but who knows, maybe it isn't). A view that sort of takes it all in would explain that sexuality is determined by when genes are activated, or what neural networks are wired together when time of life is an impressionable period what regions of the brain are active as part of sexual determinacy, and how the environment around us plays a role.

I have faith that science will solve all questions of gayness eventually once they decide they have to find a way to stop it, because gayness has become endemic and we've almost unpopulated ourselves because too many of us are afraid of opposite-sex dick or pussy.

Anyway. Back to the real question,

5. How do differing phenotypes express the same qualities, and how do we integrate these views across environments and cultures?

Author's note: I'm going to pause here for a second and say that I'm really sorry, but I'm not going to try and prove anything revolutionary, or even satisfactory. This is, and has been, from the start, my attempt to rationalize my not hotness, and it will lead me, hopefully, to take an aerial and anthropological survey of the world to find a place where they find my features strangely beautiful so they will shower me with gifts in my internet-connected cave (because that's everyone's dream, isn't it?). This was also my attempt to try and explain why people fight for and against the things they do and that its reasons may be a great deal more stupid than we'd like to think and that our existence is increasingly pointless (and really I wonder why I'm even saying this).

The short answer is, we can't. The other answer is, we should be able to, because my rambling indicates that there are underlying biological implications as to how we look, and that we should be able to recognize them. However, these universals are far and few in between, and, given what we know about environmental fitness, can be exhibited in many different, possibly conflicting ways.

Essential qualities are expressed differently. An example of this would be the distribution of body hair. The expression of hairiness is based both on the amount of androgen hormones, which include hormones such as testosterone and DHT, produced by the body as well as the number of androgen receptors on each follicle. It's perfectly possible to have two people with the same number of androgens running through their body but to have different visible hair profiles.

Environmental qualities have been selected for, and some regions don't care. If a person lives in a very sunny area, it may be advantageous to have a stronger brow so you have less sun in your eyes. In other, cloudier regions, it doesn't matter a wit.

Taken together, we get a selectional view that's both localized, and been around far longer than we have. Views of attraction are based on environmental fitness and, as a consequence, are culture specific.

This is not to say that we have no influence on what we find attractive. More than ever, there seem to be new and confusing ways to see what's best for your progeny. At this point in history, in most first world countries, humans have mostly created and modified their own environment. Some might argue that this has created a new type of environment, in which power and social standing is a key factor in what is attractive. I would argue that, instead, these sociological concerns have a biological underpinning, which alters essentially how we view one another in whatever social construct we create. What causes culture is the expectation that that people that are thought of as physically appealing often end up being more successful. This is exhibited by the study of the pretty, on average, doing better monetarily through the realization that they are objectively better as passing on their genes than the rest of us gives them more opportunities to pass on their genes.

In addition, the viewer's biology influences the way he or she sees others, as each individual is selected to approach attraction to favor themselves. The aesthetics of his or her outlook can be disseminated through culture. There are at least two principles that help discuss what a person will select for. The directional selection theory proposes that he or she prefers the person with the strongest visible traits of masculinity as seen in a person's own type. The better adapted a person is despite his testosterone handicap, the more fit mate he should be. The convergence theory states that this person finds the prototypical male more attractive than the one with the most extremely prominent traits. This was proposed by Darwin, when he overlaid different faces onto each other, only to find that the composite image produced was more appealing than any single picture. This supposedly acts in the interests of stabilizing selection, which keeps out the men that die shortly after they procreate or that happen to have deviant, strange features in addition to whatever masculine ones they have.

As a take-home message, I'd like us all to remember that what we're essentially fighting for in whatever sociological arena we choose, is some incarnation of genetic viability. The truth is that the way the majority of people look, and how we ourselves look influence the way we select what is and isn't attractive. The societal implications of this notion are linked in horrible and convoluted ways which eventually lead back down to certain selection pressures. So, for all you kiddies out there reading me, first, if you're unhappy with the way you look, there's probably a good reason for it, in that somewhere down the line your genes weren't good enough to snag you a healthy mate, and, second, whatever standard is applied to you to judge that you aren't good enough, you inevitably apply back onto your peers, in one way or another. For all you people that have interesting ancestry, go back to your home country where people look like you; you'll have an easier chance finding a mate there since you've most likely been selected to look like you thrive in that environment. And, for all you gays out there like me, you've mostly been plucked out of the gene pool already, so go have some fun or fight for the genetic viability you'll probably never use before your pointless existence ends.