Looking back over our weekly meetings this semester, I keep coming back to our discussions of pop culture, and of our everyday lives. We read so many eye-opening articles, but, in the end, it was relating these articles to representations of femininity and masculinity in the media that was most interesting to me. Thinking about things like women’s preferences in male facial features, and how these might evolve because of more prevalent use of birth control (in one study we read, women who used birth control no longer displayed a preference for masculine face shapes) is really interesting. Who is to say that in fifty years time, our definitions of attractiveness won’t have changed? Will this be because of certain hormones to which we have only recently been exposed? Throughout the course, Colin kept emphasizing how quickly humans can evolve through sexual selection. Thinking about where fast-tracked sexual selection will take us in the next few generations is so exciting, and I can’t wait to explore this further.
Speaking of human preferences in the future, this class also introduced me to several intriguing, and sometimes competing, explanations of human preferences today. Max’s recent article on attractiveness being related to MHC heterezygosity is a great example of this. The article found that women rated hetorozygote men much higher than homozygous men in terms of attractiveness and skin health. Earlier on, I had picked an article that found that women prefer men with more masculine faces, and another article had stated that women prefer men who resemble their fathers. Can all of these methods of choosing come into play at the same time? Which one would take preference? It would be so interesting to find an article that compared several factors in female mate choice, and that attempted to determine which factor comes out first.
Something else that stood out this semester was Avery’s first article pick—Griet Vandermassen’s “Sexual Selection: A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial.” Mostly, I am really interested in the discussion that this type of article can help begin—a discussion about how to bring sexual selection into our everyday life. It seems, though, that before we take that step, we must begin by further bringing a discussion of sexual selection into the scientific realm. Oddly, one of the recurring themes of our classes this semester was debating not only the validity of an author’s methods or conclusions, but also the validity of the journal in which he or she was published. Though we rotated who was to pick articles week to week, we always seemed to have trouble getting away from the likes of “The Psychology Bulletin.” Among other things I learned this semester, the lack of research related to sexual selection was an important one. Though I realized that one of the purposes of this class was to be able to discuss this subject that is often viewed as taboo, I had assumed that it was taboo in the media and in places like high school classrooms. I hadn’t imagined that even in the scientific world sexual selection would be hard to discuss. How are we to convince people that attributing a human characteristic to evolution does not make us sexist, if even researchers are afraid of making that faux pas?
