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photos by Lara Shipley

The Stepford Genes?

January 9th, 2005 · No Comments

At the close of an otherwise sound post, Will Wilkinson tosses out the following—I suspect just to see how long it would take his blogger friends to take the bait:

[M]en need women to be women and women need men to be men. And if you don’t know what that means, or know and object to it, then life among the humans may turn out to be tough for you.

Ok, I’ll bite: I don’t know what that means, unless it’s that I’d prefer not to wake up next to someone who looks like Vin Diesel, which I’ll readily concede. Seriously, though, does anyone who’s pried their nose out of an evo psych book and taken a peek at the variety of human sexual tastes imagine that straight men are all secretly seeking some demure, giggly, Rules-following stereotype in heels? The rest of the piece he’s responding to, after all, is in part about the cross-cultural differences in what’s considered attraction. Not to mention cross-temporal. I’m going to assume, after all, that neither Will nor I would find interesting or attractive someone who fit some kind of 1950s archetype of femininity, even if someone at the time who found a time machine packed with evolutionary psych literature could probably construct a just-so story about how that ideal was genetically ordained.

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