The Political Asylum

adrien · Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 6:24 pm Post subject:

OK. So there seems to be a strong evidence that "sociosexuality" is somehow linked to physical features. From the early 90s, it has been showed that "female observers could accurately assess the sociosexual orientation of men solely from visual cues such as their appearance and body language."
Sociosexual orientation is defined as ranging from ‘restricted’ sociosexuality (i.e., being less willing to engage in short-term sexual relationships) to "unrestricted" (i.e., being more open to short-term sexual relationships).
So there are two questions: the first is, what are the criterions that help people idendify "restricted" and "unrestricted" personalities. The second, is what acutally links these caracteristics to personality.

As for males, it seems sociosexuality is quite well correlated with attractiveness and masculinity. Men who have more masculine traits tend to have a less restricted persnoality. The study also suggest that women are more attracted by men showing less masculine traits, i.e. more susceptible to have a "restricted" personality... and thus more willing to engage in long-term relationship.
As for women, the case is less clear. This study suggests that women with more feminine traits are less "restricted" (i.e. more open to short-term relationship) and they are also juged more attractive by men. But previous studies also showed that less restricted sociosexuality was "linked to greater masculinisation in female cognitive (better mental rotation ability) and physical (smaller second-fourth digit ratio) traits."

As for the cause of these relationships, the authors point to different mechanisms. Testosterone levels seem to play a role, especially in males (more testosterone => more masculine traits and unrestricted personality). In females the link is less clear, since there are conflicting evidence. The authors suggest that the timing of exposure to androgens (i.e. in utero vs adulthood) might explain in part the discrepancy. If I understood correctly, they also suggest that (self-perception of) attractiveness might influence sociosexuality.
The authors also point towards evolutionary strategies to explain why women seem to be more attracted by restricted men, and why the reverse is not true for men. "the selective advantage to males in reduced mating effort may have been sufficient to drive a preference for unrestrictedness in spite of any costs from long-term relationship breakdown."

Also, the author mention that there are many other clues than just masculinity and facial characteristics (behaviour...). And they also report that other studies have showned that observers could accurately predict other types of behaviour based on appearance (for instance, whether someone is likely to cheat in prisoner's dilemma game.)
Well. sorry for the long post. Here's a link to the abstract:
Boothroyd et al., Facial correlates of sociosexuality.
Evolution and Human Behavior (2008), in press.
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Vintage Girl · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 12:27 pm Post subject:

Thank you for your post, adrien.

I understand that one's sociosexuality can be determined by one's masculinity/femininity and body language but I still cannot see any correllation to actual physical attributes such as a large nose, small eyes etc.
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adrien · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject:

Vintage Girl · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 4:56 pm Post subject:

Surely they're more influenced by our genetic make up?
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adrien · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:58 pm Post subject:

Yes and no. Look at a little kid, and if it were not for the clothes and haircut, you could hardly tell if it's a boy or a girl. Look at an adult...

Our genes do control a lot of things, but hormones and sex steroids in particular also control the way our genes are expressed. (Of course there are also genes that control who much hormones we produce and how our cells respond to them...)

Take hair for example. Well, different people could have the same set of alleles for genes that control hair color and whether it's straight or curly... but with the same set of alleles, testosterone would have men grow a beard...

In fact, very few genes are responsible for the differences between men and women. If I remember correctly my lessons on human genetics, there's a single gene, present on the Y chromosome, that, if expressed in the very early stages of embryo development, will trigger the differenciation of pre-gonads into testicles rather than ovaries. And from there on, everything depends on how the same genes are expressed - and in this case, sex hormones play a major role in the control of gene expression.
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Sit on the banks of the river and wait for the corpse of your enemy. - Indian proverb.

BlueEmperor · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:59 pm Post subject:

Mum and I were watching an episode of House the other day that featured a girl who was really a guy - or at least that's how I interpreted it. All it said was that 'her' testicles hadn't descended. Now does that mean that she was really a dude or just a chick with bollocks?

B.E.
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Vintage Girl · Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:00 am Post subject:

adrien · Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 2:00 pm Post subject:

BlueEmperor · Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject:

It was a tongue in cheek question but I am interested to know. We all start off as girls so I don't think she can reasonably have been described as a 'boy', even if she did happen to have testicles.

B.E.
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The doctor is in!

adrien · Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 5:12 pm Post subject:

OK, I checked. It's incredible how you can find everything on the net. Wikipedia has a list and description of all "House" episodes!

The one you mentionned was "Skin deep", I guess, and the girl had the "androgen insensitivity syndrome", meaning that she was insensitive to testosterone. Basically, this means that her gonads did differenciate into testes in the early stages of embryonic development (in fact, it seems we do not really start off as girls, but rather as androgynes, and girl is the default), and started producing testosterone, but her other tissues could not detect the hormone, and differenciated as female organs.

Looking for details, I came across an interesting "academic curiosity": Semi-identical twins discovered
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Sit on the banks of the river and wait for the corpse of your enemy. - Indian proverb.

BlueEmperor · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 6:47 pm Post subject:

God bless the Internet.

B.E.
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The doctor is in!