Thread: What causes physical attraction?

Originally Posted by theMagician

Together, survival and replication value make up your "value", or how attractive you are as a possible mate. When women judge men, they look for the highest value mate because he is most likely to increase her chance of survival (and again, it happens subliminally). Similarly, when men judge women, they look for wide hips and large breasts because those indicate high replication value (even though, naturally, we don't know why we like it, we just do). Modernism surfaced around the end of the Middle Ages, it's a relatively a new concept.

In most cases I doubt it happens subconsciously nor 'subliminally'. Consider this situation. A person designs and makes a clock to tell the time. But the clock itself isn't trying to tell the time, it works due to whatever internal mechanisms make it work. Similarly, evolution can be thought to have 'designed' male attraction to breasts to help with gene survival. But the reason males are attracted to breasts isn't because they're trying to help their genes survive. The phychological subconscious reason probably has nothing to do with survival.

The reason we exist is because we've undergone evolution and our species has survived, but that doesn't mean we have an inherent mission to survive. Only we can assign value to things and decide what our goals will be. Nothing else can assign value because everything else is mindless and physical. Just because we got here via evolution doesn't mean we should base our goals or morality off of it. That kind of thinking might lead a person to advocate eugenics.


(Unrelated to above)
I think I have a pretty good idea of what the average guy will find attractive in a girl, what I thought being confirmed by posts on this site, and I'm sad and happy to say that I don't fit the description. But it's alright, I would really rather not be a perfect sweet friendly anime-ish girl with no character flaws nor depth.