In his latest book, The Naked Woman, British zoologist (and psuedo-socio-biologist) Desmond Morris seeks to provide explanations for why men find the female body so appealing (as if "because" isn't a good enough answer). His predictable answer, in short, is that each part of the primate female body has been molded by millions of years of evolutionary struggle to finally give rise to the reproductively appealing human female form.
Here's a sample of Morris's accounts of various parts of the female form. You'll be able to pick holes in the accounts almost the instant you read them. I'll save my basic criticism of the whole approach for the end.
Legs: Long legs signify sexual maturity and "therefore transmits super-female signals"... this is an actual quote, people! Smooth, curved legs indicate the female of the species and also indicate a healthy body for breeding. Legs, in general, are "sexy" because they cause men to focus on the point at which they join, "which is the focal point of male sexual interest".
Breasts: Breasts operate as visual and tactile information-senders. Most basically, they identify the sex of a humanoid and also, obviously, indicate sexual maturity (capable of raring young). Less basically, on closer inspection, they indicate age via their shape. Here's Morris's breast-chronology: 1.) "nipple breast" of childhood; 2.) "breast-bud" of puberty; 3.) "pointed breast" of adolescence; 4.) "firm breast" of young adulthood; 5.) "full breast" of motherhood; 6.) "sagging breast" of middle age; (7) "pendulous breast" of old age. "Super breasts" are unusual because they fall between (4) and (5) and are only exhibited in teenage breasts that have developed slightly more quickly than average - "thus exhibiting the perfect roundness required, yet retaining the firmness of extreme youth".
Back: The curve of the back (women's backs are naturally more arched than men's) accentuates the female buttocks and so "adds a sexier outline to the profile of the body". The two sacral dimples on each side of the base of the spine are also erotic.
Buttocks: Protruding female buttocks "transmit a powerful gender signal", and naturally protrude more than men's. Relatively large female buttocks (compared to men) serve as fat stores and so indicate good survival potential. Undulation (hip swaying) - due naturally to the physical structure of the female pelvis - is another distinctive signal of femininity.
Armpits: Women tend to shave under their arms and this is due to a desire to appear "cleaner, younger and helps them reduce their scent-signalling". This, presumably, is alluring to men.
Each line here could be subjected to ridicule. For example, saying that legs are sexually attractive because they form an "arrow" (Morris's word) to the female naughty bits, is moronic: creatures as no-brained and no-legged as snails seem to have no problem finding each other's naughty bits, but the most intellectually advanced creatures on the planet need road maps? Riiiight. And "sacral dimples" are attractive because...? If you can come up with an evolutionary explanation for this one, good luck. And "super-breasts" are most desirable because they express the best survival combination - simultaneous youth and maturity. So all those guys who like small or voluptuous breasts are evolutionary defects? That's one hell of a lot of defects! But I'll put these aside. My criticism is more basic than these (although these particular criticisms allude to it).
Most socio-evolutionary 'explanations' for human phenomena are pseudo-scientific; that is, they appeal to a scientific theory (Darwinian evolutionary theory, in this case) but do not actually empirically investigate matters in a scientific way. How so? Most socio-evolutionary 'explanations' are unfalsifiable: that is, they presuppose a single causal process (evolutionary survival) for every conceivable outcome. What's wrong with that? Well, to take Morris's topic of interest, if all features that are attractive to men are "selected" by an evolutionary process, and we predict according to an evolutionary selection story that feature X is attractive to men but it turns out that in a good many cases the 'opposite' feature, not-X, is attractive to men, then according to the 'explanation' that just means X and not-X are both due to evolution. It's a bit like saying, "The weather is due to the will of the gods"; if it rains, we conclude, "thus it is proved that rain was the will of the gods", and if it is sunny we then conclude, "thus it is proved that sun was the will of the gods"; no matter what happens, no matter what you predict, you always have the same explanation (the will of the gods). In both cases, there is no real empirical testing here (empirical testing being the hallmark of science.) So, if women shave under their arms, that's due to the evolutionary desire to look younger to attract a mate, and if they don't that's due to the evolutionary desire to look mature to attract a mate. If women get breast implants that's due to the evolutionary desire to look younger to attract a mate, and if they get their breast implants removed that's due to the evolutionary desire to look natural to attract a mate. And so on and so forth. You might object that the explanation is actually talking about what men find naturally attractive, not about women's behavior. OK, let's do it that way. Men find big butts attractive because they indicate "healthy fat" and thus survival potential for offspring. And men who find small butts attractive? That's because small butts indicate youth and nubility and thus survival potential for offspring. And round and round we go again. This is not some kind of scientific explanation; it's imaginative storytelling: give me a characteristic and I'll tell you a story which always has the same ending. Mother Goose, eat your heart out.
Now, that's a basic criticism of the usual socio-evolutionary account of social phenomena. Curiously, Morris doesn't go down this path, but he does employ a reasoning strategy that has the same basic flaw. Morris doesn't ignore the fact that there is cultural variation in the particulars of female beauty (e.g. Japanese men think neck-lines are very erotic according to Morris), but he certainly doesn't subscribe, of course, to the view that the notion of beauty is culturally determined. He pulls this off, acknowledging the influence of culture while simultaneously discounting it, in the following way: he claims there are "biological features all women share" that are the underlying or essential sources of judgements of beauty (as determined by the evolutionary reproductive struggle), and then there is culture, which is responsible for attempting to modify in countless ways the basic evolutionarily 'given' female form to make it "even more" beautiful; the template, however, for what IS beautiful in essence, and therefore worthy of "improvement", has already been set by Nature. So, anything that doesn't seem to 'fit' the basic evolutionary story is just a transitory cultural variation or some other 'deformation' of the basic gifts bestowed by Nature. Now Morris tries to be "politically correct" with his explanation by saying "every woman has a beautiful body." But when it gets down to tin-tacks, his account is explicitly exclusionary: there are such things are naturally and objectively perfect breasts, perfect bums, perfect backs, perfect legs. If men (or women) claim that Morris's version of 'perfect' Y is not their ideal, he can just write-off their opinions as transitory cultural variations from the objective truth of the matter. So for Morris, his 'perfect' Y is not really his personal aesthetic judgement - the judgement is in fact determined by Nature (and there is no arguing with Nature).
Maybe this could be excused to some extent if his account were based on factual claims which could be tested. The problem is that it isn't factual at all. The scientific sounding explanations are nothing more than that - sounds. The real "engine of investigation" is in fact nothing more than Morris's own mind (Morris, not all of humanity for all time, likes long, slender legs, firm, full breasts, a curvacious back, protroding buttocks and shaved armpits). Insidiously, at no stage does he admit this. It is insidious because, say, a woman who isn't aware of the basic flaw in Morris's explanation (its pseudo-scientific character) could well falsely conclude from Morris's book that Science has established that by her very nature she is an objectively undesirable monkey who fell out of the evolutionary tree.
