Last week, I (as well as all of Twitter) came across a Spectator article called *Love Can’t Be Lectured, *a manifesto defending the immutable nature of male physical sexual preferences, written by sixty-three-year-old writer Sean Thomas. Credit where it’s due, he opens with a pre-paywall statement guaranteed to rake in the rage-traffic: he will not date women his own age because he is physically incapable of being attracted to them. His type is, quite explicitly, twenty-four-year-old Sadie Sink, who he says looks like a “Pre-Raphaelite nymph at the end of a Narnian winter.”
Anyway, his larger point is that men cannot be shamed out of their hardwired desires no matter how politically incorrect, inconvenient or “implausible for that particular man” they may be, and fair. I have no desire to push Sean Thomas towards any particular woman, his age or otherwise, as he believes body-positive advertisements for lotion are attempting to do. He says:
The advertising industry has spent 20 years trying to make us prefer women who are older, or fatter, or wrinklier – or black or brown and so on…Sexual desire is hard-wired, it is not a passing preference. And humans, especially males, are hard-wired to desire the young, the slim, and, yes, sometimes the fair. As men lust for them, women aspire to be them.
In general, I agree that most of our physical preferences are hardwired, or at the very least, out of our control (although I don’t believe there’s anything particularly biological about a male preference for skinny white women—many men across different cultures disagree on this—although other preferences are likely biological in nature) I also agree that attempting to lecture people out of those preferences is probably a waste of everyone’s time. If you are a man in his sixties, and not a particularly impressive-looking, famous or rich one, who is doomed to be repulsed by anyone over the age of thirty, you will probably suffer more than any woman who fails to trigger your lust. And yes, shaming will not change anything, although I disagree that this was the intention of Dove commercials. Only your own decision to compromise on some of your ideals—a decision almost every non-supermodel or non-billionaire makes when dating—will change your behaviors.
And yes, the world would be a better place if nobody had physical preferences at all, if everyone could simply fall in love with a soul and not care about the aesthetics of the casing. But alas, the preferences are there, and we must contend with them.
All that said, I can’t help but notice that the idea that physical preferences are hardwired—and if you don’t like it, get over it, that’s biology—seems to be limited to men. No matter how implausible these preferences are, no matter how mismatched they are with men’s own looks, they are taken for granted because men are “visual creatures.” Meanwhile, women’s physical preferences are viewed as up for debate, fleeting, frivolous, or perhaps nonexistent.
Of course, plenty of people seek to shame men away from preferring young and beautiful women (see: everyone mocking Sean Thomas) so I’m not arguing that men’s preferences are never questioned, only that they are assumed to be biological and immutable, which to some extent provides an armor against negotiation. Women, on the other hand, do not get to claim such things, with the exception of being hardwired to want a “good provider.” How convenient that our only acceptable hardwired preference is something mostly within men’s control!
