Omniloquacious wrote:tommy525 wrote:Personally I think of white males as like having O positive blood. Able to mix with other types. And Asian women as the equivalent. They seem to be able to hook up with all other races as well.
I think people of all ethnicities mix with people of all other ethnicities very well, provided their society doesn't put up religious/cultural/xenophobic barriers against it.
Yet societies do. The problem is then figuring out how much is down to society, and how much is down to actual evolutionary psychology. Wasn't there a thread at this site a year or so ago where they actually showed the results from dating websites? They compared what people listed as their preferences (or who they would be willing to date, at least), and their actual behaviour in contacting or responding to people of different races from that website. There were pretty pronounced race and sex differences. I don't think tommy's statement is that far off the mark according to the data, if I remember correctly.
Fortunately for blokes who happen to be in Taiwan for whatever reason and who find themselves attracted to a particular local woman they meet, or to many of the women they see around them, Taiwan is generally very accepting of matches between its daughters and foreign men (and goes positively gaga over the children they make). So as a rule, there are no great barriers to foreigners hooking up with locals, as long as the lady isn’t a member of one of the small (and I believe shrinking) minority of families that does still object to taking in a foreigner as one of its own.
And on the broader subject of men hooking up with women wherever they happen to be, and whether it’s more likely to be for a bit of philandering or something more lasting:
At the chemical level, we’re very simple creatures. Our hormones will trigger basic responses to basic cues. When we men catch sight of comely lips, thighs, breasts or other feminine bits that we are programmed to be sexually aroused by, we will be sexually excited, and we will want to have sex with that woman.
At the cerebral level, more complex non-hormonal triggers come into play. If a woman arouses a positive cerebral response by being appropriately empathetic, engaging us in interesting conversation, sharing our philosophical outlook, enjoying the same pastimes as us, and in other such ways, we’ll also be attracted to her and seek her company. Then, the combination of the cerebral attraction and the latent sexual attraction, even if the latter is not so strong, may lead to sexual intimacy, which causes the release of the oxytocins and other neurotransmitters that create the tremendously strong bonds of “love” between us.
In younger men, when the hormones are cascading through their brains and bodies in great torrents, the chemical responses tend to get the upper hand over the cerebral in dictating sexual behaviour. But as we get older and our hormonal surges subside, the cerebral becomes more likely to prevail over the chemical, and we’re more likely to settle into a love-based monogamous sex life than a lust-based philandering sex life.
Does that sound about right, or does anyone see this dimension of our behaviour any differently?
Evolutionary psychology is a fairly unscientific beast, in many ways, but I will use it to explain why I think the second part of your analysis (regarding the cerebral) is somewhat off the mark. Firstly, the physical cues people get (within very short time frames, and unconsciously) are much more important than people give credit to. Many of these things are actually cues of reproductive health, and markers of reproductive health (e.g. shade of hair colour for people with fair hair -- it naturally gets darker with age) are also dependent upon resource acquisition ability (i.e. ability to acquire good nutrition), which act as cues for how well a potential mate would be able to provide for one's shared offspring.
Secondly, I wouldn't actually distinguish between the physical and the cerebral precisely because so much of what we consider cerebral functions along the same lines. Evolution has basically set us up to maximise not just the number of offspring we have, but the likelihood that they will also survive to reproductive age themselves. Promiscuous behaviour is actually not even so much the folly of youth so much as it is simply pretty unlikely to occur (in anything other than either a society that communally raises children -- and in a sense, this is what a welfare state is -- or a society with abundant resources, such as that of a developed nation). This is because of the nature of human reproduction, and the time (and resources) required to bring human offspring to sexual maturity. Some species produce a massive number of offspring, but few survive. Humans produce a comparatively small number of offspring, but we have to put far more resources into them (contrast even many other species of mammals that can walk and run within a couple of hours of birth, and are completely able to fend for themselves and reach sexual maturity within a few years, let alone lower order animals that have comparatively shorter life cycles and rearing periods). Nature gives you a shotgun or a sniper's rifle, but in the end, you all end up bagging about the same number of confirmed kills or ecosystems would get out of balance (and then populations would crash in order to reach equilibrium again).
The cerebral things you outline above are not necessarily any different to physical cues. They may simply be more complex. In assessing if someone has the same interests and outlook as us, we are in effect making sure that we will not be working against each other in the allocation of our shared resources and we will maximise the likelihood of our children surviving to adulthood and having their own children. Given the costs of raising a child, it's a pretty big investment, and you want someone who is on the same page. This is actually truer the more developed the society too. Developed nations produce one or two children per couple these days, and people pour small fortunes into their children. Most people nowadays will get one or two chances. Contrast that with a family in the past that would have had, say, ten children. Ten chances that your kids will survive and be okay, even if your spouse was a knucklehead. Thus, people weren't nearly as anal about who they ended up marrying. Open the pages of any magazine directed at "professionals" these days, and you'd find yourself wondering if
anyone would meet their partner requirements. It may be more complex, but it's no different to finding another magpie that can build a good nest.
