Mating Habits of the Fantasexual
by Giulianna LamannaLadies and gentlemen, eggs and sperm: today is Valentine’s Day. Therefore, my blog entry for the day (and, likely, the month) will be about something both timely and close to my heart: chocolate. Actually, it’ll be about sex. But luckily for me, most of you singles out there can’t tell the difference anyway, so here we go!
Most people who don’t spend their lives in protective plastic bubbles have a general awareness of different kinds of human sexuality. Namely, that there are heterosexuals (people attracted to members of the opposite sex), bisexuals (people attracted to both sexes, or all three if you happen to be a Vissian), homosexuals (people attracted to members of the same sex), and asexuals (slogan: it’s not just for amoebas anymore!). Then there are Fuzzies (severely disturbed individuals who will only have sex with someone wearing a fuzzy animal costume or, failing that, a stuffed animal), who remain the only living results of the catastrophic science experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong that almost destroyed the Mattel toy factory in 1972.
But there is yet another type of sexuality, one less talked about and often unknown, possibly because I made it up. This is fantasexuality. Rather than being attracted to any human beings, fantasexuals are only attracted to their fantasies of what the media tells them people should be. The phenomenon is perfectly demonstrated by a scene from the 2004 comedy Without a Paddle. (Though the majority of America forgot about the film within five minutes of leaving the theater, we were all brutally reminded of it a few months back when it was released on DVD. Stoned college students, 12-year-old boys, and Seth Green’s mother rejoiced.) In it, our three moronic adventurers come upon a group of alluring hippie girls. Their respect for these women and their politics grows long and hard until the discovery that they do not shave their legs, at which point Seth Green gags.
Indeed, male fantasexuals are not only unattracted to real women, despite being ostensibly heterosexual, but are outright disgusted by them. They will only accept a woman after she has destroyed every hair on her body below her eyebrows and covered up her human scent with synthetic perfumes. Other features held in contempt by fantasexuals inclue acne, moles, and warts. Sadly, most fantasexuals lead lonely, unsatisfied lives. If his mate won’t destroy every visible vestige of their humanity to appease him, the fantasexual must resort to finding imaginary love through television, magazines, and the silver screen; there, anorexic, makeup-slathered models and actresses are airbrushed to perfection.
This particular strain of sexual deviance only developed in the early 20th century, when sleeveless dresses and shorter skirts made shaved armpits and legs the fashionable choice for American and British women. Since then, it’s been expected of women in Anglo-Saxon countries, and the popularity of bikinis is slowly adding pubic hair to the list of purged fur. Fantasexuality is primarily a male phenomenon, as men aren’t expected to hide their every blemish or shave/pluck their hair obsessively (beards, while veering in and out of style, never come with the kind of stigma attached to female leg hair). However, the sudden rise of metrosexuality (straight men whose fondest desire is to be a gay stereotype) may be an indication that fantasexuality flows both ways.
In the future, neither men nor women will be allowed to leave their homes without destroying every last follicle on their heads, down to the roots, under penalty of stoning. Those seen with revealed acne will be shot on sight. And God help anyone whose weight exceeds 120 pounds. Happy Valentine’s Day, you hairy tub of lard.
Unfortunately, fantasexuals are much more prevalent than that. I’d estimate upwards of 75% of Western males are fantasexual. And they’re more prevalent than that historically, too; Egyptian women suffered many of the same pressures.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 February 2005 @ 2:40 PM
I think you may be overstating the case. You can say that the demands we place on how people (especially females) look is excessive, but it hardly seems unnatural. And, as Jason pointed out, it’s not new either. The things women have to do to themselves now to make themselves attractive is different than in previous times, but the basic idea is very much the same.
And the thing is, you can’t really blame people for wanting a companion who meets their ideas of what the opposite sex should look like, even if those ideas may seem impractical. Everybody wants to have the highest probability of their children surviving. Part of that is biology–certain parts of the female anatomy are found attractive, for instance, because they indicate her ability to carry children. But with humans, there is also a cultural aspect. It’s another step removed from biology, but it’s the same basic drive. Because people of the same culture are more homogeneous than the population as whole–they tend to look and act similarly to each other. Thus, we form in our minds an image of how certain people should look and behave based on what we see around us. This helps a society function when everybody is pretty much on the same wavelength. Our culture also tells us how men and women are supposed to look and behave. And because to that person that’s what a female looks like, he is going to associate that with those biological features and thus with the higher probability that offspring will survive. Also, in many respsects those culturally defined sexual images are not so far removed from reproductive success since a man or woman who does not conform to the society’s norms is not as likely to be able to successfully raise children.
It’s a heuristic. And heuristics aren’t always right, but they can be useful. People need some way of judging how good of a partner another person might be just by looking at them, and we use our cultural ideas of what the opposite sex should look like to help us in this regard. Excessive, perhaps. But hardly abnormal.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 14 February 2005 @ 10:33 PM
It isn’t the emphasis on looks that’s unnatural–it’s the unnatural look demanded. Our demands point towards a consistent theme: we want women that are plastic, hairless, young, thin … in short, the more child-like, the better. It is a barely-concealed pedophelia.
Real women do not look like that ideal; the rejection, the gut-level revulsion that supposedly “heterosexual” men feel at the sight of a real, live female betrays their supposed sexuality. You cannot call yourself heterosexual, and be disgusted by the smell of a female.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 February 2005 @ 4:30 PM
Well, this brings up an interesting question. What is a natural way for a woman to look? Because remember, you have sex and you have gender. Gender includes cultural ideas about what the opposite sex should be like. As culture is a defining human characteristic, can you really call those cultural ideas concerning sexuality any less natural than biological factors?
For instance, you’re both talking about the hairlessness as being something unnatural. Obviously because humans have hair we should find that hair attractive. But is it really true that we like our partners to be hairless because we have an unnatural idea of how they should look? Is that really how that attitude came into existence? Consider an alternative explanation. Humans naturally have less hair than their primate cousins. It’s one of the things that automatically sets a human apart from an ape as soon as you look at them–we’re essentially bald apes. An attraction to hairlessness may not be unnatural as much as it is an emphasis on our humanity.
Youth is easy–younger women are better able to bear children. Being thin is–up to a cerain point, at least–a sign of being in good health…another indicator of child bearing ability.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 16 February 2005 @ 7:56 PM
Mike, I never said that men should never be attracted to hairless women. But when it reaches the point at which a man actually recoils in disgust at the sight of a woman with all her body hair - or acne, or warts, or moles, as also mentioned in the article - that is when it gets weird. It’s fine if someone is attracted to shaved legs or armpits. But to be physically repulsed by the opposite is something else entirely.
And I tend to doubt that attraction to female hairlessness is a result of evolution. Beards and chest hair go in and out of style. Shaved legs and armpits, in America, only started in the early 20th century. Even then, the argument wasn’t health or sexual attractiveness: it was fashion. The first ad to recommend shaved armpits claimed it was all the rage in Paris and New York; that was its driving argument. Hairy women didn’t seem to be a problem in the 1800s, when the fashion of the day covered up legs and armpits. Even today, outside of the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, very few women shave anything - or are expected to.
You could also argue that when wealthy women in the 1600s plucked out their eyebrows and pushed their hairlines back, that that was evolution at work. But now we see that it was only a fad. Eyebrows are back with a vengeance. In fact, every once in a while, bushy eyebrows come back in fashion. (Think: 80s Madonna.)
Standards of beauty can usually be explained either by evolution or social circumstance. For instance, during the plague years, fat women were all the rage, because they were healthier and more likely to survive disease. But in today’s media-saturated world, we take these basic desires and blow them completely out of proportion. The result is anorexia, widespread low self-esteem, and men who have a full-on revulsion for women who don’t look like supermodels.
I am not complaining that standards of beauty exist. I am complaining that they are being taken to ridiculous levels. And if you don’t agree, I invite you to wax your legs, your arms, your ass and pubic hair, followed by a careful plucking and sculpting of your eyebrows and about half an hour in front of the mirror plastering your face with unpronounceable chemicals. Oh wait - I forgot. Women are supposed to take men for who and what they are. It would be vain to demand anything else. Silly me.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 17 February 2005 @ 1:20 AM
Hairy women are no less human or “evolved” than anyone else, so that argument seems weak. However, the hair we’re most interested in having removed–the legs and armpits–are indicators of sexual maturity. This goes very strongly against evolution. We are revolted by the very signs that a woman is capable of bearing children. We want to think of the women we mate with as pre-pubescent children who have not yet reached sexual maturity. In short, we want to have sex with ten year olds without actually having sex with ten year olds. It’s a self-loathing, barely-repressed pedophelia.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 February 2005 @ 8:10 AM
KC & The Sunshine Band: “Shave shave shave, Shave shave shave, shave your pootie!”
—–
While enduring an omnipresent sampling of insta-transformation TV programming (wardrobe, make-up, hairstyle, cosmetic surgery, soul coaching, home remolding, etc…) - I was reminded of a distinct advantage for those folks that are attracted to and love other folks in an un-altered (”natural”) state:
They are much less likely to fall for a “false” person, someone seeking perpetual immaturity, someone seeking to “play god” with their own body (and most likely their mind as well). And they are much less likely to be “confused” by cross dressers and transsexuals.
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 17 February 2005 @ 2:08 PM
I didn’t say it was evolution. But cultural ideas about sexuality, even when they are only temporary, are often associated with biological traits. As an example, some studies have pointed out that the ideal female image in America has been thinner during times of increased prosperity and fatter during times of increased poverty. Obviously, this isn’t something that’s hardwired into the human mind. But what is is the desire to find a mate who will provide the greatest chance of reproductive success. And the traits that we associate with reproductive success change with the times.
We happen to be living in a time when hairlessness is associated with the female body. Having a body covered in hair, on the other hand, is associated with the male body. So in reality, being disgusted by a hairy female is not a sign that the person is not a true heterosexual because what that person is really disgusted by is the idea of having sex with what is to his mind another male. It’s a purely psychological association. It doesn’t necessarily make strictly logical sense. Being disgusted by females with hair makes just as much sense as starting to salivate from the sound of a bell.
I’ll be the first one to admit that the standards of beauty that women are held to today are excessive. But the magnitude to the phenomenon is not what’s at issue here. Where you lose me is when you claim that this sort of behavior is either unnatural or abnormal. To me this looks like perfectly normal human behavior, simply taken to an unfortunate extreme.
And by the way, our attitudes with regard to how men look and behave may not come even close to being as extreme as our ideas about femininity, but you’re just fooling yourself if you think they don’t exist at all. And you don’t even have to go as far as “metrosexuals” to find an example. It’s true that it is socially acceptable for men to not shave every inch of hair on their body. We seem to be in a more clean-shaven period at the moment, but it would still be perfectly fine for a man to, say, grow a beard. On the other hand, let him go a few weeks without trimming that beard, and we’ll see how much the ladies like him then. How “natural” is that? Men have simply been in the fortunate position of having the upper hand for the vast majority of history, so they have been able to demand more from their partners. But women have hardly “taken men for who and what they are” at any point in history.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 17 February 2005 @ 7:24 PM
Mike, I would challenge you to walk down the street with two people. One, a women with clearly unshaven legs and armpits. Two, a man with a scruffy beard. See how people react to each. One is infashionable, the other is repulsive “unnatural,” disgusting.
If your claim is that modification of their “natural” i.e. birthday suit appearance is common to all human societies you’re certainly right. Even in this culture none of us sticks bones through our noses or plates through our lips (although I’ve had friends with pretty damn big spacers in their ears).
What makes our beauty standards so repugnant is, 1) The extent to which they depend on toxic, often carcinogenic chemicals (Environmental Working Group just did a massive report on this, and at the Center for Environmental Oncology where I work we’re documenting the incredibly bad effects of hair-care products sold to African American women), 2) The extent to which they are directed so forcefully at women as opposed to men, so that women at best have to bizarrely modify the condition of their bodies in a way that doesn’t actually cause longterm damage, at worst have to douse themselves in poison (botox, anyone?).
The worst part of it all is that the standards of beauty come not from any organic evolution, but from distant marketers using the weapons of modern media to deliberately force people to be uncomfortable about their bodies–literally to hate themselves. And the second worst part of it is that–and I think Giuli is right in identifying metrosexualism as the new way this is hitting men, too–it is directed primarily at women.
Comment by Steve — 24 February 2005 @ 11:07 AM
I’ve noticed a distinct and consistent aesthetic in our society that promotes the artificial, and finds the natural repugnant. The fantasexual is one example, but so too is a well-trimmed lawn. We want things to be alive–whether women or grass–but also tightly controlled within very distinct, strong boundaries. Dead things are not appealing, but neither are things alive and free. Our entire aesthetic turns on the foundation of slavery, a gross display of power and control. There’s the core, I think; our aesthetic revolves around the most fundamental tenet of civilization itself: control.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 24 February 2005 @ 11:25 AM
The most hillarious part about lawns is that the more unhealthy they air, the more likely they are to be labeled healthy.
Although to their credit they are a pretty efficient system for removing all nutrients from a given piece of soil.
Comment by Steve — 27 February 2005 @ 7:17 PM
Since Gillette advertised female razors in the 20’s, shaving means to be sophisticated. That’s the message, that’s all. I would like to have a hairy woman in bed but I would prefer her armpits shaved when displayed in public. How hypocritical can I get?
Comment by Luke — 30 May 2005 @ 10:16 PM
I for one think that hair is great!!!!! It goes back to my earlier dating experiences when the womwn didn’t pay much attention to having perfectly smooth legs or armpits. It probably also had to do with the fact that it was somewhat of a sixties revival period. But the hair, wonderful. I can’t stand the “landing strip” and recoil at the idea that someone would go through so much. And since when does fashoin have to dictate how much pubic hair we have. Everyones pubis hair is different and it gives them character, by shaving everyone bald we make a bunch alien looking adult women. I guess some may think shaved is clean, but I hardly believe this, and think that the hair holds the smells and flavors.
Comment by Marty — 5 June 2005 @ 1:13 AM
Congratulations, Marty, you and I are among an endangered species: the heterosexual male.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 June 2005 @ 10:21 AM
Hmm, somehow missed this the first time around…
1) Hey! I really liked that movie!
2) Seth gets over it in the end
3) I agree on both points of this being a control issue and poorly concealed pedophilia (notice the lolita rage in internet p*rn the past few years?). But I’m not sure I can really get behind calling this a completely different sexual orientation. It just doesn’t seem to compare to homosexuality, this seems way too much of a cultural/psychological phenomenon for that. Ditto w/ “Fuzzies”. Sorry, I just think that drags homosexuality (at least) down to a point it doesn’t deserve.
Comment by jhereg — 2 February 2007 @ 9:44 AM
Er… it was kind of supposed to be a joke… I wasn’t seriously suggesting that this was a completely different sexual orientation…
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 2 February 2007 @ 11:41 AM
Ah, I see.
Sorry, not feeling well atm…
Comment by jhereg — 2 February 2007 @ 12:00 PM
Is it to late to become a fan? Thanks for writing this.
Comment by Anonymous — 5 March 2009 @ 7:26 AM