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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 242795" data-attributes="member: 1106">I think you'll find that male fascination with youthful females (like symmetry, waste-to-hip ratio, health etc.) is pretty universal among humans, regardless of culture.  Other things vary for good reason though; the amount of melatonin in your skin being related to your life expectancy (and therefore it's relationship to "good genes") differs by climate, and may therefore affect the idea of beauty of each strand of humanity who hail from specific regions.  As I mentioned earlier in this thread, theory is that our brains are tricky, though, and adapt to the beauty of the surrounding humans we grow up with - and make that our ideal.  And then there's the stuff with finding the looks of a partner who looks something like your family - but definitely not too close to the looks of your family (built in safety mechanism to avoid in-breeding) - attractive, and that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish too...and then there's that beauty mask thing...evolutionary biology would have you believe that what an individual considers beautiful is a complex thing!  There's a whole section of our brains dedicated to recognising faces, it probably devotes some time to recognising beauty too...IIRC, chimps, our nearest relatives, have males which don't care what age the females are when choosing sexual partners - guided probably by their sense of beauty or sexiness.  Why?  Theory has it that it's because they're a lot less monogamous than we are.  In fact, not really monogamous at all, really.Human males have a bit of a universal age fetish, the theory goes, because they've evolved so as to reduce the chance of accidentally "marrying" an already-pregnant woman accidentally, and unknowingly end up looking after another man's child for years on end (thinking it their own).  Young women just reaching marriageable age are less likely to be sexually active than their older counterparts, and are therefore safer bets in that respect at least...plus the youth more likely to mean healthy thing.As we probably all know (or at least suspect), humans aren't that monogamous though.  Our men have sizeable testicles compared to our body size, and the bigger the testicles compared to body size, the theory goes, the more adultery a species is "designed" (loaded word, used carelessly) to be involved in.  Gorillas, who are one-partner-for-life types, have a very small testicles for their body size.  Adulterous chimps, on the other hand, have huge ones.  Humans fall somewhere in the middle, and fall "naturally" (another loaded, unwise word to use) into a pattern of monogamy with some excursions into adultery.  No surprises there, eh?I'm not sure how this all maps onto long lived demi-human cultures such as elves and dwarves, and I'm not sure you'd want to go there anyway!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />And Ashtal's right that men's idea of female beauty is subject to fashion when it comes to body fat.  The Playboy centrefolds over the years go through slim and plump phases, but their breast-hip-waste ratio never really changes, though...</blockquote>

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