Ovulation: what is it in simple words and when does it happen?
The reproductive period takes up almost half of a woman's life. It lasts on average from 11-12 years, when a teenage girl has her first menstruation, to 48-50 years, when menopause is established. And all this time, the body patiently, month after month, prepares to accept and nurture the future new person.
“By extracting” more and more follicles from the ovarian reserves, the woman’s body releases eggs from them. This process is called “ovulation”. Let's take a closer look at some points.
What is ovulation in girls
Ovulation occurs once a month for every female if she:
- not pregnant;
- does not breastfeed;
- has no problems with hormones;
- does not take birth control pills.
Perhaps the wording of the question is a little incorrect - ovulation occurs not only in young girls, but also in mature women, until the menopause period begins. What is ovulation and when does it occur - a question to which the clearest and most detailed answer will be given by a gynecologist or gynecologist-endocrinologist. How does it manifest itself?
If we touch lightly on the field of biology, the overall process looks like this.
What many consider to be the end of the menstrual cycle - regular bleeding - is actually the beginning of the ovulatory cycle. On the day when spotting appears on the pad, indicating the rejection of the endometrial layer that turned out to be “extra”, several small - so-called antral - follicles begin to slowly mature. The supply of them in the body of a newborn girl approaches a million, but throughout life it steadily decreases. Most follicles do not reach the maturity stage. Having begun to grow on the first day of a new cycle, they undergo atresia and resolve, with the exception of 1 or 2.
At about 8-9 days, ultrasound already shows 5-10 antral follicles in each ovary. At this point, the dominant one, that is, the largest one, is determined. It is he who is destined to rupture on days 12-14 of the cycle, release an egg and turn into. The process of formation and release of an egg is called ovulation.
This is the most favorable time for, dangerous for those who do not plan to expand their family, and favorable for those who want to become parents.
Early ovulation occurs on days 11-12 of the cycle. comes around 19-20 days. Both cases are not anything different from the norm, because many factors influence the menstrual cycle of women:
- changing of the living place;
- stress;
- any diseases;
- taking medications;
Sometimes a woman constantly ovulates during these periods. If fertility is preserved and there are no hormonal or sexual diseases, then there is no need to worry: this means that this is the individual norm for this woman.
Ovulation day
The day of ovulation is “day X,” which becomes the beginning of a new life, if it is destined to be born.
In teenage girls, ovulation cycles are not established immediately. If menstruation begins early, around age 11, the entire first year may consist of anovulatory cycles. This should not cause concern: the “dance” of hormones has not yet subsided, the body has not adjusted the mechanism by which it will work properly until menopause.
However, this does not mean that young girls do not have to worry about the need for contraception: ovulation can happen in any month. Not always (especially at first) and not every girl will be able to feel the distinctive signs of ovulation: it does not manifest itself in any way, because it is not a disease, but a natural process, and it can often be tracked only by ultrasound and jumps in basal temperature. But more on that later.
Gynecologists achieve stimulation of ovulation by injecting drugs. hCG appears, which is administered intramuscularly when the follicle has already become dominant, but has not yet reached its maximum. This gives an impulse to the oocyte to mature and break away from the wall of the ovarian follicle. After an hCG injection, ovulation occurs approximately 36-48 hours later.
Such an injection can be given to the patient before, so as not to miss the time most suitable for the injection of the husband’s or donor’s sperm.
Last update: 12/22/2018Here Kanazawa addressed a very important issue that often misleads people who do not know the basics of statistics. Does advertising determine women's desires to look a certain way, or were existing beauty trends formed much earlier and served as the root cause of the advertising we see today? Despite the fact that these articles were written back in 2008, their relevance today has probably only increased. Below is an adapted translation.
Why men love blonde beauties (and why women want to look like them)
It is generally accepted among sociologists and the public that the media imposes arbitrary images of ideal female beauty on girls and women and forces them to strive for these artificial and unreasonable standards. Nothing could be further from the truth.
According to this statement, girls and women want to look like supermodels, actresses or pop idols because they are bombarded with images of these women. As a consequence, according to this view, girls and women will stop wanting to look like them if the media stops saturating them with such images or changes arbitrary standards of female beauty.
This view was popularized, among many others, by former model turned social activist Jean Kilborn in her documentary series Killing Us Softly.
Apparently, Kilborn and other feminists believe that girls and women are mindless robots who will do and think whatever advertising agencies tell them to do. Saying that girls and women want to look like blonde beauties because of billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine ads makes as little sense as saying that people feel hungry because they're bombarded with images of food. in mass media. If the media stopped bombarding people with images of food, people would never go hungry!
Anyone can see the absurdity of this argument. We periodically become hungry because we have physiological and psychological mechanisms that cause us to seek and consume food. And we have these innate mechanisms because they solve an important adaptive problem of survival.
Our ancestors (long before they were humans or even mammals) who somehow didn't go hungry didn't live long enough to leave offspring carrying their genes. Of course, we would be hungry even if all food advertising disappeared today. Advertisements are consequences of our tendency to become hungry, not causes. They speculate on our innate needs for food, but do not create them.
The same is true for the ideal of female beauty. Two pieces of evidence are enough to refute the claim that media images and “culture” in general encourage girls and women to want to look like blonde beauties.
Firstly, women dyed their hair blonde for more than half a millennium, and perhaps two millennia ago, when there was no television, movies and magazines (although there were portraits, and it is thanks to these portraits that we know today that women dyed their blonde hair in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy). Women's desire to be blonde predates the media by centuries, if not millennia.
Secondly, a recent study shows that women in Iran, where they are largely unexposed to Western media and culture and therefore cannot recognize Jessica Simpson in Roseanne Barr, and where most women wear the traditional hijab, are free covering their entire body so that it is impossible to tell what shape it is, are essentially more concerned about the appearance of their body and want to lose more weight than their American competitors in the land of Vogue and Barbie dolls.
Traditionalists who attribute women's preferences and desires entirely to socialization through the media will find it difficult to explain how both Italian women in the fifteenth century and Iranian women today strive and achieve the same ideal image of female beauty as do women in modern Western societies. .
Why, then, do women want to look like stunning blondes? Evolutionary psychology suggests that this is because men want to mate with women who look like them.
The desire of women to look this way is a direct, expedient and common-sense response to this male need. This leads quite simply to another question: why do men want to mate with women who are similar to them?
Because women who look like them have higher reproductive value and fertility, and experience greater reproductive success on average. There is nothing accidental about the image of ideal female beauty; it has been strictly and carefully determined by millions of years of evolution through sexual selection.
Nowadays, men want to mate with women who look like blonde beauties, and as a result, women want to look like them, because our male ancestors, who did not want to mate with women who looked like them, did not leave as many descendants as those who did this.
Let's take a closer look at what I mean by "blond beauties." Note, firstly, that there has been a long line of blondes in Western media: Pamela Anderson, Jordan, Madonna, Brigitte Bardot, Jayne Mansfield, going back to the iconic Marilyn Monroe and even further back into history. Equally, there are many modern examples: Jessica Simpson, Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johansson among many others.
Readers from non-Western societies can substitute female beauty representatives from their own cultures accordingly. I don't know who they are, but despite this, I can be sure that they share many characteristics with their Western competitors.
What are these characteristic features? In the next few posts, I will highlight and examine in turn the key features that define the image of ideal female beauty. These are youth, long hair, narrow waist, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes and big eyes. Behind each of them is an evolutionary logic.
Why do men prefer to mate with younger women?
One of the main characteristics of ideal female beauty is youth. Why do men prefer to mate with younger women?
Men prefer younger women because they have greater reproductive value and fertility than older women. A woman's reproductive value is the expected number of children she will have during the remainder of her reproductive career, and therefore peaks at the very beginning of her menstruation, declines steadily throughout her life, and reaches zero at menopause.
Her fertility is the average number of children she currently has at any given age, and peaks between the ages of 20 and 30. The logic of evolutionary psychology suggests that because of this, men are attracted to teenage girls and young women, despite the laws of civilized society regarding the age of marriage.
Remember that in the ancestral environment there were no laws prohibiting sexual intercourse with persons under the age of majority; in fact, there were no laws at all. , which argues that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and taking action regarding entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment, and suggests that the human brain cannot properly comprehend written law, including laws regarding the age of marriage.
For example, male high school teachers and college professors in the United States (but not their female counterparts) have higher than expected divorce rates and lower than expected remarriage rates, likely because they routinely encounter girls and women in the prime of their reproductive years.
Any adult woman they may be married to or dating will pale in comparison to their female students in terms of reproductive performance. This may also explain why most don't last very long. Actors constantly encounter and interact closely with younger generations of rising movie stars, while their actress-model spouses may only be aging.
In this regard, here is a short autobiographical digression, which, however, explains my point of view on the importance of youth in ideal female beauty. When Alan S. Miller and I began writing Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters in 2000, we chose Pamela Anderson as the ideal of female beauty, an animated Barbie doll, and we titled the corresponding section of the book Why Men Like Pamela Anderson (and why do women want to look like her)?”
However, over the years, it no longer met the requirements. The Rescuers ended its run in 2001, and in 2007 Pamela Anderson turned 40 years old. As a result, we decided to replace her with Britney Spears, who at that time was the ideal image of an immaculate, marriageable princess. Well, you know what's happened to her lately. Next candidate please!
As we once again searched for another ideal image of feminine beauty to replace Britney Spears, it eventually dawned on us that no matter who we decided to use, she would soon enough go out of style due to the significant penalty set on youth in favor of ideal female beauty.
If we had written our book 30 years ago, the section would have been titled “Why do people like Farrah Fawcett Majors (and why women want to be like her)?” (except that evolutionary psychology didn't exist 30 years ago and we wouldn't have anything to write about in our book!).
This would make our book seem really dated; Farrah Fawcett turned 60 in 2007. Because we wanted our book to be read for a long time and didn't want it to ever look dated, we ultimately decided not to use a modern example of a stunning blonde.
Why do men prefer women with long hair?
Mostly men prefer women with long hair. And most young women prefer to let their hair grow for a long time. Again, men's preference for women with long hair is the reason why women choose to grow their hair long. The question arises: why do men prefer women with long hair?
Since the human fetus grows inside a woman's body for nine months, and then the mother breastfeeds her newborn baby for several years afterward, the woman's health is vital to the baby's well-being.
Sick women do not make good mothers any more than sick men do not make good fathers. In view of this, men are interested in choosing healthy women as mothers of their children. One of the reasons why men prefer younger women, other than their higher reproductive value and fertility (as discussed in my previous post), is that younger women tend to be healthier on average than older women.
How can men assess the health of their potential partners? There were no clinics in the ancestral environment; male ancestors had to judge women's health for themselves. One of the reliable indicators of health is physical attractiveness and this is the reason why men like beautiful women, as I mentioned in a previous post.
Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have glossy, shiny hair, while the hair of sick people loses its shine. During illness, the body needs to use up all available nutrients (such as iron and protein) to fight the disease. Since hair is not fundamentally important for survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the very first thing the body turns to to gather the nutrients it needs. Because of this, poor human health is primarily detected in the condition of the hair.
In addition to this, hair grows very slowly, approximately six inches per year. This means that if a woman has shoulder length hair (two feet long), it is an accurate indication of her health over the past four years, because once the hair grows, the owner cannot do anything about its appearance afterwards.
A woman may be healthy now, but if she had been ill for some time in the last four years, her long hair would indicate her past illness. And in the ancestral environment, there was nothing a woman could do to make her hair look healthy and shiny if she was not healthy. This is also the reason why older women tend to keep their hair short, as they tend to become less healthy as they age and they don't want tell-tale signs of their current health status hanging from their heads.
If you want to see this process in action, try a little experiment yourself. Find a stranger in a public place (for example, in a park or at a metro station). Watch her from behind, without looking at her face, hands, clothes or anything else touching her, but look only at her hair.
Try to guess her age based solely on the condition of her hair and nothing else. Once you've come up with a ballpark figure for her age, walk past her, turn around and sneak a look at the woman's face. You will find that on very rare occasions you will be surprised by her estimated age if you look at her face and her entire body, because usually the condition of her hair is a very accurate indicator of her age. You have now established the importance of hair as an indicator of age in ancestral conditions.
Why 90-60-90 are ideal female parameters
What are the ideal female parameters? 90-60-90. Why are they considered ideal female parameters? It turns out that these numbers were not chosen arbitrarily. There is a scrupulous evolutionary logic behind them.
An evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, Devendra Singh, conducted experiments in different societies to demonstrate that men have a low waist-to-hip ratio (waist size divided by hip size).
Familiar with drawings of female figures identical in all respects except waist-to-hip ratio (ranging from 0.7 to 1), most men in Singh's experiments preferred women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, which is very close to the waist-to-hip ratio any with proportions 90-60-90 (0.67).
I have personally and informally recreated Singh's experiments in three different countries on three different continents (USA, New Zealand and UK) and obtained the same results as Singh. The results seem quite consistent in every experiment in every country; most men prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, and a majority of women prefer men with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.9.
Why do men desire women with a low waist-to-hip ratio? Singh argues that this is true because healthy women have lower waist-to-hip ratios than unhealthy women.
Many diseases - such as diabetes, hypertension, heart attack, stroke and gallbladder disorders - rearrange the distribution of fat in the body, so that affected women cannot maintain a low waist-to-hip ratio.
Women with a low waist-to-hip ratio are also more fertile; It is easier for them to conceive a child and to do so at an earlier age because they have a large amount of the most important reproductive hormones. And of course, women who are already pregnant with another man's child cannot maintain a low waist-to-hip ratio.
Women's waist-to-hip ratio also varies, albeit very slightly, throughout the menstrual cycle; it is lowest during ovulation, when a woman is fertile. Thus, men unconsciously search for healthier and more fertile women when they look for women with smaller waists.
Singh's preference for a low waist-to-hip ratio explains both the popularity of corsets in many Western societies throughout history as a device to make women's waists look as small as possible, and the modern fashion among young women to expose their midriffs.
This also explains why teenage girls, rather than menopausal women, are more likely to expose their bellies as a direct signal of their fertility (ability to conceive), just as young rather than old women are more likely to let their hair grow as an open signal. their health.
The importance of the waist-to-hip ratio in determining female fertility explains the importance of the second and third numbers in the ideal female parameters of 90-60-90. But what about the first 90? Why is it important for women to have 90cm breasts? This is the topic of my next post.
Why do men prefer women with large breasts?
It has long been a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, especially since the size of a woman's breasts has no bearing on her ability to produce milk; Women with small breasts can produce just as much milk for their babies as those with large breasts.
Therefore, women with large breasts do not necessarily make better mothers than women with small breasts. Why then do men prefer women with large breasts? Until recently there was no satisfactory answer to this question.
Then-Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe proposed a solution to this conundrum in the late 1990s, although in retrospect, why no one had thought of it before is another mystery.
Marlow makes the simple observation that larger, and therefore heavier, breasts sag more noticeably with age than small breasts. Thus, it is much easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) based on whether she has larger breasts than if she has smaller breasts that do not change in shape with age.
Let us remember that in the living conditions of our ancestors there were no driver's licenses or birth certificates that men could check and find out how old women were. There was no calendar and, thus, there was no concept of birthdays among the ancestors, so the women themselves did not know exactly how old they were.
Male ancestors needed to infer a woman's age and reproductive value from certain physical traits, and the condition of her breasts was a very good clue, but only if they were large enough to noticeably change shape with age. Men could more accurately determine a woman's age and only attempt to mate with younger women if they had large breasts. Marlow hypothesizes that this is why men find women with large breasts more attractive.
Not long ago, there was an alternative evolutionary psychology explanation for why men prefer women with large breasts. A study of Polish women shows that women who have both large breasts and narrow waists are the most fertile, as measured by their levels of two sex hormones (17-β-estradiol and progesterone). Therefore, men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason that they prefer women with small waists.
Further empirical evidence is needed to evaluate which of these two competing explanations from evolutionary psychology is more accurate. This is just one of many areas in evolutionary psychology where competing hypotheses exist—a sign of active, healthy science and clear evidence that critics of evolutionary psychology who claim it consists of intractable “fairy tales” are simply ignorant of the topic.
Men can accurately determine a woman's age and reproductive value if they can directly study her breasts and other physical features (such as the content and distribution of body fat, evidenced by a small waist, as I explain in a previous post).
But what would men do if they could not directly observe women's bodies? What if a woman's body is hidden, for example, by warm clothing? Men need another way to determine a woman's age: her hair color. This is the topic of my next post.
Why are blondes stupid?
Why do blondes have more fun? Because gentlemen prefer blondes. Why do gentlemen prefer blondes? Because they have evolved psychological mechanisms that predispose them to prefer women with blonde hair. For what?
The idea that blonde hair is a feminine ideal dates back at least half a millennium, and possibly two millennia, ago. There is evidence that women during the Roman Empire and the Renaissance dyed their hair blonde long before the discovery of peroxide in 1812. Women throughout known history have strived so hard to be blonde that they achieved it without the help of peroxide.
Some people believe that men prefer blonde hair because blondes usually have lighter skin, which they prefer. But this seems wrong. While men prefer women with lighter skin color because it is an indicator of higher fertility (a woman's skin color darkens if she is pregnant or on the pill), the lightest skin color corresponds to red hair rather than blond; However, according to one study, both men and women have a strong antipathy towards partners with red hair.
It turns out that men prefer blonde hair for the same reason they prefer large breasts: both are accurate indicators of a woman's age and, therefore, reproductive value.
What sets blonde hair apart from all other hair colors is that it changes dramatically as you age. Young girls with light brown hair usually grow into women with brown hair (although there are very few women who retain their light brown hair into adulthood).
Due to this, if men choose to mate with fair-haired women, they are unconsciously trying to mate with younger (and as a result, on average healthier and more fertile) women with greater reproductive value and fertility.
It's no coincidence that blonde hair evolved in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, where winters are very cold. In Africa, where our ancestors evolved for most of their evolutionary history, people (men and women) remained predominantly naked.
In such an environment, men could accurately determine a woman's age by the distribution of fat on her body or by the firmness of her breasts (which I discuss in a previous post). Men in cold climates did not have this opportunity because women (and men) were wrapped up warmly in such conditions.
This is probably why blonde hair evolved in cold climates as an alternative means for women to signal their youth. Under these circumstances, men responded by developing a predisposition to prefer to mate with fair-haired women; those who did develop, on average, had greater reproductive success than those who did not because, unbeknownst to them, they ended up mating with younger, healthier women with superior reproductive value and fertility.
By the way, this also suggests that the stereotype of blondes being empty-headed may have some statistical basis and be true (since in fact, all stereotypes are true, as I explain in the previous series of posts).
Why do people think blondes are stupid? Recall that the human brain, including the stereotypes it generates, is adapted to the living conditions of its ancestors (as suggested by ). What would be the average age of blondes in their natural ancestral environment (say, Northern Europe 10,000 years ago) in the absence of hair dye? Approximately 15. What would be the average age of brunettes under the same natural conditions? Approximately 35.
A 15 year old woman will inevitably be more naive and less experienced, mature and wise (in other words, stupid) than a 35 year old woman, regardless of her hair color. It's not that blondes are dumber than brunettes, it's that younger women are "dumb" (less knowledgeable, experienced, and mature) than older women, and blonde hair is a reliable indicator of exceptional youth.
The same logic must be behind the stereotype that women with large breasts are stupid. Under ancestral conditions, without plastic surgery or even bras, only very young women had large, firm breasts.
Why blue eyes are attractive
The typical description of ideal female beauty is always accompanied by "blonde hair, blue eyes." After Marlow proposed a solution to the mystery of why men prefer women with large breasts, the attractiveness of blue eyes remained the only mystery to be solved and was solved in the area of characteristics associated with physical attractiveness.
We learned why men prefer women with all the features that characterize Barbie or the typical blonde beauty, and we learned the evolutionary logic behind each of them. But eye color, even more than hair color, seems to be a very arbitrary trait. Why should women with blue eyes be different from those with green or brown eyes? And yet the preference for blue eyes seems universal and undeniable.
There is one more link in the mystery of blue eyes. Unlike all the other characteristics discussed previously in this series of posts (youth, long hair, small waist, large breasts, and blonde hair) that are only seen as attractive in women, blue eyes are considered attractive in both women and men .
For example, a typical description of an attractive man is “tall, dark and handsome,” not blond; Unlike blondes, fair-haired men are not universally considered attractive (because women generally prefer to mate with older men rather than younger ones).
And yet, as the examples of Frank Sinatra (“Mr. Blue Eyes”) and Paul Newman (who famously quipped that he didn’t want his epitaph to read, “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a loser because his eyes turned brown”) show, that men with blue eyes are considered as attractive as women with blue eyes. And so it seems that the answer to the question “Why are blue eyes attractive?” must include more than just male sexual preference.
The attractiveness of blue eyes remained an evolutionary mystery until my graduate student Lee Ann Turney proposed an innovative solution in a class paper she took from me in the spring of 2002.
As far as I know, her explanation of the attractiveness of blue eyes is the only viable one that anyone has ever offered, and at least has superficial plausibility. But, of course, it must be subjected to rigorous experimental testing before it can become an acceptable explanation.
Turney points out that the human pupil dilates when an individual interacts with what he likes. For example, the pupils of women and newborns (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Thus, pupil dilation, usually beyond the individual's conscious volitional control, can be used as a reliable indicator of interest and attractiveness.
Most people don't even realize that the size of their pupils changes when they see something they like, so it would be difficult to fool others by consciously manipulating the size of their pupils. We can't help but show our interest and attraction to other people through the size of our pupils.
In what follows, Tierney makes two simple observations.
First, any human pupil is dark brown, regardless of the color of the iris that surrounds the pupil and determines the color of the eye.
Secondly, blue is the lightest color of the human iris.
The result of these two observations is that it is easiest to determine pupil size in blue eyes. If you encounter people with different eye colors and need to determine whether any person likes you or is interested in you, all other things being equal, it is easiest to recognize the level of interest or attraction of a blue-eyed person.
Turney's argument, which I believe may be true, is that blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential partners because whether they are interested in us or not is the easiest to determine. It's easier to "read the minds" of people with blue eyes than those with eyes of any other color, at least when it comes to interest or attraction.
One of the benefits of Turney's solution to the blue eyes puzzle is that it not only explains why blue eyes in partners are considered ideal, but it also explains why, unlike all the other features I discuss in this series of posts , blue eyes are considered attractive in both sexes.
It is just as important for women to read men’s thoughts as it is for men to read women’s; Given that the consequences of failing to attract the “wrong” person are much more significant, women should have a greater need to decide whether their potential partner seems genuinely interested in them or not. The negative consequences of being fooled by a deceitful admirer are much more important for women, so blue eyes should be a more important trait in men than in women.
In this regard, I believe that Turney's logic can also explain why people with dark brown eyes are often considered "mysterious."
They are mysterious because their thoughts—that is, whether they are interested in us or attracted to us—are much more difficult to determine. The color of a dark brown iris is very similar to the (universal) color of a dark brown pupil, and therefore it is very difficult to estimate pupil size in dark brown eyes. In one study, many people, both men and women, showed an aversion to dark brown eyes (just as they did to red hair).
Why women with big eyes are attractive
Another feature considered attractive in women is large eyes. However, unlike blue eyes (discussed in the previous post), huge eyes are considered attractive only by women, but not by men. Why is that? Why are large eyes seen as attractive in women but not in men?
There are at least two different reasons why large eyes are an element of ideal female beauty. First, as briefly mentioned in a previous post, large eyes (along with full lips, large foreheads, and smaller chins) are indicators of high estrogen levels. And women with higher estrogen levels have an easier time conceiving than women with lower estrogen levels. Therefore, women with large eyes, on average, make better partners than women with smaller eyes.
The second reason is that large eyes are a characteristic of neoteny (characteristic of children and infants). Because human eyes do not increase in size at the same rate as the rest of the face and head during development, the size of the eyes relative to the face decreases as we grow.
As we all know, babies (and newborns of other mammal species) have relatively larger eyes compared to older children and adults. And, as a result, people (both men and women) with large eyes are often perceived as younger than they actually are. Because, as I explain in a previous post, men prefer younger women, they favor women with neotenic characteristics such as large eyes. This is another reason why large eyes (typical of babies and children) are a component of ideal female beauty.
You can try to dismiss this explanation for the attraction of women with big eyes to men. You may (correctly) point out that men don't try to mate with babies and small children; this would be extremely inadequate, because they are not fertile. So, you may ask: why do men prefer women who, in fact, look like children?
This is a very good time to introduce an important concept in evolutionary biology: runaway selection, sometimes known as Fisher's runaway selection, named after the British geneticist Ronald A. Fisher who first proposed the hypothesis.
As an aside, if you ever collected basic statistics in college, you may vaguely remember something called the “F-statistic” or “F-test.” The "F" in "F-statistics" stands for Fisher, who invented the test and made other significant contributions to statistics. This is why, unlike the t-statistic, z-test, or chi-square test, “F” is always capitalized.
The concept of uncontrolled selection suggests that when members of one sex prefer mates with certain genetic traits, then through the process of sexual selection, members of the other sex will possess the trait in increasingly exaggerated forms.
A good example is elk antlers. Elk cows prefer to mate with male elk with larger antlers because such males can outcompete other males with smaller antlers in competition for territory and mates, and since antler size is largely genetically determined, their offspring will also have larger antlers. attractive to potential partners.
Eventually, male elk will have larger and larger antlers until their antlers are simply too big. They become so large that they create obstacles to feeding and surviving and even fighting other males, which is the original purpose of having big antlers in the first place. However, males still display prominently large antlers because the trait is preferred by females and evolves under uncontrolled Fisher selection.
Perhaps the same process occurs with men's preference for women with neotenic traits. As men choose to mate with younger women, women achieve more and more neotenic features that allow them to appear not just of marriageable age and sexual maturity, but ultimately even pre-pubescent, like children and infants.
Men's preference for blond hair may have undergone similar uncontrolled selection. As Carlene Flora, senior editor at Psychologytoday, pointed out to me earlier, many young blonde kids stop being blonde and have dark hair long before they reach puberty (as Carlene did).
Therefore, while preferring to mate with women with light blonde hair, men are often (inappropriately) attracted to children who have not reached puberty. Their preference for women with large eyes may be similarly inappropriate. However, male preference for females with neotenic traits, and female possession of such traits, evolved through uncontrolled selection.
Why men are deceived by women and modern technology
So, men like women who look like blonde beauties or Barbies, and women want to look like them because each of their key features (youth, long hair, small waist, large breasts, blonde hair, blue eyes and big eyes) is an indicator of youth and therefore health, reproductive value and fertility.
There is a thoughtful evolutionary logic behind the image of ideal female beauty. By now, astute readers who have been following the posts in this series may have caught the irony of it all. Nothing I said in earlier posts in this series is true anymore.
Through the use of facelifts, wigs, liposuction, surgical breast augmentation, hair dye, colored contact lenses and plastic surgery, any woman - regardless of her age - can have all the fundamental features that define ideal female beauty.
A very small part of Pamela Anderson's appearance is natural. Today, a 40-year-old woman can rely on modern technology to still look like a 20-year-old. At 60, Farrah Fawcett looks better and more youthful than most “ordinary” women half her age.
And men fall in love with them. Because the Savannah Principle (“the human brain has difficulty comprehending and taking action regarding entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment”) suggests that the male brain cannot actually comprehend silicone breasts or hair bleach dye, since these things do not existed under the living conditions of their ancestors 10,000 years ago.
Men can cognitively and consciously understand that many blondes with firm, large breasts are not actually 15 years old, but they still find them attractive because their formed psychological mechanisms are deceived by modern inventions that did not exist in the natural conditions of their ancestors.
Ovulation in women is a short period of the menstrual cycle when the possibility is highest. A newborn girl already has about one million germ cells in her ovaries. After puberty, she releases one or two eggs every month. For a short period of time they become ready for fertilization. The period when a mature egg is released into the fallopian tubes is called ovulation. Only from this moment is it possible to conceive a child.
As a rule, ovulation in women is accompanied by the maturation of only one egg, but there are exceptions. If hormones are produced excessively during one period of the menstrual cycle, one reproductive cell may be produced in each ovary. Both eggs are healthy and can be fertilized. If this happens, then twins or even triplets are born. But the genotype of newborns, unlike twins, will be completely different.
After menopause, as well as during pregnancy, ovulation in women stops. After pregnancy, he returns to his usual pace. But it has been noticed that after childbirth or abortion, the ovulation rhythm changes. The same happens after 45 years, when the female body begins to prepare for the onset of menopause.
So, for women? It is generally accepted that this happens on the 14th day from the beginning of the menstrual cycle. But still, this phenomenon is exclusively individual and is determined by the characteristics of the body. Ovulation may occur several days earlier if a woman's cycle is short. It happens that the egg is released on the 18-19th day with a longer cycle.
Ovulation in women is calculated in several ways. The most popular method is the calendar method. To determine the most favorable one, it is necessary to regularly mark the beginning and end of menstruation for 4-5 months. This way you can set the average length of your cycle. If it is 28 days, then the suitable day to conceive a child is the 14th. It is much more difficult when the cycle is irregular. Then this method becomes ineffective.
In fact, the moment when a woman ovulates does not go unnoticed. There are a number of signs by which it is easy to recognize. You need to focus on your own feelings. So, the body can signal both the release of the egg into the fallopian tubes and the completion of ovulation. If you carefully monitor the changes in the body, you can calculate these moments. Most women note that the amount and consistency of mucus secreted changes. There is more of it. In color and composition it resembles egg white. Determine the moment of ovulation by measuring basal temperature. Its increase is associated with the production of the hormone progesterone, which is responsible for maintaining pregnancy in the early stages. Symptoms of the body’s readiness to conceive may include pain in the chest, lower abdomen and lower back. These sensations are caused by the process of the release of the egg. The pain can last from several hours to 2-3 days.
Morris Desmond published a book in 2004: The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, published in Russian under the title: Naked Woman.
“The evolutionary process proceeded differently in men and women. The same characteristics changed at different rates among them. Men retained a little more of the characteristics of their youth in their behavior, and women - in their anatomical features.
For example, men (thirty-year-olds) are 15 times more likely to be involved in car accidents than women. The fact is that men have a higher risk-taking tendency, characteristic of children's games, than women. Although this quality often creates problems for men, in ancient times it played an extremely important role, because without risk, hunting would not be successful. Ancient women were too valuable for their lives to be put in danger by hunting, so men had to take the risk. The death of several of them did not affect the reproduction capabilities of the small tribe, while the death of several women threatened to significantly limit them. It must be remembered that in ancient times, when there were still few people on our planet, the reproduction of members of society was of great importance.
There are many more men than women inventors. The risks that men took were not only physical, as they often experimented, refusing to use traditional methods and techniques. Women had to be careful. They played a central role in the life of the tribe, being responsible for almost everything except hunting, and could not afford costly mistakes. In the process of evolution, they learned better than men to do several things at once, became more talkative and sociable, their sense of smell, hearing, touch and color vision became more subtle and acute than men’s. Women became better educators than men, more attentive parents and were less susceptible to illness - after all, health was of vital importance to the mother.
Along with this, psychologically, men remained “little boys” to a greater extent than women remained “little girls.” Men have been endowed with a richer imagination and are sometimes more vicious than women. Women have become more tender and caring. These differences corresponded to the roles that the two sexes played in society. They complemented each other, and the combination of their qualities guaranteed their overall success.
Physically the situation was different. Due to the division of labor, men who hunted were expected to have a more athletic build. On average, a man's muscle mass is 28 kilograms, while a woman's is only 15. The average man is 30 percent stronger, 10 percent heavier, and 7 percent taller than the average woman. A woman, who played such an important role in reproduction, should have been better protected from nutritional exhaustion, or, simply put, from hunger. As a result, the average female body contains 25 percent fat, while the male body contains only 12.5 percent.
A woman's higher body fat content is a childhood characteristic that, along with other similar characteristics, allows her to fit into her role in society. Adult males have been programmed by evolution to protect their offspring. The more physical childlike traits women exhibited, the more willing men were to care for them.
As a result, the voice of an adult woman became higher than that of a man. The frequency of the male voice is 130-145 Hertz, and the female voice is 235-255 Hertz. In other words, a woman's voice is closer to a child's voice. Women also retain more childlike features, especially when it comes to hair. Men grow mustaches, beards, and chest hair, and are distinguished by thick eyebrows, heavy chins, and large noses, while women's faces retain the childlike smoothness of their skin and fine structure.
So, as representatives of the two sexes followed the evolutionary path towards more and more neoteny, men behaved more and more childishly, changing less physically, and women developed more and more physical childlike traits, displaying fewer psychological childish qualities.
Here it is necessary to say about the degree of difference between men and women. I focus on all sorts of differences between the human sexes. However, it is necessary to remember that both of them are 100 times more “child-like” than representatives of the sexes of other biological species.
The differences between men and women are very noticeable and very interesting, but in general a person is a person. I mention these differences here only because it is very important to note the following fact from the outset: the female body is in many ways more perfect, that is, more “childlike,” than the male. Understanding this will help to understand many features of the anatomy of the female body.”
Desmond Morris, Naked Woman. M., "Eksmo", 2009, p. 10-13.
Today I read a post on this topic in my feed. The girl writes that she is really looking forward to an answer to the question of what kind of women everyone wants to marry, and writes her thoughts. So, they say, Evolution objected to one commentator who wrote that such a woman should be very active and have many projects, that for some men there is nothing good in this, some want a wife to spend cozy evenings with her, and not hang out in God knows where . Really, a girl writes in my feed (and I immediately removed her from there), I’ll have to sit at home and bake pies. I, he writes, have long suspected that I am too active and strong, which is why they won’t marry me.
Can you imagine this strong? She is ready to give up everything she owns and bake pies for someone. She doesn’t know how she could bend herself so hard that someone would want to marry her. And who needs such rubbish?
If someone like that sits at home and bakes pies, it will be hell for her husband, no pie will fit down his throat. It’s better to hang out, pumping blood from friends and colleagues.
Just yesterday, many wrote that such a woman should not be a burden to a man.
You can avoid being a burden if you are an unnecessary thing, you have been placed somewhere and you are not in the way.
From a burden to happiness there is a whole abyss, and where we are talking about pleasure, there is not even the concept of such a “burden” or “not a burden.”
If I write that the woman everyone wants to marry (everyone she is in a relationship with, that is) is independent, what do you think most of the readers will imagine?
They will present a woman who is not interested in a man at all. She hangs out somewhere, leads an active life, has many projects and friends. There are no men in her field at all.
That is, most understand independence as indifference, disinterest, indifference. They are independent of everything that does not matter to them. But if something suddenly becomes important, if someone suddenly becomes loved, immediately grunting, and tentacles grow all over their body and begin to wrap suction cups around this loved one on all sides, addiction immediately appears. And it grows until it faces disappointment.
How to combine love and independence in people's minds with the merging of boundaries and an external locus? No way.
Having decided to become independent, many wives begin to hate their husbands. She was dependent and was waiting for care, but since she needs to become independent, she doesn’t need this freak at all. Where does such a wife go? Look for someone to cleave to, of course. She can get carried away with work if she manages to stick to her colleagues. Maybe start hanging out if you can stick with friends. She can find a lover and cling to him. Independence for such wives means that they turn their backs on their husbands and look for dependence elsewhere. As a rule, with a lover, because this is the easiest way.
Therefore, many husbands, upon hearing the word “independence,” immediately understand that they are growing horns.
Well, what words to look for?
I could tell that the woman everyone wants to marry is a giver, not a taker. But what will people with an external locus imagine?
They will imagine a sticky mat that is so firmly stuck to the feet of their partner that they are ready to give everything so that they do not leave. The rug is ready to give everything it has just to prolong its merger. The rug doesn’t like to take anything, because they don’t give him anything, they don’t even offer him anything. He is afraid to take, because he already feels like a burden that is about to be abandoned. He loves to give because it is an opportunity to remain in fusion.
This is the ugly picture people with an external locus imagine when they hear that they need to give. If they are in a strong disadvantage, then this strengthens them in the fact that their drain is love. And if they are frostbitten, then such words infuriate them. Give away? What more.
Independent? Indifferent.
Loving? Dependent.
Generous? Obsequious.
Active? Shturmanikha.
Strong? Rude navigator.
Tender? Helpless.
Delicate? Cowardly.
Smart? Teacher.
Modest? Shattered.
Confident? In the crown.
There is not a single virtue that a person with an external locus would not see through his prism as a vice.
This is a real crooked mirror in which everything good turns into bad.
The woman that all men (her) want to marry is characterized by the following:
She is independent, despite the fact that she loves this man and is glad to be with him.
She is independent because it does not even occur to her to appropriate him, absorb him and absorb him; she looks at a man as a living, separate, but beloved and interesting creature to her. She is happy with closeness and communication. She sees a lot of unusual and wonderful things in her beloved, and this supports a man’s self-esteem if his self-esteem is shaky, and if it is strong, he simply feels comfortable next to her and sees a kindred spirit in her.
She is generous because she has something to share, she does not feel needy, and she feels pleasure when she shares.
Unfortunately, enjoying your investment is not a measure of true generosity. Many addicted people experience pleasure akin to relief when throwing food. It seems to them that in this way they ensure the presence of a second person. In a strong minus, everyone (everyone!) begins to throw food. This happens to everyone, not just to the victims of predators, predators just know how to put them in a strong minus. But people themselves go down there quite well, without any predators. In a strong addiction, a person always drains the resource of the economy. All resources and money too. This kind of “generosity” from addiction should never be confused with real generosity. A truly generous person must be independent. Otherwise, it’s all a waste, not generosity. A generous person must be strong, not weak, otherwise it is not generosity, but fear, the need to bribe and appease.
Generosity raises your importance, generosity evokes gratitude and a desire to repay you a hundredfold. Therefore, generous people never end up at a loss. This applies to both material and emotional generosity.
She is hot because she sees mutual pleasure and is captivated by the process of exchanging emotions with her loved one.
This special warmth, which arises not from hunger and hungry passion, but from the exchange of emotions, has strong magnetism. And this is constant positive reinforcement. The more a man loves, the more she loves, and if he suddenly cools down, she cools down too. With passion from hunger, the opposite happens. The colder the partner, the stronger the passion, because the hunger is stronger. The hotter the partner, the less passion, as saturation occurs. With such people, everyone begins to feel that it is unprofitable to love them, they grow cold, they need to be constantly tormented a little. A sadomasochistic mechanism is built into deficient love. Such love becomes stronger from pain, from distance, from jealousy and doubt. But normal love becomes stronger only from reciprocity and its growth has no limits, it can grow throughout life.
That is, here are three main qualities: independence, generosity, warmth.
See how these three qualities (but only if understood correctly) make the flow strong and beautiful.
Independence ensures stability and stability of the stream, generosity makes the channel of the stream free and open, warmth makes the stream stronger and hotter and gives it sparkle.
This is what it feels like on an energetic level when you are close to such a person. It doesn't matter if it's with a man or a woman. It’s clear why everyone wants to stay closer to such a flow and stake it out for themselves by all means, including legal ones?
Is it clear why people with an external locus don’t even have the perspective to look at it from such an angle?
Fortunately, anyone can improve their locus of control. This is available to everyone. And this entirely depends on the personal will of the person.
