women, please tell your experience. some men do not get it. 19, 10pm, college campus

[caseymoz]

84. Obviously, preferences are learned

To some degree. Genetic expression responds to the environment.

But the next questions about an animal formed from particular genes, such as a human being should be: 1) How easy can an animal formed from particular genes learn a specific behavior? (So, easily it can perhaps be learned accidentally?) 2) How difficult then is this behavior to suppress or unlearn? 3) In a particular environment, can certain learning be prevented? 4) Is there a morally acceptable way to do 2-4?

I'll pose the question like this: if they could get men to spend massive amounts on cosmetic surgery, don't you think they would? I mean the purported patriarchy hasn't stopped the upper class from exploiting lower-class men on other things, why not this? Maybe they can convince men that women desire flaring nostrils and high foreheads against all evidence, and convince women through the media to actually prefer those traits.

However, it at least doesn't appear possible with just ad and marketing campaigns alone. Maybe abducting people and doing operant conditioning while disguised as aliens, but not with advertisements and movies.

The point of genes combining together is that they're supposed to give adaptation to environments, including social structures. They're supposed to give alternatives to animals, not limit them. But no individual can adapt to all possible environments, because there's always a limit to how many genes an organism can carry and express. Even so, where people outside biology see genetics as determinism, biologists do not see it that way, including about sex genes.

I don't have anything but my own guesses about men's varying preferences for breast size. (If you ask me, any such study in this social atmosphere would have trouble receiving funding and being taken seriously.) However, I do know of other examples of variance in male tastes where the biology of it is known. When food is abundant, men prefer thinner women. When food is scarce, they prefer heavier ones.

Also, we do get a biased report of those preferences. A hypothetical example. Suppose it were socially favored in the upper classes that women have smaller chests, mainly because large, semi-exposed breasts were considered the hallmarks of lower-class prostitutes (thus, men of refinement would show their civilized tastes by choosing smaller chested women). The men who expressed their sexual preference would probably be too contemptible to mention openly, so the records we see are going to show that flatter chests were in, when actually, it has little to do with what men preferred sexually.