Which happens to be the story behind Miss Sexiness large busted blonde Belinda's Brandon's younger sister. Incredibly sarcastic with a lithe sexiness all her own who never acts on it because she feels she is in her sister's shadow. (I knew two sisters like that, the pretty brunette from the previous post and her fraternal twin)
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
How do you make a sexy/attractive character? What makes a character sexy and or attractive?
Kim, maybe an analogy could help? Or confuse things more…
You are a person who loves cars, you don't know why, you just do:
You love the four wheels, rubber tyres, the headlights, engines, exhaust pipes, windscreens, side mirrors, car seats, hubcaps…
-Not for themselvs but because they're parts of that car: Love of the car was there first.
But you love stuff the culturally influenced stuff as well*:
Different styles of car body shape apeal to you, but you most like the sports types from the 1960s because there were a couple in the street where you grew up and now you really admire that curvy, compact shape. Leather seats are a must for you too because they represnt your idea of opulance and style. You can't stand plastic attachments, cars should have real chrome fittings only. There's nothing like the roar of a well tuned V8 engine, the idea of silent electric motors is unimaginable to you.
-Noncoincidentally all those things are associated with 1960s sports cars.
(*Let's pretend none of the things mentioned in the first paragraph were culturally influenced)
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Ok, there we have: Biological (love of cars), Love of things related to that love (car parts), and culturallly influenced aspects (car body shape etc).
To further unpack that with another example:
Biological: Love of women.
Related: Love of boobs.
Cultural influence: Love big boobs.
Ozone, in your car analogy you seem to lend more credence to the biological aspects than in previous posts. I'm not sure what percentage your giving to each but you list both biology and culture more or less equally so… around 50% to each…? That's something I was not picking up in your previous posts, where it seemed that you considered cultural the good bit stronger of the two… But if you weren't saying that then we're not really in as much disagreement as it seemed…
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I also think cultural plays a large part (realy large), but the reason the I consider the biological to be more paramount is I don't think the cultural would even exist without the biological, where as the biological can easily exist without the cultural (just look at animals).
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Here's an analogy for me. You may prefer Jazz, Blues, or Rock Music… that's your preference… but none of those musical styles could even exist without the concept of Musical Harmonic Scales (ie the Music Key the song is playing in: C Major, Gb Minor…). In music, you can even (carefully) go against the Scale (by hitting off-scale notes, called accidentals) but there is a keen awareness that there is something your going against and for the music to sound worth a crap you have to get back to the scale pretty quick. The Scale rules and is the basis for your music - but you can layer your preferences on top of it to such an extent that two styles can seem like completely different things.
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Does that analogy make sense?
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In an earlier post you said a man isn't hardwired to think a breast is sexy, but rather it's the cultural covering up with clothing that makes it exotic and forbidden (and therefore sexy)… I say the reason it ever started getting covered up to begin with is because it's inherently sexy to a man, and culture/society wanted to hold back those fires a bit (that's the defense of the burqa, although they couch it in religious terminology).
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Sexy Breast = Inherent base Part of the Musical Key/Scale
Clothing/Accessories = Style of Music
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(and I enjoy beating dead horses to a pulp :)
I do understand your analogy Kim.
Mine is different though. I'm not talking about biology VS culture in a duology like that.
For me it's all one thing, with sex (as in a person's sex), being the most important and the other aspects less so, but to simplify I split it into 3.
I'll change the name of my "biological" catagory to "subject".
The "related" catagory isn't the same as "biological". "Related" just means whatever is unique to that subject. The subject is the object of affection, the related aspects become objects of affection as well because of that relationship, they can also become symbolic of the subject (e.g. Love of boobs and dresses replaces love of women for some people), but the subject is the only source of the sexuality (boobs are sexy because they are female, not the other way around). They are a mixture of cultural and biological traits.
More purely cultural aspects are things like "big boobs are hot", or "Smooth skinned sweaty pectoroals are hot".
Example-
Subject: Woman
Related: boobs, dresses, long hair, pink, lipstick, long legs, round bottom…
Cultural: Big red lips are sexy, short dresses and high heels show off long legs…
Boobs in the West are covered because they distinguish women as female (among other things), not because they're sexy. They're sexy because they're covered. Whenever there's a culture where they're uncovered, from temporary things like nude beaches and hippy communes, to established cultural practise as in Australian Aboriginals, African tribespeople, Amazonian Indians, Melanesian and Polynesian islanders etc breasts aren't a sexual thing anymore.
Ozone, Ha, at this point I pretty much know I’m not gonna convince you of anything, and I still think you’re failing to really get what I’m saying as well, so even though it feels like we’re going in circles I’m going to try to get at the root of where we’re missing it once more (from my point of view). Apologies to everyone for performing necromancy on this horse carcass ;)
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I sort of think we both aren’t really disagreeing all that much, and a part of me feels that some of our issues are just a failure with semantics. But then saying it a certain way really does change the meaning it and makes me think you really believe that some things are a lot more cultural than they I think really are. Let me grab one sentence you said as an example: boobs are sexy because they are female, not the other way around…
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Of course breasts are sexy because they’re female, but not because of a cultural fetish-type preference. Rather, they are one of the dimorphic triggers that signify ‘female’ when seen by another person (both male and female know when they see a breast and they instantly think ‘female’) and we find ourselves drawn to these signals. Now where culture comes in is the preferred shape of the breasts: some cultures like ‘em smaller, some larger, etc… But there isn’t a single human culture I know of that wishes all females had breasts that looked exactly looked like a man’s. Again, that’s because their distinct shape are a hardwired signal that tells a man he is looking at a woman. So yes, a woman most certainly is sexy because she has boobs! Bare or covered-up (provided you can still see their shape), breasts do their job. They are not just an ‘object’ - they are one of the traits that announces 'female'!
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We find sexy the things that let us know we’ve found a healthy member of the opposite gender. Never forget that sex is, at root, about reproduction. The drive would not exist if reproduction were not a biological imperative. We accessorize it with cultural preference and exploit and revel in the physical pleasure it brings, but the base urge remains rooted in biology.
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Now here’s a thing: you’re right in that certain cultures strongly downplay the sexuality of breasts, especially certain indigenous peoples where women don’t even wear tops, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the breast isn’t doing its job. For one thing, they’re a signal to a man that a woman can have babies (they grow at puberty); they swell and the nipples become erect when a woman is aroused, and men are hardwired to look for these cues. Why would these biological phenomenon happen if it’s only a cultural thing?
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Again, you’re right in that the overt sexualness isn’t the same in cultures where Breasts are not hidden, but I more compare that to me seeing a man’s shoulders in our culture. A man with a man’s shoulders (not a woman’s) indicates great strength, and women are drawn to that, but because they aren’t hidden and forbidden, we don’t go all spastic when we see them! We’re inured to them, and the same thing can happen with Breasts if we stop hiding them, but that does not mean their distinct shape stops doing what it evolved for ;)
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When I lived in Spain, you could go topless on the beaches, and it was only the visiting American tourists that gawked with mouths agape. Spaniards and visiting Brits wouldn’t bat an eye. Even so, in the right moments, say an intimate encounter, they’d let you know they found your breasts pleasing! How do I know all this? None of nobody’s business haha!
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If you promise to make your response short and sweet then I promise to let you have the last word! :D
bravo1102 wrote:Just read my tl/dr version: human sexual is rooted in biology, not sociology, and anybody that disagrees with me is a stupidhead! :D
These posts are gonna be hell to read if they are to be featured in a future series of Quackcasts. Great listening for sure but hell to read.
I know I used the analogy before, but I think it's helpful to think of sexual preferences in the same way we think about food preferences. Sure, it's ultimately a base biological need, but what kind of food we prefer, and how we enjoy it, can be based on a myriad of cultural and personal influences, learned habits, and individual biological quirks. People in different parts of the world enjoy different types of food, and they tend to (in general) sexualize different parts of the body and different fashions. While inserting giant discs into a woman's lips may not be very appealing to most westerners, it's considered sexy by the Surma of South Sudan. Rhinoplasty bandages are considered sexy in Iran. There's no across-the-board perfect recipe for sexiness any more than there's an across-the-board perfect recipe for perfect food. You need to cater to the consumer's tastes, in much the same way fast food franchises alter their menus when they open franchises in new countries or zip codes.
Cid, I think food preferences is a great analogy - I actually was gonna use food as a comparison but decided my previous post was too long already…
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The drive to eat, like the drive to procreate, is, I think safe to say, universal, but we can certainly layer all types of cultural preferences and taboos on top of them! Take meat: we as a species are perfectly designed to eat meat. Our digestive tracts are built to handle it, as is our teeth structure (pointed canines, even smalls ones like ours, ain't for grass eatin', folks). Nevertheless, some humans (Vegans, Hindus) have developed a cultural taboo against eating meat. They've learned to think of it as gross, disgusting, something to avoid… Some even get sick (largely a psychosomatic response, imo) when eating it…
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But just let one of them go about five days with no food…! It's amazing how fast the base urges will take back over! A starving Vegan will devour a prime rib - they instinctively know it will keep them alive! (yes, some supremely devout Hindus can force themselves to starve anyway, but they are RARE exceptions). When pushed against the wall, biology overrides culture!
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The Sex Drive doesn't carry quite as much weight because it's rarely a personal life-or-death matter (you won't die by failing to mate), but there are certain traits that I believe every human is hardwired to cue in to when prospecting a potential mate. We can culturally learn to have various preferences for them, or even convince ourselves we find them repulsive but they're still there. Example: most women in western culture will not admit they are turned on by just a pic of an erect penis. A penis by itself is just an object, not even all that much worth looking at (maybe even ugly) without a man attached… Oh but their bodies say something different when wired up to check bloodflow to the relevant areas (so much for culture ;)
KimLuster wrote:I remember reading that studies found that one of the most arrousing parts of the female for the male is her hair. (Measuring blood flow and the sampling was across cultures) Seems various Eastern cultures called it right.
Example: most women in western culture will not admit they are turned on by just a pic of an erect penis. A penis by itself is just an object, not even all that much worth looking at (maybe even ugly) without a man attached… Oh but their bodies say something different when wired up to check bloodflow to the relevant areas (so much for culture ;)
I once saw a guy get a hard-on when just talking about mundane non-sexual stuff to a girl who was playing with her long red hair. It was like Holy Shit what is he thinking? Just like that?
I guess some like it short or long, thick or thin… but there might be some truth about the hair… I see many beautiful women everyday, but I found myselft talking to one that wasn't the prettiest, but she has the longest hair I've seen… and we were talking about her hair…
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