# Would men be better off without our intense attraction that we have to beauty.



## sokillme (Jun 10, 2016)

I often think it must have been much easier to live in the 19 hundreds when it came to this aspect of our nature. At the time most woman were covered up and society was much less sexualized. Maybe that is not the case and ankles would have had the same effect but today it seems to be so in your face. I wonder if this is a contributing factor to why marriages lasted longer. 

Then again I can't deny there is a ton of pleasure that I get out of it as well. 

So my question is do you think this motivating part of our nature is a good thing or a bad thing in general, and has the changes in today's society made it much more of a hindrance. Especially when you consider that men's sexual nature is not openly discussed as toxic. Also with virtual reality becoming a real possibility in the future will this level the playing field.


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## bandit.45 (Feb 8, 2012)

I nearly drove into the curb today when I saw a bevy of gorgeous business women walking down the street. They were dressed to kill and looking fine. To me, there is nothing more glorious in nature than a woman who dolls herself up and struts her stuff. It would be a boring, bland ugly world without skirts and high heels. 

Marriages in the 1800's lasted longer because back then men and women simply had fewer options. People back then were no more or less moral than at any other time in history. That whole notion of Victorian propriety and virtue was a sham.


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## sokillme (Jun 10, 2016)

Maybe so but I always see these guys putting up with such crap from their SO's and I wonder, would you do that if your weren't attracted to her. Maybe I am being shallow. But attraction is shallow in many ways. However I feel men are kind of in the position that woman were 60 years ago, when they had no financial power and were left at the whim of their husbands. Now they work and have the same power that men did, this gives them much more choice. VR may change the sex power dynamic in the same way. After all if it feels the same as a the real thing and is maybe even better sex stops being a motivator. 

Then again there are people who argue basically all the great things invented my men in life were done so for sex.


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## Icebearsmom (Oct 20, 2016)

Up until the 1960s divorce was considered a non-option by most of our society. Doesn't mean marriages were happy - they just learned to live with it. Probably a lot of cheating, at least by men, prior to that point. Although at least in rural America prior to the 20th century, there wouldn't have been much opportunity to cheat. There wouldn't have been a lot of interacting with people outside your own family group back then.

Unattractive women didn't have much chance to marry historically unless they were from rich or well connected families. So that really hasn't changed much.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## Bibi1031 (Sep 14, 2015)

Better off...no way!

Eye candy is too good to pass up and why would I have too. It brings such pleasure that doesn't cost me any calories to indulge in. :grin2:

My tastes have matured as I have as well.

I was eating lunch at one of the local restaurants we have in the tiny border Texas town I am calling now home for the end of summer, and low and behold I bumped into my first partner when I started my teaching career ions ago. Talk about mouth watering eye candy. 

That hunk of goodness is hitting 55 as we speak...talk about looking better with age. His gorgeous blue eyes have not changed one bit either. Time hasn't done a damn bad thing to this delightful site for my sore eyes!

Too bad he is forbidden fruit. He was there with one of his boys. He married in his very late 30s so this kid of his is maybe 14 at most right now.


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## sokillme (Jun 10, 2016)

Icebearsmom said:


> Unattractive women didn't have much chance to marry historically unless they were from rich or well connected families. So that really hasn't changed much.
> _Posted via Mobile Device_


And in this sense wouldn't it be better for them if beauty wasn't such a currency in society? How much of a currency was it 150 years ago, not any where near the way it has become in our visual society. I believe the photograph and eventually the motion picture really changed how much power beauty has in society, and this has happened in really the last 100 years.


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## MJJEAN (Jun 26, 2015)

Umm, wars were started over beautiful women. Empires literally fell over a beautiful woman and how she chose to use her feminine wiles. A skilled courtesan had more influence politically than a Queen and many lower nobles simply because she was hot and had the King by his..thing.  This is nothing new. 

Besides, back in the day people didn't have the expectations of marriage they have now. It was pretty much accepted that NO ONE was going to be happy all or even most of the time. A good marriage was one where the couple worked well at their expected tasks and were able to produce children. She had her tasks, he had his, they made babies, the family survived. The end.


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## bandit.45 (Feb 8, 2012)

sokillme said:


> And in this sense wouldn't it be better for them if beauty wasn't such a currency in society? How much of a currency was it 150 years ago, not any where near the way it has become in our visual society. I believe the photograph and eventually the motion picture really changed how much power beauty has in society, and this has happened in really the last 100 years.


That is a very good observation. Mass media has indeed set the bar for what society deems "Beauty". 

This is off point, but when you go into the old saloons in the Southwest U.S. and see the old 1880s murals on the walls of naked courtesans, they are all chubby and curvy. Back then they were all about that bass. I think it is hysterical how curvy women with big butts are all back in style now, thanks to the Kardashians and J-Lo . :grin2:


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## NextTimeAround (Dec 15, 2011)

sokillme said:


> And in this sense wouldn't it be better for them if beauty wasn't such a currency in society? How much of a currency was it 150 years ago, not any where near the way it has become in our visual society. I believe the photograph and eventually the motion picture really changed how much power beauty has in society, and this has happened in really the last 100 years.


I also think that beauty is more attainable for people these days. We age less. Before people intheir 40s were considered generally unattractive. PRotection from the sun slows down aging. Innovations in dental care makes a huge difference. Women have more options in hairstyles and haircare. and that's before all the permanent plastic surgery. 

While on the one hand it seems that bar for attractiveness gets higher and higher, what's considered beautiful is far more numerous than before. Up to the 80s, if you didn't look like Doris Day, Farah Fawcett, Candace Bergen, Grace Kelly (all blonds, I might add) you were considered 2nd string. Or the few brunette (white) women who considered hot were then considered unusual and "special." 

As humans, we're never going to stop having a hierarchy for beauty.


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## bandit.45 (Feb 8, 2012)

We also have to take into account that over the last 100 years we moved from an agrarian society, to an industrial society, then to a a post-industrial society, in a very short space of time. As we have become more urbanized, women have become more standardized in their ways of beautifying themselves. I imagine that frontier 1880's ranch wives in the Western territories did not have much access to makeup and toiletries...so they aged faster given that they had poorer diets and no way to protect their skin from aging. Women in the city had more access to beauty products and generally, I would imagine, had better access to healthy foods, makeup and skin products, and proper medical care. 

Men back in those days also did not have the high expectations that we men have today as to what we accept as "beauty". A man back then looked for a woman to bear his children, cook his meals, run this household and be a companion. Those guys worked 12 hours a day six days a week, at backbreaking labor. The women worked even harder. There was little time for either sex for fraternizing and partying and no time to do the dating circuit. They took what available mates were at hand in the immediate locale. So if all you had in your area were less than pretty women, you learned to lower you expectations, because unless you had money and could travel, you were stuck with what you had where you were.


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## sokillme (Jun 10, 2016)

MJJEAN said:


> Umm, wars were started over beautiful women. Empires literally fell over a beautiful woman and how she chose to use her feminine wiles. A skilled courtesan had more influence politically than a Queen and many lower nobles simply because she was hot and had the King by his..thing.  This is nothing new.


You are talking about maybe a hand full of woman. The common man wasn't concerned with beauty, not it the sense that we are today. It was more about dowry. Closer to what you have in India and other Asian countries.


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## Ynot (Aug 26, 2014)

bandit.45 said:


> Marriages in the 1800's lasted longer because back then men and women simply had fewer options. People back then were no more or less moral than at any other time in history. That whole notion of Victorian propriety and virtue was a sham.


I don't even think marriages lasted longer in the 1800's either. In fact the average length of marriage was probably actually shorter then than it is now. How many men died in industrial accidents and women in child birth? Which brings me to the next point - life expectancy was a lot shorter back then as well.

Finally I think the one flaw in premise of the OP was that I don't think you ever considered that "happiness" and its attainment is a much more modern societal construct than simple survival. When the 1800's couple made it to the end of their day, it was often times following 12 to 16 hours of labor. It is really only in more modern times that we have had time to stop and think about our happiness. Our definitions of beauty change along with it.


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## joannacroc (Dec 17, 2014)

Marriages lasted longer because women had few (if any) career options. If you can't support yourself you have no choice but to stay with your husband, who often had a mistress or two. There was also sewage flowing in city streets and extremely high rates of death during childbirth. I wouldn't romanticize the 1800s.


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## TheTruthHurts (Oct 1, 2015)

The gay 90's and the roaring 20's were hedonistic times. The 1950s saw sex clubs and swinging in the suburbs. The 1940's had men and women, separated by war, enjoying flings abroad or at home with soldiers from abroad.

We tend to assume too much about the chastity and fidelity of the past. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## EleGirl (Dec 3, 2011)

sokillme said:


> And in this sense wouldn't it be better for them if beauty wasn't such a currency in society? How much of a currency was it 150 years ago, not any where near the way it has become in our visual society. I believe the photograph and eventually the motion picture really changed how much power beauty has in society, and this has happened in really the last 100 years.


Beauty has always been a currency. 

Just because the fashion today might show more skin, it does not mean that it's more beautiful today.

Society has defined beauty in different ways at different times. Like you said, at one time the peek at an ankle was as tantalizing as the show of cleavage, midriffs and yoga pants are now.

People have great imaginations. In a lot of ways, using ones imagination is more of a turn on then having a lot of flesh showing.


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## RandomDude (Dec 18, 2010)

> In a lot of ways, using ones imagination is more of a turn on then having a lot of flesh showing.


Damn right, that's why women shouldn't undress straight away for a man, kills the fun!


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## VladDracul (Jun 17, 2016)

bandit.45 said:


> I think it is hysterical how curvy women with big butts are all back in style now, thanks to the Kardashians and J-Lo . :grin2:


Whatjew mean, back in style now. They've always been in style with me. (That's way before the Kardashians were being paid big bucks for breathing. I'd bet back in my prime, I'd could have any of those chicks and their momma, curling their toes.)


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## morituri (Apr 1, 2011)

VladDracul said:


> I'd bet back in my prime, I'd could have any of those chicks and their momma, curling their toes.)


No doubt Vlad.


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