Sager begins his post pretty annoyingly, saying, "At the risk of alienating any females in the audience, today we're going to discuss… the science of a butterface." Starting off a sentence with "at the risk of" in this way is basically like saying, "no offense" — that is "I'm about to say something really offensive, but I'm acknowledging it, so now you can't get mad." And did Sager really need to commit the language foul of calling women "females?" No, nor did he need to link us to his Google image search for the word "butterface," or indeed, mention the word at all. The actual research goes something like this: 375 college students, male and female, were asked to evaluate potential dates of the opposite sex for either a long-term or short-term relationship. They could choose to see a photo of the date's face or body, but not both. Everyone was more likely to choose the face, except for men deciding on a short-term relationship. Sager writes,

For a short-term relationship, men were as likely to say they wanted to see the face as the body. 50-50. For long-term, 75% of men wanted to see the face.

Frankly, this is probably "better" than most people would expect men to do on such a measure, given cultural jokes about how men think about women.

I'm not really sure there's any need to attach a value judgment to this research. We may think of faces as more individual or expressive than bodies, and thus a "better" basis for making relationship decisions, but is this really true? Or does it just reflect a puritanical view of the body? I remember when a boy in high school told me I had a nice ass, and my friend retorted, "He shouldn't like you for your ass! He should like you for your eyes!" Well, if that boy and I were actually going to have a long-term relationship (we didn't), he probably would have needed to like me for my brain in addition to whatever physical qualities he was into — despite windows-to-the-soul stereotypes, eyes aren't any less superficial or any more related to inner beauty than asses. They're just considered less sexual, and therefore somehow more acceptable in a rather outmoded view of human attraction.

A similarly misguided view of the interplay between women's looks and men's desires is at work in the BBC coverage of a study about women's weight. Apparently a group of male students rated "normal weight" women as both healthier and more attractive, based on photographs, than either underweight or overweight ones. The BBC titles its article "Size zero girls 'less attractive' " (seriously, could we retire the phrase "size zero" in all cases not specifically referring to clothing?), and the study authors manage to insult both underweight and overweight women. Study supervisor Prof. David Perrett says,

This sends a strong message to all the girls out there who believe you have to be underweight to be attractive.

The people making judgments in our study were all between the ages of 18 and 26 and they did not rate underweight girls most attractive. They preferred normal weight girls.

That's right, girls, quit having that eating disorders so that boys will like you! I'll admit that it's probably good for heterosexual young women to know that the men in their lives expect them to diet themselves down to nothing. But most people who develop eating disorders don't do it so that guys will like them, and invoking the generalized sexual preferences of a group of men in their teens and twenties isn't exactly a great way to instill healthy habits in women. Of course, neither is fat-shaming. Lead researcher Vinet Coetzee said that overweight women in the study had higher blood pressure and more colds and flus than their normal weight peers. She added,

Even at this young age, their health was already suffering because they were overweight, and what is more, other people can spot this in their face.

She seems confident that the men in the sample rated overweight women as less healthy not because of cultural mores that equate fat with omgdeath, but because they could totally tell that the women probably got the flu a lot. This seems Specious, but more than anything, it's unhelpful — being told that guys can tell they're unhealthy isn't going to make anybody lose weight, especially since anyone who's considered overweight is already bombarded with the message that they're unhealthy anyway.

I'm not against studies about human attractiveness per se — I just wish those who report on such studies could stop linking them to health or morality. Anybody who's been on the Internet knows that sexual attraction isn't always healthy or moral. And just as a man who ogles your ass is no better or worse than one who gets lost in your eyes, a woman is no more sound in body or soul because a panel of men deem her doable.

Image via Flickr.

The Science Of A Butterface [True/Slant]
Size Zero Girls 'Less Attractive' [BBC]
A Pretty Face Or A Hot Body? [Scientific American]

While the essay covers pretty much every facet of girlhood - and does a good job of capturing a lot of adolescence's pain and rapture, Flanagan's ultimate take on Twilight's appeal is in some ways reductive:

If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. ...That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel...But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church...The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Flanagan is not the first critic to make the explicit link between Edward's self-imposed restraint (he is afraid, to the uninitiated, that if he loses control with Bella he'll be overcome by the temptation to drink her blood, killing her) and the loss of virtue. In several reviews, critics called this out as a transparent bit of moralizing; or a whitewashing of teen sexuality. At the risk of lowering the discourse, sometimes a vampire is just a vampire. To my mind, such simplification — and co-option — does a disservice to the story's elemental appeal. Whatever the author's own inclinations, the book's moral universe is not a didactic one (except in the good/evil way, of course.) Parents advise using birth control; in a later book, characters aren't adverse to abortion. If Meyer had wanted to impose her moral views; she could have — the book was hardly undertaken as a commercial labor. More to the point, were sex actually morally wrong in this universe, there'd be no real tension to the story. That's not to say that the lack of sex isn't a driving force —vampires by definition conflate seduction and death, hence: conflict. Rather, what some critics describe as chaste and Flanagan as essentially puritanical is a return to the basic principle of the page-turner: make them wait for it. I'm passionate about this because I went into the movie without any particular investment, and found myself so swept up in the maelstrom of teen emotion that I fainted. (Yes.) Had this been rooted in a deep-seated puritanism I don't think this would have been the case. More likely, it was the result of a drama that came from something much more fundamental, tension.

Flanagan feels Twilight succeeds because it taps into the innermost wishes of teen girls — for comfort, for love, for reassurance. While we might disagree on the particulars, I won't argue with that: what I will say is that (based on my own humiliating experience) people generally — not just young girls — are moved by simple stories, well-told, and that is not something anyone grows out of. (And it's a pet peeve when teens are treated as a separate species with unfathomable motivations.) Restraints make for good stories (see: the popularity of Jane Austen adaptations) but as society loses them, usually the fictional substitutes we come up with are too lcking in urgency to really command much interest. We've lost a lot of the tricks of good storytelling, and if vampire love is the only way to make people realize that, bring it.

What Girls Want [The Atlantic]
Twilight Is The New Breed of Chick Flick [AP]

Earlier: 7 Vampires Better Than Twilight's Edward Cullen
Twilight At Midnight: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Is it all just the selfish pursuit of recycling our genes and keeping the Human Race from going extinct? Readers, I pondered all this and the ethics of throwing a fat man in front of a trolley to save five thin workers — most people wouldn't do it, apparently for biologically-ingrained moral reasons —over the weekend, when I ventured deep into the 90 zillion word philosophical abyss that was the cover story of the New York Times Magazine. I did it so you wouldn't have to, and I probably should have just gotten drunk because all I got for ya:

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like."

The Moral Instinct [NY Times]