This is no way invalidates my previous entry by the way I still want all you buggers to buy my entire arsenal from me!!

But I found a writing site, helium - http://www.helium.com/ - and this question caught my eye:

"Why men seem to only look for physical beauty." And I then indulged myself and anyone willing to read my thoughts with everything written in blue below

Now before article I would just like to mention how deeply, deeply ironic it is that I have a pretty good grasp of why this is when what has actually happened with myself and the girl now stayin in India goes directly against the grain of these ideas, but hey, I'm not like most guys at all because I tend to (it has been a depressingly recurring theme in my life [/emosity] get waaaaay too attached to a girl as soon as I sleep with them - generally to the exclusion of all else.

But nevertheless, the meat & potatoes of why men base their choice of sexual partners and why we are generally looking for physical beauty first and foremost in women is, according to your truly, as follows:

There are 2 things to consider here, and an understanding of the most likely biological explanation for the bias towards physical attraction as the main reason for choosing sexual partners (both genders do it, but yes more obviously it is men) is needed to really get a good answer to the question: Why do men pursue attractive women more often than `ordinary` women and why do women tend not to base their judgements in this area on physical attraction as much as men?

First, the science -

The most likely reason WHY people are attracted to typically `beautiful` people is genetic, if you use the term broadly and in the context of our perception (which is far more sophisticated than is commonly acknowledged), rather than actually studying a person's DNA before choosing them as a mate. Until biolabs are installed in every single area where people on this planet are likely to talk to each other we'll just have to do this the traditional way!

We want attractive mates because the physical features that we can actually perceive instantly that make a person attractive imply strength and healthiness, characteristics that we want out children to have in order to best survive their lives. Lean, muscular bodies and faces with strong, defined bones show strength and survival ability through inferred physical fitness, although seeing as we no longer have to fight off praire dogs and other humans for our dinner this is arguably a vestigial trait from the past. The well-proportioned faces that we find attractive will belong to people who can pass on their that attractiveness if we have children with them, so we want them for our sexual partners. This is a very generic and simplified way of explaining the whole biological history of humanity, but a simple & brief look at the details can provide an understanding of this:

People have been genetically altered over hundreds of thousands of years to be more and more inclined to select their sexual partners for reasons of strength and healthiness because each time a pair of our ancestors did this, they were more likely to have strong healthy children who survived and had children of their own, who received the genetic material that made them more likely to do what their parents did and select partners for reasons of strength and health. Being inclined to select mates for physical fitness is a trait passed from parent to child and incrementally affects the entire chain of descendants that arise from that coupling. The weaker children of people who selected for other reasons stood less chance of surviving - thats evolution, baby.

Now there is a huge amount of extra detail and circumstantial modulation to this theory, (an important part worth noting is that evolution may have favoured what we find attractive for other reasons such as those features tended to belong to people free from disease, for example, and therfore we evolved a preference for those non-survival-orientated features that we still find beautiful today) but basically thats it, and the important thing is to remember that this, happening over hundreds of thousands of years, made the whole of humanity more and more likely to do this as each generation advanced and in turn made the next generation based on these selection preferences.

Thats the science bit, broadly speaking.

What the issue is for us today is the manipulation of these desires by the global media so that we are given an almost perverted idea of beauty and the need to be beautiful because it makes us willing to pay for products & services that claim to do just that. Men are more sexually open and more aesthetically driven because of their (our: I'm a guy by the way) basic subconscious biological desire for healthy, attractive children who stand a good chance of survival.

Women actually gestate the children and have a great deal more time to think about other traits such as generosity, intelligence etc. so they think and analyse information about potential partners more quickly and more deeply. Again, this all comes from the thousands and thousands of years of biological `steering` towards the people that we are today.

Another thing to bear in mind as a result of the manipulation of our perceptions of beauty is that women, especially, who feel they are not attractive enough lose confidence in themselves and their attractiveness, and confidence is one major thing we would want our children to have, as it equates, very basically, to happiness and contentment with one's life.

And who wouldn't want that for their children? Exactly.

Going back to genetics for a second, there is one more good reason why men are likely to think about brief physical attraction more than women, and that is that men are inclined, genetically, to have many sexual partners. This is a result of the fact that men do not carry a baby through pregnancy so they can impregnate many women, which increases their chances of having many children and basically `living forever` through a genetic legacy.

Women have to carry a baby for 9 months then, typically, feed it and care for it for another 3-6 months at the very least so their choices are naturally more well thought-out because they have to devote so much time to each child, whereas men only really have to devote an hour or so, being brutally honest.

This is not a statement of how things should be this is just genetics; my views are irrelevant anyway but suffice to say I believe in faithfullness because it is POLITE, and it would be hurtful to do otherwise. Like all men however I am inclined to find many women attractive at the same time, as women are too!

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The last thing worth mentioning, although really this is a topic suitable for (another) ten thousand books as it is one of the most important things to people, is that society's influence, especially the media, is explicable when you look at how the world has changed in the last hundred years: people get to communicate now like never before and ideas are shared globally in days, hours and minutes, instead of decades and centuries as they were for the previous thousand years.

As people got together and connected with others so quickly the ability of business' to contact so many people with offers of products and services becomes phenomenal. With this comes the analysis of what will be possible to sell to people, and the first and most powerful thing that is easily exploited are our sexual desires.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And no, I did not think of the biological reasoning here myself, the credit goes firstly to Charles Darwin who actually spent far more of his life developing his theories of Sexual Selection than he did to the theory of regular evolution - the last third of his life was spent almost exclusively in the study of this idea which goes to show what a brilliant mind he had, regardless of the truth (as if it was in any real way discernible no, anyway ) and also that the common perception and appreciation of such an important historical figure can be so amazingly off-centre.

The major credit goes secondly to Geoffrey Miller and his exceptional book The Mating Mind (available at Amazon, here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mating-Mind-Sexual...ie=UTF8&s=books ) because although it is rather heavy reading, it is still some of the most fascinating work ever commited to paper thats subsequently found itself in front of my eyes.

Credit thirdly goes to my deep level of cynicism regarding the worldwide media and humanity in general