487. Wide-Faced Or Narrow-Faced Men
I am demisexual, I do not get physically attracted to looks. I am consciously ready to create a bonded commitment with any man, whose personality and intellect attract me, while there are no dealbreakers. But while I do neither perceive nor need physical attraction, physical repulsion is a deterrent.
Consciously, I am attracted to men who are more nice guys than machos, who are more psychologically androgynous than virile. Aggression, dominance, power, competition as the typical indications of virility are repulsive to me. Consciously, I need to rely upon a lot of information to find out, if I can trust a man to appreciate and treat me as an equal partner. I consider first and superficial impressions as misleading.
But after reading about the study quoted below connecting facial proportions with personality, now I am wondering, if my subconscious reacts to visual stimuli, of which I am consciously ignorant.
I prefer bearded men. So far, I attributed my pognophily only to my preference for someone's personality trait of lacking vanity, of considering shaving as a ludicrous waste of time. I considered the act of shaving in itself as a repulsive behavior. But maybe there is more than that. Maybe a beard covers stimuli, which my subconscious mind perceives as repulsive.
One study is of course not enough to be conclusive. But it allows me to scrutinize for what my subconscious mind is doing to me. I have no answers, but at least some important new questions.
I am demisexual, I do not get physically attracted to looks. I am consciously ready to create a bonded commitment with any man, whose personality and intellect attract me, while there are no dealbreakers. But while I do neither perceive nor need physical attraction, physical repulsion is a deterrent.
Consciously, I am attracted to men who are more nice guys than machos, who are more psychologically androgynous than virile. Aggression, dominance, power, competition as the typical indications of virility are repulsive to me. Consciously, I need to rely upon a lot of information to find out, if I can trust a man to appreciate and treat me as an equal partner. I consider first and superficial impressions as misleading.
But after reading about the study quoted below connecting facial proportions with personality, now I am wondering, if my subconscious reacts to visual stimuli, of which I am consciously ignorant.
I prefer bearded men. So far, I attributed my pognophily only to my preference for someone's personality trait of lacking vanity, of considering shaving as a ludicrous waste of time. I considered the act of shaving in itself as a repulsive behavior. But maybe there is more than that. Maybe a beard covers stimuli, which my subconscious mind perceives as repulsive.
One study is of course not enough to be conclusive. But it allows me to scrutinize for what my subconscious mind is doing to me. I have no answers, but at least some important new questions.
- Does my subconscious mind recognize indications, which I am consciously oblivious of?
- Do I have a subconscious preference for narrow faces in men?
- Do wide faced men scare me?
- Do they scare me less, when a beard covers the indication of facial virility?
- Do I perceive clean shaven men as more repulsive, when they have wide rather than narrow faces?
Sources:
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/120107_facialstructure
"You can to some extent assess a person’s trustworthiness from their looks, according to new research that could upset decades of settled scientific thinking.
In a study, Michael Haselhuhn and Elaine Wong of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that men whose faces are relatively wide for their height are statistically more likely to act unethically.
“Our results demonstrate that static [fixed] physical attributes can indeed serve as reliable cues of immoral action,” Haselhuhn and Wong wrote, adding that their findings appear to apply to males only. “Perhaps some men truly are bad to the bone.”
However, they added, recent findings have linked more aggressive tendencies in men to faces that are wide relative to their height. Such men are statistically more likely “to retaliate to perceived slights by others [and] to act in their own self-interest, even if it means violating another’s trust,”
In their own study, Haselhuhn and Wong concluded that the greater propensity of men with these facial types to act unethically flows from a sense among these men that they have more power than average. Therefore, they tend to feel they can get away with it.
A major objection to the idea that facial features could predict bad behavior, they said, has been that men with such features would swiftly drop out of the gene pool. Presumably, no one would trust them so they would have trouble mating. This objection loses force, Haselhuhn and Wong argued, if you suppose that the drawbacks of having such a face may be counterbalanced by an advantage, namely that those faces also signal aggression and dominance-a trait that appeals to many women."
http://www.livescience.com/14909-wide-faces-predict-unethical-behavior.html
""We believe that men's facial structure should be used as one important cue in detecting liars and cheaters, but caution should be taken in automatically labeling relatively wide-faced men as bad seeds."
Future research can investigate whether men with broad faces "have truly evolved to be less ethical, or whether these men 'learn' to be less ethical over time," Haselhuhn noted. "For example, if people are naturally inclined to act deferentially to men with relatively broad faces, these men may feel more powerful over time, leading them to act less ethically.""
