Young people want good-looking mates; their parents want them to have mates from the same social class

Three psychologists in The Netherlands just published the results of a study on how young people’s preferences differed from their parents’ preferences on finding mates.   The work, recently published in the Review of General Psychology, involved interviewing Dutch, American, and Kurdish young people and parents. 

Not surprisingly, the young people wanted attractive mates while their parents mainly wanted the kids to have mates from similar social classes and groups: 

… young people invariably considered the potential mate’s attractiveness the most important quality, whereas parents uniformly paid more attention to the suitors’ social background or group affiliation…

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/may/15/checking-mates/?living

There’s no great surprise in these findings.  It has been thoroughly proven that people who are dating and picking partners, both male and female, almost always want good-looking partners.  For a review of the evidence for this proposition, see almost any of my posts on online dating and speed dating.

 

 

Male hosts with Rod Stewart hair, tight suits and jewelry

I read about a fairly new phenomenon in Tokyo called male host clubs, where women buy expensive drinks so they can talk to young men.  It seems sort of comparable to guys going to strip clubs and buying the dancers expensive drinks for the privilege of chatting with the dancers at their tables:

… male host clubs, the newly booming pleasure dens where women buy expensive drinks for the privilege of chatting with young men. The men are unmistakable in Kabukicho with their Rod Stewart hair, tight suits and jewelry. “The surprising thing is that the top earners are not the guys you’d expect,” Arias says. “They’re not the best-looking guys. They’re the best talkers.”

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-tokyo06-2008jun01,0,5903053.story?page=2

It’s interesting that the guys who make the most money at these clubs are not the best looking guys but the guys who can talk well (assuming this guy’s observation is correct).  I kind of doubt the same earning dynamic works for (female) strippers.  But then again, guys are highly visual.