this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
452 points (97.9% liked)

Comic Strips

13196 readers
3528 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Something that blows my mind is realising how much of our understanding of sex and attraction is socially constructed. For example, there are plenty of documented cultures where women's breasts don't have the erotic connotation we attach to them. The thing that really threw me off was learning about some people who don't kiss as a show of affection — I found this a surreal concept, because in terms of romantic interactions with a partner, I'm fairly meh about sex, but I'm a big fan of kissing/making out; There's a sense in which I obviously know that preference towards kissing is likely not an evolved trait, but more sociocultural, but it feels so intuitive that something so visceral isn't necessarily an innate trait.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying "did we evolve to like butts, though?". Evolutionary biology, the field that would consider questions like these, is unavoidably pretty heavy on the speculation side — given that humans have evolved to be such social creatures, we can't really separate out the sociocultural aspects of development from the genetic side, and that makes asking evolutionary questions on large timescales to be a tricky endeavour.

Edit: This isn't to say that asking these questions is pointless to do. I appreciated your question precisely because it's the kind of thing that cooks my brain (and I enjoy that)

[–] AnUnusualRelic 2 points 1 day ago

We'd have to engineer a race of humans without butts and see if they managed to breed.