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2003-03-22 - 7:36 p.m. I believe that woman's magazines provide vivid, albeit grossly exaggrated, evidence of a basic human female adaptation, which Colette referred to as woman's "instinct for spontaneous comparison": vis., to learn from observing other females how to stimulate, and use to advantage, male desire. This is analogous to the human abilities-which almost surely represent adaptions-to observe another person's skilled tool-using performance, to imagine oneself performing the same activity, and to use this imagined performance as a template with which to compare the sensations of one's own performance. Human females have always been objects of male sexual desire, and it is difficult to believe that a natural environment ever existed in which females did not have some opportunity to increase their reproductive success by learning to manage and manipulate this desire. Learning to be effective as an erotic stimulus is underpinned by the abilities to imagine oneself as a sex object and to discriminate and identify with sexually attractive women. Although female intrasexual competition ultimately underlies woman's interest in other women's bodies, competitive emotions apparently do not normally interfere with woman's abilities to learn through identification. Sources: Symons, Colette � 
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