does the Virgin Mary in many of her portraits. In many
crucifixes it can be seen in the hand of Christ.
It disappears after the thirteenth century and appears
again in the fifteenth in the hands of the baby Jesus
and the Virgin in paintings from the Netherlands.
Evidently it has been used all this time as a godlike
gesture.
In the work of later painters, Botticelli and Bellini,
the hand in this position began to appear on saints, and
later Raphael used it in lesser characters in paintings
in the Sistine Chapel.
It was then picked up in portraits. Titian used it for
the repentent Mary Magdalene, and Bronzini gave it to
hands in many paintings of men and women. Abbate, of
the Fountainbleau school, gave the 101 hand posture to
a brothel madam and a lecherous client of the brothel.
The signal had lost all its holy, godlike meaning.
Today, Bates points out, he has seen it on a mannequin
in the window of a Carnaby Street clothing store and
in a poster for the play Jesus Christ Superstar, where
Christ uses it to hold a microphone. Has it come full
circle?
Last week I brought Sandra home to meet my folks.
Sandra and Mom hit it off well, but both of them
have this thing in common—fat! Mom is twice the
weight she should be, and Sandra is coming along fast.
Afterward, Mom kept at me about how great Sandra is,
70 THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
always smiling. When I made some crack about her
weight, Mom laughed it off and said, "Well, you'll be
happy with her. Fat people are jolly by nature." Now
I'm not so sure that Sandra is all that jolly. Do fat people
really smile more and are they happier?
Your mother seems to confuse smiling a lot with being
happy or jolly, but there may be some logic at the root
of your confusion. The jolly fat person is so much a
stereotype that there has to be some truth to it. The
trouble is, the jolliness, the smilling, and the joking of
fat people are usually a defense, a way of saying "Like
me even though I'm fat and unattractive. I can still
make you laugh."
In a sense, they are trying to buy affection with a smile
because they feel so uncertain of their own physical
attractiveness. If this is where Sandra's at, then you're
right in your feeling that she's not all that jolly.
However, not all fat people smile, nor are they all
jolly. Many are just as serious, just as unhappy, and just
as unpleasant as their leaner cousins. There is nothing
in the physical makeup of a fat person to incline him
to jolliness. The clue lies in his psychological makeup.
The body language message he sends out is usually one
of desperation, a mask to cover up the hurt dealt to him
by a unsympathetic world.
In some cases, such people stay fat for these very
reasons, to create a mask to hide their inner selves. "If you
THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
never see the real me, you can't hurt that me," they seem
to be saying, as they hide behind their layers of fat.
If Sandra is like that and you truly love her, your good
feelings for her and your respect for her as a person
behind the fat may help her control her mixed-up image.
I'm twenty-two years old, just average in looks, and a
little overweight, but I always seem to have more boys
around than I can handle. My father says it's because
I have sexy blue eyes—but I haven't, really! I've looked
at my eyes in a mirror and in my photos, and all I can
see that's different are large pupils. Could this be sexy?
Sexy is different things to different people. It's very
possible that your eyes communicate warmth and softness
because of the pupil size, but it's also possible that
it's not your eyes but your personality that's responsible
for the overabundance of boys.
As for the eyes—Dr. Eckhard H. Hess, professor of
psychology at the University of Chicago, has come up
with some convincing proof that pupil size in women can
cause different attitudes in men. In an experiment, he
showed two photographs of a pretty young woman to a
group of men. Both photographs were identical, but in
one the woman's pupils had been retouched so that they
were larger. In the other they were made smaller.
How did the men react?
72 THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
None of them noticed the pupil difference consciously,
but all described the picture of the woman with the large
pupils as soft, more feminine, and pretty.
The same woman with small pupils was seen as hard,
selfish, or cold.
These results were more obvious when the woman
had blue eyes.
It seems clear that large pupils make a woman more
attractive to men, no matter what the woman is really
like. Perhaps blue eyes emphasize the difference. Your
father, in calling your eyes sexy, is simply putting into
slang his feelings that you are pretty, warm, and feminine.
There's very little new under the sun, and for hundreds
of years women have arrived at Dr. Hess's conclusion
empirically. They've used the drug belladonna (which
contains atropine) to make their eyes more beautiful.
Atropine dilates the pupils of the eyes.
There are additional fascinating facts that Dr. Hess's
work and the work of others have turned up about pupil
size and people. Younger people have larger pupils than
older people, and youth is usually more physically
attractive.
Large pupils indicate interest on the part of the person
who has them. Work done in this field (the new and
growing science of pupillometry) shows that in men and
women the pupil expands when we look at something
we like. It's easy to conclude that the person who looks
at you with large pupils likes you. We find people who
THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX 73
like us much more attractive than people who don't. Is
this why we like people with large pupils?
Men's pupils dilate when they see a woman with large
pupils, but their pupils do not change when they look
at other men with either large or small pupils. However,
many women's pupils grow larger when they look at
another woman with small pupils! Do these women prefer
other women who seem cold, or are women with small
pupils less of a challenge?
Two experimenters in pupillometry at the University
of Missouri dilated the pupils of a man by using eyedrops
and found that that he was preferred as a partner by
both men and women—at least when they had to choose
between him and a nondilated-eye partner.
At the University of Toronto, pupillometrists found
that male homosexuals prefer women with small pupils.
A final and thought-provoking finding at Toronto was that
heterosexual Don Juans who wanted sex with many
women, rather than a relationship with just one, have the
same pupil response to women as homosexuals have. Are
these men unconscious homosexuals? Or are they attracted
by seemingly cold women who are less likely to be
permanent partners?
My Aunt Grace used to be on the stage, and she
always played very sexy parts. The thing is, now she's
over seventy years old and you'd never know it. When I
kid her about it, she just grins and says it's all in
crucifixes it can be seen in the hand of Christ.
It disappears after the thirteenth century and appears
again in the fifteenth in the hands of the baby Jesus
and the Virgin in paintings from the Netherlands.
Evidently it has been used all this time as a godlike
gesture.
In the work of later painters, Botticelli and Bellini,
the hand in this position began to appear on saints, and
later Raphael used it in lesser characters in paintings
in the Sistine Chapel.
It was then picked up in portraits. Titian used it for
the repentent Mary Magdalene, and Bronzini gave it to
hands in many paintings of men and women. Abbate, of
the Fountainbleau school, gave the 101 hand posture to
a brothel madam and a lecherous client of the brothel.
The signal had lost all its holy, godlike meaning.
Today, Bates points out, he has seen it on a mannequin
in the window of a Carnaby Street clothing store and
in a poster for the play Jesus Christ Superstar, where
Christ uses it to hold a microphone. Has it come full
circle?
Last week I brought Sandra home to meet my folks.
Sandra and Mom hit it off well, but both of them
have this thing in common—fat! Mom is twice the
weight she should be, and Sandra is coming along fast.
Afterward, Mom kept at me about how great Sandra is,
70 THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
always smiling. When I made some crack about her
weight, Mom laughed it off and said, "Well, you'll be
happy with her. Fat people are jolly by nature." Now
I'm not so sure that Sandra is all that jolly. Do fat people
really smile more and are they happier?
Your mother seems to confuse smiling a lot with being
happy or jolly, but there may be some logic at the root
of your confusion. The jolly fat person is so much a
stereotype that there has to be some truth to it. The
trouble is, the jolliness, the smilling, and the joking of
fat people are usually a defense, a way of saying "Like
me even though I'm fat and unattractive. I can still
make you laugh."
In a sense, they are trying to buy affection with a smile
because they feel so uncertain of their own physical
attractiveness. If this is where Sandra's at, then you're
right in your feeling that she's not all that jolly.
However, not all fat people smile, nor are they all
jolly. Many are just as serious, just as unhappy, and just
as unpleasant as their leaner cousins. There is nothing
in the physical makeup of a fat person to incline him
to jolliness. The clue lies in his psychological makeup.
The body language message he sends out is usually one
of desperation, a mask to cover up the hurt dealt to him
by a unsympathetic world.
In some cases, such people stay fat for these very
reasons, to create a mask to hide their inner selves. "If you
THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
never see the real me, you can't hurt that me," they seem
to be saying, as they hide behind their layers of fat.
If Sandra is like that and you truly love her, your good
feelings for her and your respect for her as a person
behind the fat may help her control her mixed-up image.
I'm twenty-two years old, just average in looks, and a
little overweight, but I always seem to have more boys
around than I can handle. My father says it's because
I have sexy blue eyes—but I haven't, really! I've looked
at my eyes in a mirror and in my photos, and all I can
see that's different are large pupils. Could this be sexy?
Sexy is different things to different people. It's very
possible that your eyes communicate warmth and softness
because of the pupil size, but it's also possible that
it's not your eyes but your personality that's responsible
for the overabundance of boys.
As for the eyes—Dr. Eckhard H. Hess, professor of
psychology at the University of Chicago, has come up
with some convincing proof that pupil size in women can
cause different attitudes in men. In an experiment, he
showed two photographs of a pretty young woman to a
group of men. Both photographs were identical, but in
one the woman's pupils had been retouched so that they
were larger. In the other they were made smaller.
How did the men react?
72 THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX
None of them noticed the pupil difference consciously,
but all described the picture of the woman with the large
pupils as soft, more feminine, and pretty.
The same woman with small pupils was seen as hard,
selfish, or cold.
These results were more obvious when the woman
had blue eyes.
It seems clear that large pupils make a woman more
attractive to men, no matter what the woman is really
like. Perhaps blue eyes emphasize the difference. Your
father, in calling your eyes sexy, is simply putting into
slang his feelings that you are pretty, warm, and feminine.
There's very little new under the sun, and for hundreds
of years women have arrived at Dr. Hess's conclusion
empirically. They've used the drug belladonna (which
contains atropine) to make their eyes more beautiful.
Atropine dilates the pupils of the eyes.
There are additional fascinating facts that Dr. Hess's
work and the work of others have turned up about pupil
size and people. Younger people have larger pupils than
older people, and youth is usually more physically
attractive.
Large pupils indicate interest on the part of the person
who has them. Work done in this field (the new and
growing science of pupillometry) shows that in men and
women the pupil expands when we look at something
we like. It's easy to conclude that the person who looks
at you with large pupils likes you. We find people who
THE BODY LANGUAGE OF SEX 73
like us much more attractive than people who don't. Is
this why we like people with large pupils?
Men's pupils dilate when they see a woman with large
pupils, but their pupils do not change when they look
at other men with either large or small pupils. However,
many women's pupils grow larger when they look at
another woman with small pupils! Do these women prefer
other women who seem cold, or are women with small
pupils less of a challenge?
Two experimenters in pupillometry at the University
of Missouri dilated the pupils of a man by using eyedrops
and found that that he was preferred as a partner by
both men and women—at least when they had to choose
between him and a nondilated-eye partner.
At the University of Toronto, pupillometrists found
that male homosexuals prefer women with small pupils.
A final and thought-provoking finding at Toronto was that
heterosexual Don Juans who wanted sex with many
women, rather than a relationship with just one, have the
same pupil response to women as homosexuals have. Are
these men unconscious homosexuals? Or are they attracted
by seemingly cold women who are less likely to be
permanent partners?
My Aunt Grace used to be on the stage, and she
always played very sexy parts. The thing is, now she's
over seventy years old and you'd never know it. When I
kid her about it, she just grins and says it's all in
