When it's war, it's still Helen

What makes men go to war? Gold? Land? Revenge? Try a woman — an attractive face of a woman or even just her nice legs. That is what the results of a study published last March 23 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin may be telling us. The study was aptly entitled “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships: The Mating-Warring Association in Men,” alluding to Helen of Troy, the mythological beauty that caused the Trojan War. Apparently, while she was a myth, the effect of female beauty on the male mind for war, is not.

The study saw multiple effects of seeing photos of attractive women or women’s legs on men’s war-related behavior. One effect was that men were more eager to go to war toward hostile countries upon seeing an attractive female face versus being told of another issue like trade. Another was that the men were able to locate an armed soldier (versus a farmer) on the computer screen; and they could locate a war-related word on the screen faster when stimulated by a picture of women’s legs than a traditional symbol of heroism in war, like the flag. Even more, the words the men recognized were really words associated with war and not merely with aggression. All these effects were not seen when the men were shown photos of unattractive women’s faces.

This “it’s still the girl” theory has always been part of a few possible explanations for how wars start. Homer who wrote the Iliad, an epic that culminated in the Trojan War had Helen as its motivation for war. This is why all other news releases on this study, including this column, could not help but refer to Helen. Helen of Homer’s imagination caused epic wars long before anthropology and its theories of human motivations for war, was born as field of study. It seems that Homer was intimately in touch with his maleness and what it would really take for men to go to war.

Judging from the results of the study, inside men’s biology is a written code that impels them to take risks as big as wars to get the girl and the sexual rewards that go with it. Obviously, it is not the emotional or intellectual satisfaction they would get from the woman that makes them go to war since they do not know these women at all (they have only seen their faces and legs before they did the tests.) Imagine, how many wars with all its evil, past, present and future, would be based on a beautiful face and a pair of legs?  

OK, OK, so a beautiful woman could launch a thousand ships and make men go to war. But I think the next important question is, what could make those ships come back and abandon the wars they have started? Maybe the answer lies in women again from another Greek drama called Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Lysistrata was a woman who organized all the women to withhold sex from their partners until they end the Peloponnesian War. Should 21st psychologists also take the cue from Greek literature? The women succeeded, in the play anyway.

So girl, the next time, you jazz yourself up a bit and show your nice legs, remember a potential battle lurks in men’s brains for you. Or should all of us women just quit taking care of ourselves as to become so unattractive to tame the male mind for war? After all, unattractive women’s faces did not get men in the study motivated for war. Would we have to get rid of the fashion industry and cosmetic surgery, and all else that helps make women to be attractive, to finally rid of wars? Maybe not but hey, if you are like me, sick and tired of the overwhelming number of ads on how to make a woman fairer, sexier and desirable, war-prevention may just be that one big excuse.

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