How Men React to Attractive Women.

The ability or often, promptitude of males and females to flirt and be flirted- a set of behaviors and mutually understood signals deeply and universally embedded in our psyche during a long, transcendent history and beguiling sophistication-has been long trivialized if not demonized. It's only in the latest decades, especially since the 1970s (see below) that flirting behaviors and attitudes have began to be analyzed to clues concerning the biological and psychological wisdom they encode.

Evolutionists have it that human beings flirt to propagate their genes. According to them, men are inclined to flirt with young and beautiful women as beauty and youth are, inter alia, signs of good health and fertility. On the same ground, women will favor stronger and muscular men with dominant demeanors, who will not only provide them with healthy babies, but also, will stay with them and invest their resources in them and their offspring.

However, human psychology is much more perverse and diverse than that; unlike other animals humans also flirt with conscious calculation. Flirting among human beings is culturally modulated, as part of a particular culture, in a particular time and specific thinking patterns each time.

Even our animal and human ancestors needed a means of quickly and safely judge the value of potential mates without "going all the way" and risking pregnancy with every possible candidate they encountered. Throughout the ages up to now it is common knowledge that flirting itself does achieve that end, offering a relatively risk-free set of signals with which to "sample the field" and exchange vital information about candidates' general health and reproductive fitness. However, it is also clear in our culture today that we do not always choose as the object of our desire those people the evolutionists might deem the most biologically desirable.

In other words, we flirt with the intent of assessing potential lifetime partners-regardless of the likelihood of having children with them or not; we flirt to have easy, no-strings-attached sex; we flirt when we are not looking for either; and we flirt because flirtation itself can be a liberating form of play, a game with suspense and ambiguities that brings joys of its own". (Deborah A. Lott: "The new flirting game", see bibliography). Simply put, the elementary tendency and process