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This podcast talks about the universality of beauty and mankind’s basis of attraction. Levi Straus, a famous anthropologist, was known as the father of structuralism which states that there are universals throughout mankind that are cross cultural. There are mental processes that seem to be universal.
Brett Newcomb has taught for years that the idea of the adolescence stage of life is new as of the last 150 years. People are living longer and the evolutionary changes in our lives are not automatically matched in hormone production and the occurrence of testosterone and its role in arousal and production. So what happens when people adapt to the advances in medicine allowing them to live longer but their natural hormone levels maintain the same time table as those from past generations?
It’s common that although medicine has made it possible for our bodies to be able to live twice as long as mankind did centuries ago, our hormones remain the same. Although the length of our lives has expanded enormously, our quality of life has not. Our bodies begin to get old at 40, even though we are living until 80.
The chemicals in our food affect our hormone level, such as estrogen. Currently women are found to be maturing earlier and men are reaching andropause later in life. Cancers are stronger and tumor growth is more rapid due to these unnatural chemicals that we are exposed to in the environment.
Media and biology are creating young teenagers to become sexualized but our mentality has not adapted to this early development. Culturally people discourage and criticize sexually active or curious adolescents. Yet the media, combined with biologically altered hormones from food, has created adolescent bodies to hit puberty much earlier then what was normal, 10-15 years ago.
It’s a struggle for young people to battle what their hormones are saying versus what they are hearing from their parents. We need to be careful with what we are putting into our bodies as well as how we approach our children on the topic of sex.
