Cupid and Psyche : Psychologists Say That Gorgeous Women in Ads and on TV Inhibit Young Men’s Sex Lives,but They’re Forgetting a Thing or Two

“Psychologists say” is a pop phrase of our times that is most often encountered in newspapers, where it introduces some new and often poppycock explanation of contemporary behavior.

What psychologists say is often based on some funded study of the subject, but it may also be merely a theory that was thought up in the quiet of the psychologist’s study.

I have an idea that psychologists, like any other kind of professionals, are eager to practice their specialty once they get their degrees.

They hang up their shingles and begin to make pronouncements on the motivations of their fellow beings, much as a dentist hangs up his shingle and begins to pull teeth.

In this age of science and information, we are eager to know everything, and I do not blame psychologists for taking a shot at explaining us to ourselves. I have an idea that they are right about as often as medical doctors, political analysts and theoretical physicists.

Nothing should lie outside the bounds of fair inquiry. If psychologists want to find out whether there is a scientific basis for the notion that gentlemen prefer blondes, more power to them. If they want to find out whether redheads are better lovers, let them go to it.

Now I read in a syndicated column by Maxwell Glen and Cody Shearer that psychologists say the gorgeous women shown on television, in magazine ads, on billboards and in such magazines as Playboy and Penthouse are inhibiting the sex lives of young American men.

According to Glen and Shearer, the young men’s expectations of female beauty are so fantastically intensified by the young women they see displayed that no woman they actually meet and get acquainted with can possibly come up to those heights.

“Welcome to America’s latest neurosis,” they say, “the unrealistic expectations of the American male.”

They quote Douglas T. Kenrick, psychologist at Arizona State University, whose research “has confirmed what other psychologists have discovered”--that the kind of female sexuality and beauty exploited by Madison Avenue is so far beyond the reality of everyday life that men have become disappointed and dissatisfied by ordinary women.

“Accordingly,” the columnists say, “there is not enough healthy interaction between the sexes.”

They say that this phenomenon is causing men to delay marriage.

Somehow I’m not too worried about this latest finding of psychologists.

Young men in America have been exposed to the glamour girls of motion pictures and advertising for a good many decades, and yet they have managed to have school and office romances and to get married and have children and sometimes even to be in love.

The fact that all the young men of my generation were in love with June Allyson and Carole Lombard and Ingrid Bergman didn’t mean that we were incapable of falling for the girls we took to their movies. Actually, I found a girl who was prettier than any of them, and I convinced her that I wasn’t unworthy of her hand.

On several occasions in recent years I have visited high school and college campuses, and I want to tell you that the girls are as pretty as ever, and there is no chance that young men are going to fall on their swords, so to speak, because they can’t have Miss Centerfold.

It is possible, as Kenrick says, that many young men have an idealized vision of their own beauty, and thus find it difficult to meet their match. There is nothing new in male vanity; it preceded the movies, advertising and TV, but it has never protected men against the natural seductiveness of ordinary young women.

If there were any truth in Kenrick’s analysis, I should think it would apply to women’s view of men, as well as vice versa. How about all the handsome young men on film and TV, all those rough-hewn types in the beer ads, for example? Don’t young women look at those hunks and then look around them and say, “Hey, aren’t there any good-looking guys in real life?”

Not a chance.

Remember that movie, “Marty,” in which Ernest Borgnine, who wasn’t too much to look at, fell in love with a woman who wasn’t too much to look at either?

I believe there’s a guy for every girl, and vice versa, and Playboy and Playgirl magazines aren’t going to make it any different.

Here’s to the girl next door.