Boobs Or Brains

Katie 'Jordan' Price recently released her autobiography on the public. Most of the sales were made to women – men having had their fill of Jordan on Page 3 over the years for a more affordable 20p copy of The Sun. So, if Jordan is simply a piece of eye candy for gents to ogle, then why are women so eager to muse over her thoughts?

Freud would call discourse simply another means to manifest the sex drive leading to every human's ultimate goal of a little nookie. He believed that men would go for a beautiful form, if he could attain it, over an enthralling chat with a less sculpted female any day. This is in keeping with Darwin's ideology whereby every human, be they male or female, seek an attractive other so that their children are blessed with good looks and a running start in life. Why then isn't every man head over heels for Jordan like Peter Andre obviously is?

Perhaps there is more to love and attraction than simple looks, genetic drives and sexual goals. Perhaps Peter and Jordan are together not simply so that Jordan can launder infant Princess's baby-grows on Peter's washboard abs, but because they are intellectual equals.

For generations marriage has been a forced institution whereby men chose wedlock to achieve the physical closeness that was reserved only for married couples in times of old. Through that chase an intellectual war was fought and a bond achieved. Nowadays sex is not so difficult to attain and possibly as a result marriages all over the country are breaking down at a record rate. In 1921 divorce rates per year were at 558, in 1995 they stood at a staggering 77,636. Now that men and women can trade in their partners for younger models with looks that are easier on the eyes, why not? If marriage is built on love and love is simply about looks then love is transient, not eternal as the Bronte sisters would have us believe.

Men are attracted to women physically but in the long run it is character and discursive interaction that win out. The problem is not people's inability to stay attracted to one person, it is this consumerist society's inability to settle with what they have, be happy and make that work.

Boobs and bums may be what initially attracts a man to a woman but when he sees past the attraction he sees her for who she is and if the intellectual level is not compatible the attraction is lost. In the days of cavemen, women walked on all fours to present to a man that it was his job to club her around the head and drag her back to his cave to have his wicked way with her. In present society humanity has developed communication as a means to avoid violence and encourage compromise. Perhaps it is unfair that nowadays women are still presented to men everywhere he looks in a sex soaked society but he is left high and dry without his club. This is why communication and character are intrinsic in relationships; the move from those times of old proves there is more to what men see in women than just looks for the taking.

To borrow from Dr Freud once again, it is the oedipal complex that states a man seeks his mother in competition with his father and this is what builds his drive to go out and seek a wife, often similar to his mother. For this reason a man is not only physical but seeks a woman to listen to him, laugh at his bad jokes, look after him during a bout of man-flu and ultimately care for him. Perhaps love isn't found in the fast-paced battle for sex but in the hard times when one is at their weakest and finds themselves not alone but being cared for, being nursed back into the world.

As physical procreative beings, looks are a factor in attraction but are certainly not the be all and end all. In the long term, make-up runs, looks fade and vitality dulls; but what is hopefully left from the flames of passion is a burning ember of love that never dies.

This article was for a female audience which read ETP magazine online. The question posed was a very open one. For this reason my research specified on areas common in the public interest such as Katie Price and divorce rates. I mainly used the internet for research of facts and figures which I believed would be of interest to the women readers.

The article left a lot of scope for originality. This is why I tried to incorporate psychological references to provide structure to my argument. It was a very long piece compared to what I am used to so research was imperative to avoid unfounded, irrelevant comments.

One of the worries that arose while writing for a mainly female audience was appearing sexist. It did not worry me to the point of affecting my argument, but I was wary of the potential position of the reader throughout.

Legally speaking this one was a bit of a mine-field since a large proportion of it focused on the assumption that Jordan was less than intelligent. I believe that the lack of direct attack and side stepping of the initial point about her meant it could not be considered libel on the grounds that I genuinely believed what I was saying to be true at the time (Contempt of Court Act – Section 5).

The style in this was very different to the other stories as it was for an online magazine rather than a paper. It meant a much more slow paced discursive dialogue which allowed for opinion rather than pure fact after fact like a news story.