To fundamentally change a harmful phenomenon, you have to start at its source. You have to understand what causes it to happen, what keeps it logical in people's eyes, and what reinforcements they receive for acting in a certain way. Women's lingerie in Israel and around the world is a market that presents us with a worrying problem that has already claimed countless victims. So how can we explain that we still support a market that crushes our self-image and creates destructive consequences, instead of choosing quality lingerie? Evolutionary psychology is here for exactly that.
What is evolutionary psychology anyway?
Evolutionary psychology is a scientific field that explains the psychological processes that people go through, and gives them a rationale related to evolution. According to evolutionary psychology, there are two main motives that will cause a person to make a decision, make a choice, or take a certain action:
- Improving his or her chances of survival or that of his or her offspring.
- Improving the chances of finding a stronger and better mate (so that the offspring will be stronger and better).
What's the deal with underwear?
For years, the lingerie market has presented women according to a certain beauty model who modeled lingerie products, and we have learned over time that women's lingerie should be beautiful and sexy because it is a sign of a woman's quality. That is, if a woman is wearing a stunning red set , she is probably better than other women who choose other fabrics or colors. Therefore, men will appreciate women who present lingerie like the models, and women will strive to resemble them. Both sexes make their choice with the intention of improving the quality of the potential partner.
Why is lingerie so important to women, but men can walk around with torn underwear?
Because women are measured by their underwear and men are not. Women are measured by how they look in underwear and a bra, and men are measured by physical strength, humor, and so on. That's why men will check out what women's underwear looks like and not the other way around. Instead of quality underwear, we are forced to choose sexy underwear. Most of the time, it doesn't work together.
So why are we still cooperating with this?
We continue to cooperate with it because our survival mechanisms are stronger than anything. If our brain understands that sexy lingerie is the key to finding a better partner, that's what it will choose to purchase. Add to that the enormous difficulty of independently resisting certain societal dictates, while all the consumerist worlds and preconceptions are the wheels that move the world. It's not easy to decide to go against and choose quality lingerie, to choose your own comfort and health before the satisfaction of a partner or society as a whole.
So what to do? Choose quality lingerie!
The psychology of underwear is much broader than the little we've described here, but there is something we can do to change things and resist a market that celebrates a woman's sensuality instead of her health, body image, and comfort. Here are some options:
- Choose yourself first - your health, your comfort, a positive body image, self-compassion and investment in yourself, not what others will think of you.
- Understand that what you see in advertisements is only driven by money, and no one there really cares about your body.
- Surround yourself with people with a cleaner worldview, those who don't measure your worth based on your underwear. Yes, it may be very difficult because we are all constantly subjected to negative marketing messages, but think about how amazing it would be to live with a partner who cares about your health and not about the lace underwear you bought at an exorbitant price for one night with him.
