Name: Scientifically... Why Do We Find Someone Beautiful?
Uploaded: 2025-07-11T16:22:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scientifically... Why Do We Find Someone Beautiful?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scientifically... Why Do We Find Someone Beautiful?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-11. Transcript available.

At a scientific level, why do you find someone beautiful?
Like, is it only visual?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, obviously, it's not just visual,
but vision is the dominant sense for beauty.
So obviously, people are attracted to voices, right?
And of course, that's something, it's not a universal,
it's a cultural thing.
Like, British guys come to the U.S. to get laid
because American women hear a British voice
and they just, you know, they want to, you know,
some British guy could say, oh, fuck me on the floor.
I guess I'm doing a Scottish guy, but, you know.
Well, the Scots, yeah, the Scots will do anything on the floor, first of all.
But, you know, and it's just, oh, you know.
So we love British accents in the U.S.A.
Come colonize his vagina type of thing.
So, you know, I mean, this is a thing.
So obviously, voices can be attractive, too.
But, yeah, visual is really important.
Smell is important.
I know you were talking about this with Huberman, right?
Weren't you talking about the dirty T-shirt experiment?
He may have mentioned it.
My brain falls off sometimes.
Well, you know, so...
But, yeah, I'm just wondering, like, is there,
like, what elements go into that attraction,
that feeling when you find somebody,
I guess, attractive is more the kind of what I'm looking for instead of
beautiful.
You know, I think, really, the main thing it gets down to
is we're attracted to people who seem like if we were to mate with them,
we would have children that would be likely to thrive and survive, you know.
So the most attractive faces are the most symmetrical faces.
People who have smooth skin are more attractive than people who have mottled
skin, right?
And there are various other things that go there.
In other words, things that signal fitness.
And I don't really mean...
I don't mean fitness in the sense of, like, going to the gym.
I mean fitness in the sense of being able to survive and get your genes into
the next generation,
sort of the Darwin way of saying the word.
Yeah, I guess that's what I mean.
Those are the things we find beautiful.
When you're saying, I find someone beautiful,
most of the time you're saying,
yeah, you look like somebody who would be good to mate with and have my
children with.
And the thing is, if you're gay, you still have that feeling,
even if you're not making children with people.
In other words, that's such a fundamental human thing about attractiveness
that these fitness signifiers, like being symmetrical, having clear skin,
being tall, being well-muscled, these sorts of things,
are, you know, things we find beautiful, you know,
even if you aren't thinking about mating with that person.
Do we have nerves in our...
We have nerves in our butt, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, you've got nerves in all your skin,
but it turns out that, you know,
in the places where people like to get sexy,
you got a special kind of nerve.
And so, you know,
the lips,
the genitals,
the butthole, right?
So these places aren't just random.
They're a special kind of skin.
And so for years and years and years,
people said, well,
how come you can have sexual sensations from certain places on your body,
but not others?
Like the back of your hand doesn't feel that sexy,
end of your nose, not that sexy.
But, you know, your genitals, sexy.
Your lips, you know, maybe your butthole, sexy, you know?
And so why is that?
And nobody really knew the answer until there was a fundamental discovery.
And it actually started in the 1850s.
There was a German anatomist named Krauss,
and he took sections of the skin of the penis and the skin of the clitoris,
and he looked at them under a microscope,
and he said, well, there's this one kind of little nerve ending,
and it's kind of like wiggly like this,
and it has a little capsule around it.
And I see a lot more of them here than I do in other places in the body,
and maybe this is the special nerve ending that makes sexual sensation.
Oh, it's interesting.
And people said, well, yeah, maybe, but maybe not.
We don't really have a way of testing it.
We didn't have a way of, like, specifically activating those ones and not other
ones,
turning them on or turning them off.
And this was, like, a total mystery.
But there were some things that really made it seem possible.
So, all right, so, like, if we're going to talk about dicks here,
like, if you talk to most guys and you say,
on your dick, what is the most very sensitive part of the dick?
Well, most guys will say, well, like, the ridge right around the head of the
dick,
what's called the corona, that's a real hot spot.
And the underside of the dick, particularly that kind of elastic tissue towards
the bottom,
which is called the frenulum is what the doctors call it.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
That baseboard or whatever.
Right.
These are, like, the hottest sexy hot spots on a guy's dick.
All right.
And it turns out that's where the very largest number of these Krauss corpuscle
endings are.
So, oh, well, that seems, like, likely to be true.
But is it really true?
But a couple of years ago, a buddy of mine, David Ginty at Harvard,
figured out how to specially label and then electrically turn on or turn off
these endings in laboratory mice.
And he proved that these really are the nerve endings that are involved in
sexual sensation.
And so—
Wow, mice are partying, huh?
Well, you know, mice got what we got, right?
I mean, they've got—you know, mice have sex, mice have orgasms.
They do what we do.
Yeah, and they're willing to be tested, too.
Well, you know, they don't get to say no, you know.
I've never heard one complaint, to be honest with you.
You know.
And so, you know, this brings up some things.
Like, so, you know, like, so people always joke about, like, how young men come
really fast, right?
Well, you know, that's for a lot of different reasons and, you know, being
nervous at being new and all that.
But part of the reason is actually not just these Krauss endings, but all the
different endings in your skin from about 20, as you age, you lose about 1% of
them every year.
So, you get less and less sensitive in your skin as you get older.
Why?
So, yeah, well, we don't really know why.
That's a good question why.
But this seems to happen.
It happens in humans.
It happens in other critters.
And so, part of the reason why old guys don't come as soon and sometimes have a
problem coming at all is because fewer and fewer of the nerve endings that
trigger orgasm are there.
You lose them as you age.
Yeah.
The same thing happens, interestingly, with nerve endings for pain.
So, you might have heard, for example, that, like, old folks that are confined
to bed get bed sores.
Well, and you might think, well, why, like, you know, and they get it from just
laying in one position and wearing a hole in the skin.
You would think, oh, God, that would hurt like hell.
Why don't they just move to a different spot?
And the reason is, as you get older, you not only lose the sexy nerve endings
and the fine-touch nerve endings, you lose the pain nerve endings, too.
They don't feel it.
They don't feel it.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why.
Yeah, oh, dude, if I'm, yeah, even if I ejaculate or whatever, it's like a
couple mealworms getting out of a sleeping bag, you know?
I mean, there's nothing.
Definitely things change, you know?
Things change.
Thank you.