Things like such highly personal preferences are way too complex to be attributed to one particular early experience.

I can´t stand the sound of classical violins playing together - it´s a negative preference that makes me miss out on a whole world of wonderful music, as I´m well aware. I don´t know why this is the case; I have absolutely no idea. On the other hand, I have been magically drawn to the groove of bossa nova from the second I first happened to hear it.

Likewise, I don´t know where I got my hair fetish, and the more I delve into the question, the less real evidence for potential reasons comes up, and the more I´m left to simply speculate.

My mother, the epitome of an attractive woman as far as I was concerned at least as a boy (and who I´m deeply indebted to for all the wonderful things she has done for me), didn´t even have chin-length hair.

My much older sister (a very attractive woman in her late fifties by now, and a person I have always been very fond of) had her ponytail cut off so early on that I don´t even remember she ever had long hair.

I spent my first four months in hospital - perhaps one of the more likable nurses there had long hair (but no one has ever mentioned anything like that to me).

I can´t remember anyone in my town or in my family who I was close to who had long hair, not to mention extralong hair.

And yet I would always jumpstart at the mention of somebody who supposedly had very long hair. And I was absolutely mesmerized as a boy by long-hair encounters such as seeing the "Barbarella" movie poster showing Jane Fonda when we went shopping in a big city.

Couldn´t there be purely genetic reasons for such a fetish: While some men simply like short hair (I´ve got a friend who encouraged his wife to get a short haircut after complaining for years that her tit-length mane was way too long - which statement would make me cringe!), others simply go for long hair.

I used to have a beautiful girlfriend with brunette wavy waiste-length hair who my parents liked very much; one day in winter, we arrived in coats under which her mane was hidden, at the sight of which my father at once and in a very touching way expressed his sincere concern that she might have cut it off: "You shouldn´t cut off such beautiful long hair", he said. Did he have something in his genes that he didn´t get the chance to live?

I find myself completely indifferent toward certain features of a woman´s looks or body that other men really go for. Some look at tits first, some look at legs first (I sure don´t), and even the most tempting superlong mane of a woman does really not turn me on if there is a certain quality (warmth?) in the woman´s face missing.

There are women where I cannot find the slightest sign of anything I could regard as unusually attractive (which is not to say that they look ugly), and yet I notice that men fall deeply, or even madly in love with them.

Isn´t all of this just a trick of nature to have different people interested in different features so that in the end almost every woman turns on some man in some way, by which she makes sure her genetic information is passed on?

Nature is not interested in the survival of the most beautiful - it is interested in the survival of many, and of a broad spectrum of genes. Humans must be different. The idea is that if there is a plague, not all of us will be wiped out at once, because some have got an undiscovered resistance or some quality that saves them.