Are you still looking for the perfect man, the one with the good job, great attitude and David Gandy like abs?
It turns out that height and ‘length’ (yes, that length) matter less than many men think they do.
Credit for that study goes to Australian scientists at ANU, who showed a sample study of women a collection of different images of men altered in three different ways: height, shoulder-to-waist ratio (big shoulders to tiny waist, tiny shoulders to large and so on), and genitalia size.
They were predicting the women would pick the tallest and best-endowed. Easy to guess, right? Wrong.
The women in the study most preferred men with broad, hefty shoulders and a slimline waist – that famous ‘triangle’ shape demonstrated by Olympic swimmers and Gaston in Beauty & The Beast.
Genital size did play a part, but not nearly as much as the scientists thought it would – though many studies still show that being large is definitely a help in the dating department, particularly if you have other attractive qualities like humour, wealth or good hair.
However, the study isn’t nearly definitive – commentators note that what you find attractive depends very heavily on socio-cultural factors, like how much money you have yourself, how wealthy your country itself is, what your local standard of attractiveness is and so on. So really, all the study showed was that Canberra women like men who are built like surfies.
Other ideas you may have heard about the ‘most attractive’ male face? Well, there’s the chin myth.
The chin myth states that universally, around the world, a more ‘square’ chin is viewed as ideal for a mate, while a more ’rounded’ one is not. Some scientists argue that women like to mate with the ‘square-chin’, who’s thought to be more virile and full of testosterone, and marry the ’round-chin’, who’s more caring and less likely to cheat.
However, this is turning out to be baloney from start to finish. There isn’t one kind of attractive chin worldwide, and it doesn’t correspond to testosterone levels; a study done this year at Dartmouth in the USA found that the most common historical chin shapes across all the continents were radically different.
The study trumpeted that ‘there is no single sexy chin’ – no one model of male attractiveness or beauty, at least in the lower regions of the face.
Other apparent factors in male attractiveness, according to various scientific studies? A deeper, bass voice, looking serious as opposed to cheerful, and scars. (Don’t look for a mate solely based on that last one, it rarely ends well.)
