I just came across an article that reveals why women have the hots for unattractive men. It says that according to a new study women give less importance to looks, in comparison with power, wealth and status, when it comes to choosing their man. It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other compelling attribute.
Infact, study after study shows that people think that what is beautiful is good. The more attractive you are, the more likely you are to get jobs and have people be nice to you. But that all seems to be in the case of women.
However the new study has uncovered the actual laws of attraction, and also explained why not so good-looking men like Andrew Upton, Billy Joel, Lyle Lovett and Donald Trump get gorgeous women.
The study, by leading psychologist and author Viren Swami, found that women don’t necessarily prefer physical appearance but, rather, power, wealth and status.
The study reported in Swami’s book ‘The Psychology Of Physical Attraction’, also found that we’re superficial when it comes to waistlines – because it’s not thinness but the WHR – waist-hip ratio – that is key to attracting men.
Co-author Adrian Furnham explained that the lower the WHR the better. He added that female figures such as those of Scarlett Johansson and Marilyn Monroe are seen as the most enviable.
Marilyn Monroe, the Venus de Milo, Sophia Loren, Scarlett Johansson – at different times, these women have all been considered among the most desirable on earth. What is it about them that makes men go weak at the knees? Quite apart from their beautiful faces, they are united by the fact that they all boast, or boasted, a low waist/hip ratio.
Used by our hunter-gatherer forefathers to judge the health and fecundity of women, the WHR is one of the best measures of a woman’s attractiveness to men. It explains why men find more curvy (but not necessarily overweight) figures such as Scarlett Johansson attractive.
To work out WHR, the waist measurement is divided by the hip measurement. Most women’s WHR falls in the range of 0.7 to 1.0. WHRs of 0.7 or 0.8 are deemed most attractive, with attraction decreasing as the WHR increases. Unlike boobs, where bigger doesn’t mean better, attraction increases as WHR decreases, even if the waist is artificially cinched in with a belt or corset.
Signs of health; a symmetrical face etc is attractive because people associate it with healthy people who produce healthy children.
However a study conducted by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist some time ago at the London School of Economics, suggests another theory on why unattractive man gets beautiful women. According to him it may be a simple supply and demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men.
Wonder why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son — which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
According to him, “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”
Beauty is apparently just one “female” trait. Kanazawa has done previous research suggesting that nurses, social workers and kindergarten teachers — those with “empathic” traits — also had more daughters than sons. Meanwhile, he found that scientists, mathematicians and engineers are more likely to have sons than daughters.
It is good that Kanazawa is only a researcher and not, say, the president of Harvard. If he were, that last finding about scientists may have gotten him fired.