Study: What women find attractive in men

For men wish­ing to at­tract wom­en, pe­nis size mat­ters about as much as body height, and a good broad-shouldered fig­ure mat­ters much more than ei­ther, new re­search sug­gests.

Sci­en­tists ex­am­ined the rel­a­tive im­por­tance of these traits in fe­male rank­ings of male at­tractiveness us­ing life-sized, com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed im­ages of nude men.

The study was the first to as­sess the im­por­tance of those three fac­tors in com­bina­t­ion rath­er than in isola­t­ion, said the in­ves­ti­ga­tors, Bri­an S. Mautz of Aus­tral­ian Na­t­ional Uni­vers­ity and col­leagues. This change is im­por­tant be­cause fe­males might eval­u­ate fac­tors in rela­t­ion to each oth­er: for ex­am­ple, “the same sized pe­nis might be per­ceived dif­fer­ently on short and tall men,” the re­search­ers wrote, re­port­ing their study in this week’s early on­line is­sue of the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­tio­n­al Aca­de­my of Sci­en­ces.

Mautz and col­leagues wrote that they pre­sented a sam­ple 105, het­er­o­sex­ual Aus­tral­ian wom­en of av­er­age age 26 “with pro­jected life-size, com­put­er gen­er­at­ed male fig­ures. Each fig­ure was an an­i­mat­ed [4-second] vi­deo in which the fig­ure ro­tated 30 de­grees to each side to al­low par­ti­ci­pants to more easily eval­u­ate the fig­ure. We tested for the ef­fects of flac­cid pe­nis size, body shape (shoulder-to-hip ra­tio), and height on male sex­u­al at­tractiveness. The lat­ter two traits have reg­u­larly been in­ves­t­i­gated and are known to in­flu­ence male at­tractiveness or re­pro­duc­tive suc­cess.”

The new find­ings show that “fe­male mate choice could have played a role in the ev­o­lu­tion of the rel­a­tively large hu­man male pe­nis,” along with those two oth­er traits, they wrote.

The im­ages used in the study were life-sized in or­der to more real­is­tic­ally as­sess the role of height, Mautz and col­leagues wrote. They not­ed that a fe­ma­le’s own body shape could in­flu­ence her rat­ings, too; for in­stance, taller wom­en placed more of a pre­mi­um on taller men.

Over­all, broad shoul­ders as com­pared to the hips were the most im­por­tant fac­tor in at­tractiveness rat­ings, ac­count­ing for 79.6 per­cent of the varia­t­ion in these rank­ings, the study found. Pe­nis size and height ac­counted for 6.1 per­cent and 5.1 per­cent, re­spec­tive­ly.

The huge ef­fect of shoulder-to-hip ra­tio might have re­sulted be­cause the com­put­er fig­ures veered strongly in­to “unat­tractive” ter­ri­to­ry with wid­er hips than shoul­ders, the sci­en­tists spec­u­lat­ed. “How­ever, giv­en in­creas­ing waist­lines, the val­ues we used are well with­in the range now seen in ma­ny West­ern coun­tries.”

If there is any “ide­al” pe­nis size, it seems to be larg­er than range shown in the stu­dy, which went from 5 to 13 cm (2 to 5.1 inch­es), the sci­en­tists found. Yet the pe­nis size-related boosts in at­tractiveness were found to di­min­ish pro­gres­sively for pe­nises over 7.6 cm (3 inch­es) long. Pe­nis width was­n’t stud­ied as a sep­a­rate fac­tor, but rath­er was lumped to­geth­er with length, as larg­er pe­nises were shown as both wid­er and long­er.

“Larger pe­nis size had a great­er ef­fect on at­tractiveness for taller men” af­ter con­trol­ling for the shoulder-to-hip ra­tio, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors wrote. This “could be be­cause per­ceived pe­nis size was smaller when as­sessed rel­a­tive to the height of a taller ma­n; or be­cause of gen­er­al dis­crimina­t­ion against short men ir­re­spec­tive of the val­ue of oth­er traits, so that even a larg­er pe­nis did lit­tle to in­crease their net at­tractiveness.”

.Culled from World-science.net